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Almost perfect.
by Steve B. on Friday 13/Jun/2003, @18:41

I am very happy with JuK, having just emerged it on Gentoo. It's much more useful than Noatun and SplitPlayList

There's one set of UI changes I'd like to see: when viewing the collection list, arrange the songs in a tree format, maybe by Artist, Album, Genre, and maybe Year. The exact heirarchy and tree depth should be user-selectable; I would prefer to sort by Artist alone, but other people might prefer something else. In most cases I can't imagine the tree getting more than 3 levels deep...you'd need a boatload of songs to make that really useful.

My reasoning is thus: a large song collection is rather cumbersome to navigate in a flat list. A collapsible tree would give users the option to collapse Artists/Genres/etc that they are not interested in. Also, it would enable users to add a large number of songs to a playlist by dragging that level of the tree to a playlist. Besides, when you're looking for a song to play, don't you do it by classes? I usually remember either the artist or genre before I can remeber the name of the song I'm looking for.

Please note that I would _only_ apply this change to the collection view, not when viewing a playlist. Playlists are by nature sequential, and they should be displayed that way. The existing UI is excellent for that.

Related Links

·   Articles on Multimedia
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Re: Almost perfect.
by miles on Monday 03/Nov/2003, @15:50

The Opera M2 mail client technique of having various 'views' of an underlying set of items looks like a good idea here. All your songs are in some file tree, but you'd like to have a display by date, by artist, by artist after a date... or filter to show only the songs with 'KDE' in the title (only kidding!). This is a powerful mechanism to allow the user to dynamically change the way their stuff is represented, independently of the file system underneath (which will usually remain album-per-directory for music).

I'd agree with KDE multimedia being KMuddled what with so many alternative mixers, etc being available, and artsd being unruly. Time to slim it down (at least on Mandrake, which is many people's KDE showcase) and get it working for new users who can then explore happily.

Miles

M2 works pretty well now, by the way, after a slightly troubled start. Worth looking at (Opera 7.21 is current)

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Re: Almost perfect.
by Ryan on Friday 30/Jan/2004, @11:36

I completely agree. I have gentoo as well, and of course we love choice (isn't that why anyone has gentoo?). I'd like to see the "song library" list as customizable as possible, with hierarchies or whatever I want. It might be useful to have tabs at the top (browse by artist)(browse by album)(browse by song) where browse by artist is a list of artists, where you can click on and get a list of that artist's albums, and then songs.

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