Sage Music Player usability

[src666]

I brought these issues up in the "official requests" thread, but I thought I might get a bit of feedback from the people who have been there and done that.

I'm moving to Sage after having used ReplayTV's and Audiotrons for years. Obviously, I'm very comfortable with the way ReplayTV and Audiotrons work. For the most part, I find that Sage is an excellent replacement for my Replay's, but for music, it's coming up lacking.

The biggest problem I'm running into is the music selection process. It seems to go to great lengths to avoid letting you easily play the music you want to play. For example, if I browse by Artist, and I choose Pink Floyd, there is no way to play all of the Pink Floyd music in my collection. It seems that the only time I can say "play this now" is when I have selected either a single song or a playlist. I _really_ shouldn't have to build a one-off playlist just to play what I want to listen to right now.

Here is a list of what I cannot do with Sage:
Play an Album
Play a Genre
Play an Artist
Add songs/albums/artists/genres to the current play queue
View the current play queue
Remove songs/albums/artists/genres from the current play queue

Am I being incredibly dense here, or is something seriously lacking in the interface? This is an absolutely HUGE issue for WAF, and really isn't that hard to implement.

Unless I can get Sage working at least in a moderately intelligent way with regards to music, the Audiotrons aren't going away - and I really need to sell the Audiotrons now to recover some of my costs in transitioning to Sage.

Ideas, feedback and suggestions are most welcome!

[sharker]

I agree with your issues. I also want to be able to play a certain album for instance without it going to the next album in alphabetical order. I also want to select an album, then naother, then another and have them play those. Right now, I don't think that's possible.

I also think though that the Audiotrons still ahv a place in any well connected house...let me know when you want to get rid of them. Maybe I'll replace my old Rio Receiver!

[src666]

I'll be sure to post here when they go on the block. I have 3, and I know that 2 are going.

One thing I noticed about Sage that is nice (scared the whiz out of me the first time, though) is that after it finishes playing, if you leave it alone for a while it will pick a song from the last playlist and play it. Kinda cool as a reminder "Hey, I'm still here!"

[mayamaniac]

didn't want to start another thread so I dug up this one from two months ago.

Anyway, I've been using SageTV for a while mostly for the PVR features. But now I've finally got my music collection organized and started using the music features in SageTV. Like you guys, I found the interface to be very lack lustering. It's very hard to do simple things like finding a song to play.

I think the interface needs to improve greatly. They have to copy JRiver or iTunes or something. At current stage, it seems like a half-ass design or incomplete, especially when you compare it to the PVR features. Same goes to the Pictures and Video libraries. I wonder when they are gonna improve these basic features of SageTV?

As for STV, most custom STVs just skip the music, photo, and video library customization, because they look and operate exactly like the default STV.

[mlbdude]

SageMC operates very differntly. In fact, it supports most or all of the origional posters suggestions.

[src666]

Originally Posted by mlbdude

SageMC operates very differntly. In fact, it supports most or all of the origional posters suggestions.

Thanks for that info - I haven't checked that one out yet. Pretty much settled on Cayers early on. Is there a post anywhere that compares the two? I need to know what functionality, if any, I'll be losing.

[mlbdude]

Not really. Cayars basically took all my old stuff and combined it with some new features in other STV's. There are screen captures of most SageMC screens so you can see what is in there at least.

[GbrNole]

i can attest that mlb went to a LOT of effort to implement better music playback functions at the request of myself and many others.

sageMC 16_9 is a very good stv.