[mythtv] Proposed MythMusic Interface Improvements

Steele Price steele at xtcp.net
Sun May 2 15:57:21 EDT 2004


I am doing alot of work on the Playlists in MythMusic.  I really want to 
work with you on the NEW interface. 

I just released the preliminary Autoplaylists patch and am working on 
the UI for entering these now.  Hopefully Thor will get around to 
commiting that patch soon.  The idea is to be similar to  iTunes 
autoplaylist, but with one added feature, grouping criteria.

I am also working on revamping how regular playlists are created!  
Slogging through the hierarchy just doesn't cut it with 20K tracks.
Search is vital in this regard, I want to be able to browse the whole 
system to "add song to THIS playlist" as well as add current playing 
song to Playlist X via popups.  Whatever the interface, it needs to 
allow me to hook in to the current selection (both song and playlist) , 
it also needs to support the current skin.  Drawing too far away from 
the common interface of MythTV would be a bad thing, but music is surely 
a little different than video.  Slight modifications to the Program 
Finder could work well, but at the same time I'd like to see another 
screen that supports keyboard driven systems more fully.

Thor is working very hard on a completely new MythMusic so I am not sure 
this point is moot or not, but support for all his hard work tying into 
DAAP needs to be considered in any new interface so that when his 
changes are implemented the new interface doesn't radically change again.

A lot of people don't listen to albums anymore, in fact as we move more 
towards online music distribution, I expect albums will completely 
disappear in several years, however we obviously need them now, but 
focussing the entire interface around them is a bad idea IMO.  I'd like 
to see the option of using playlists as the focus instead of just 
Albums.  With support of Images for playlists this would go over very 
well.    With the addition of add/remove this track from Playlist X, 
Album handling as a playlist seems like a much more logical approach 
than relying on the file system hierarchy.

Albums are just a special kind of playlist and should really be treated 
that way.  So in light of this, many people have told me they really 
don't store their tunes in a hierarchical form, artist/album, etc.  I am 
proposing that I can get away from the need for this in MythMusic 
altogether by making Albums a specially handled Playlist.  Then you can 
lump everything in various folders of your choosing and just throw them 
all together with the interface and database.  Forcing people into a 
specialized hierarchy is just not needed (or even practical) anymore 
with the power of the pcs and networks we have today.  This becomes more 
important in a system with multiple frontends sharing drives with the 
backend to increase storage.  For example kids may keep all their tracks 
on their own pcs but want to share them across the network to play them 
in the living room.  Forcing them into a centralized storage is not 
needed or wanted, centralized database however is very nice.  The 
current method of importing songs into the database needs to be revamped 
for this to work, when I add an album/group of tracks, I currently have 
to refresh the database and its dumping everything thus loosing any 
changes in the database and all the playlists.

For Genre, ID3v1 requires a certain genre, but ID3v2 doesn't, that 
should be clarified as saying "you can put anything you want in genre" 
is misleading of you only use ID3v1 for your tags.  If you use no tags 
and just add tracks, then you can of course do anything you want with 
genre in the database.

I want to see a 2 way interface between tracks, albums, playlists and 
the ID3v2 tagging system.  I will be working on this as well, I want to 
be able to make a boatload of changes in the database and write them out 
to the ID3v2 tags in each track, then I don't have to use some external 
tag editor to bring tracks into the system or to synch the file changes 
with MythMusic.

I think MythX as a complete media control system can be fantastic with 
some minor changes to make it more distributed system friendly.  Of 
course that's why OpenSource is so cool, when we want support for some 
new player we can add it.  Thinking in terms of what is happening to 
media control systems in the future is important if we are going to 
overhauls the interface.

Steele Price
CTO
Digital Dreamshop
http://xtcp.net


Daniel C. Casimiro wrote:

> I am looking for some feedback on a number of improvements (IMHO) to 
> the MythMusic interface.  Please take a look at the screen shots found 
> here: http://members.cox.net/dcasimiro/index.html.  I have also pasted 
> the body of the web page into this mail.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I do not particularly like the current MythMusic interface. So, I 
> started to experiment with possible improvements. The screen shot 
> above was created from some quick mock up code that I wrote. The code 
> doesn't work and is sure isn't pretty. It is just something to 
> communicate my idea. That's why there is no link to the source here. I 
> have no qualms about releasing it, once I spend some time cleaning it up.
>
> You can click on the image for a higher-resolution image.
>
>
>    An Explanation of what you see
>
>
>      Music Browser
>
> The icons in the upper left box represent the user's music collection. 
> The icons are probably too big, but I was too lazy to shrink them 
> down. I can leverage ImageMagick later on to handle this. I like to 
> think of it as a music browser. The idea is that the user would add 
> songs to current play list through this widget. Although not shown, 
> the widget would also display individual songs. I would give the user 
> the ability to add single songs, or entire directories 
> (albums/artists). The directories could be generated from actual 
> directories on the hard drive, or from the database. Perhaps, the 
> directories could be created via autoplaylists 
> <http://xtcp.net/?q=node/view/56%22>.
>
>
>        Cover Art
>
> I found a cool website, named Slothdog's Amazing CD / Album Cover 
> Finder <http://www.slothradio.com/covers> where you can download cover 
> art. I was hoping to design an interface that automatically pulls down 
> art from Slothdog.
>
> My biggest problem with the current interface is that it takes too 
> long for me to find music. To alleviate this problem, I would also 
> like to add the capability to filter albums/songs by letter. Again, 
> the autoplaylists would help in this area. I was thinking of adding a 
> spinner-type widget to implement the letter filtering, but an 
> autoplaylist interface may work better.
>
>
>      Play list
>
> The column to the right represents the play list. The user uses this 
> list to skip to specific songs and to remove songs. Fairly 
> self-explanatory.
>
>
>      Song Info
>
> The widget towards the bottom represents the current song's 
> meta-information. For example, it will display total artist, track 
> name, track-time, elapsed track-time, and genre. I'm sure that other 
> info can be displayed as well. Perhaps this could be user configurable...
>
> Perhaps this could be fit into a single line. The space may be better 
> used to build an interface to the autoplaylist engine. The remaining 
> problem is to design an interface that does not require a full keyboard.
>
>
>    Feedback/Comments
>
> Just looking for feedback and/or comments on this interface. It seems 
> fairly easy to navigate with the keyboard, which should translate well 
> to a remote.
>
>
> Thanks.
> Dan
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