[mythtv-users] Re: New MythMusic Theme - 4 bins

[Brad]

Nick,

I'm SOOOooooo happy to see the work you are doing with the MythMusic  
theme. I find the old theme completely unusable -- at least in my  
case. It may have been good for navigating or creating playlists for  
a couple hundred songs, but my music library is over 2300 songs --  
most of those are 2 hr long sets -- and navigating the current theme  
is a nightmare.

At first glance, I like your theme much better. Unfortunately I can't  
try it until I update (I'm running .16.1) but I have a few comments  
to pass along, that hopefully you or someone else will find useful...

- I've always admired Apple's UI in iTunes' browse mode and thought  
that a derivative of that would work well in MythMusic -- simplified  
for remote control access, of course. In some ways, your theme seems  
to already provide some of those benefits. See an iTunes screen here:  
http://homepage.mac.com/bdolman/iTunes_Screen.png . In particular,  
the Playlists (which includes an all-music "Library" listing), Genre,  
Artist, and Album can easily be selected to narrow the list of Songs  
in the lower panel. This works incredibly well. You can narrow the  
listing by changing any of the panes from its default "All" setting  
and the other panes update to reflect the changed selection. For  
example, changing setting the artist to "Felix da Housecat" shows all  
songs by that artist and updates the Albums list to only the albums  
by that artist -- the song listing can be further narrowed by  
selecting one of the albums, which then only shows the songs from  
that artist on that album. See a screenshot here: http:// 
homepage.mac.com/bdolman/iTunes_Screen2.png

- For really long listings, I thought it would be beneficial if  
MythMusic let you use the remote as a keyboard to jump down the  
list... 2 = abc, 3 = def, 4 = ghi, etc. So highlighting one of the  
lists, such as artists, and pressing 8 twice would jump down to the  
beginning of artists that start with "U" ("Underworld"). Navigating  
the listing for a large number of songs is my number one complaint  
with the current theme (you try scrolling through several hundred  
songs from a remote!)

- I know I'm totally dreaming, but if MythMusic could read the  
playlist files generated by iTunes, particularly "smart" playlists,  
I'd be in heaven. I just store my entire iTunes library on my Myth  
box and connect to it over the network from my computer (works great  
and frees up lots of space on my computer). I manage all my playlists  
through iTunes anyway, so if MythMusic could just read those files it  
would take a lot of the burden off creating the perfect remote  
accessible interface. Smart playlists are amazing -- you can set a  
playlist that, for example, lists all songs by a particular artist  
which is updated automatically if you ever add more songs by that  
artist (basically these are playlists defined by rules instead of a  
fixed list).

Ok, I've written enough. Sorry for the long post... I just got  
excited... I love the changes you've made so far. I can't wait to  
check it out!

Brad