Ideas for a Music UI mod.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

See you in 6 months to a year

Thanks for the vote of confidence...You realize this is your fault right? You could have just made this for me a long time ago, but no you had to go and do bigger and better things...

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by Spectrum

Here's a (bad, there's a reason I don't do graphic design) idea, but I worked on it so I'm gonna post it!
Pretend that the text has changed to match the album covers.
This is flat (well minus the bevels and the drop shadows) so it might render on an extender too

I kinda like that. In fact, I think I like it more than the slanted version. And, it's much better graphically than anything I could have whipped up.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

Thanks for the vote of confidence...You realize this is your fault right? You could have just made this for me a long time ago, but no you had to go and do bigger and better things...

No insult intended towards you or your capabilities. I just know the love/hate relationship with studio and the time it takes to do something like you are proposing. Maybe you sill catch on faster than us older slower turtles

As for me not doing it. Simple enough I use sonos for all my audio needs. If I won't use it in sagetv i won't code it harsh I know....(and not totally true 90% of smm addins is stuff I don't use)

[Skirge01]

Looking at your wall view, I think there could be a usability issue with mirroring the Movie Wall. Unlike movie covers, many music albums don't have the name of the album or artist on the cover, which could make it difficult for people to find what they're looking for. Granted, most of us know our own covers, but it could be an issue as we add albums or for any friends/family who try to find something.

Just something to consider...

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

Looking at your wall view, I think there could be a usability issue with mirroring the Movie Wall. Unlike movie covers, many music albums don't have the name of the album or artist on the cover, which could make it difficult for people to find what they're looking for. Granted, most of us know our own covers, but it could be an issue as we add albums or for any friends/family who try to find something.

Just something to consider...

My 2 cents is I agree. You need a 2x2 space padding give or take around them with the name below each album like an icon of sorts.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

No insult intended towards you or your capabilities. I just know the love/hate relationship with studio and the time it takes to do something like you are proposing. Maybe you sill catch on faster than us older slower turtles

As for me not doing it. Simple enough I use sonos for all my audio needs. If I won't use it in sagetv i won't code it harsh I know....(and not totally true 90% of smm addins is stuff I don't use)

I know you have too much on your plate already, you just tempted me in the past and got me all excited so now I have to do it myself. You are actually the reason I decided to tackle this project. With you making things like smm, it actually makes it easier as I already have your ideas to build off of. I wouldn't be doing this if I wouldn't use it. I just think it is the most overlooked part of sage.

As for insulting my capabilities. I don't even know what they are yet so don't think your gonna offend me, that isn't an easy thing to do. I'm going to listen to you more than most as I know what your capabilities are. I hope I can catch on quick. I've been reading the manual and studio seems pretty straight forward.

I'm actually looking into sonos myself so I'd like to integrate it into this mod in the future.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

Looking at your wall view, I think there could be a usability issue with mirroring the Movie Wall. Unlike movie covers, many music albums don't have the name of the album or artist on the cover, which could make it difficult for people to find what they're looking for. Granted, most of us know our own covers, but it could be an issue as we add albums or for any friends/family who try to find something.

Just something to consider...

Originally Posted by PLUCKYHD

My 2 cents is I agree. You need a 2x2 space padding give or take around them with the name below each album like an icon of sorts.

I was thinking the same thing to actually. However, I can't think of a way to do it and make it look good. Any suggestions? I think that putting the artist name under the covers would work, but I'm afraid the font would be too small. I think something similar to the way plucky did the wall view with the name at the top or in a box at the bottom of the screen would work.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

I was thinking the same thing to actually. However, I can't think of a way to do it and make it look good. Any suggestions? I think that putting the artist name under the covers would work, but I'm afraid the font would be too small. I think something similar to the way plucky did the wall view with the name at the top or in a box at the bottom of the screen would work.

It it needs to be at each box even if you can't fit it all in a single line. I will show you a quick mockup in a bit.

[Skirge01]

I think Plucky had it. Just a 2x2 space, so that you can fit the artist and album names. Your 3rd picture is actually similar to what I was thinking, but there's just unused space on the sides, too much room for text, and you don't need the header info for a wall view. Although, having a menu popup like that at the top (or bottom) would be nice for filtering.

[PLUCKYHD]

Here is a very very quick and rough draft using diamond movie view modded quickly to more be square like music (remember i don't have music so I had to be really really rough .

[Skirge01]

I know Plucky was just using that as a (very) quick mockup, so I'll just point out that the font would be tweaked so everything would fit and you might want to have two lines of text below the albums, since you might want both artist and album names shown.

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

I know Plucky was just using that as a (very) quick mockup, so I'll just point out that the font would be tweaked so everything would fit and you might want to have two lines of text below the albums, since you might want both artist and album names shown.

2 lines gets to busy keep it clean with one line cut it off if it doesn't fit and either show the highlighted in a popup or scroll the text of the highlighted.

[DRB]

See you in 6 months to a year

You mean this isn't going to be released in time for the holidays?

DRB

[OneOfMany]

I'm liking where this is going! I would prefer to use a nice Sage music frontend on my PC clients.

Just a quick thought. The documentation for BMT hints at using a central fanart repository for music, although there probably no APIs available for grabbing them.. I would love to be able to create a \\Fanart\Music subdirectory and populate it with

\\Fanart\Music\Background (able to drop some hi-res graphic of my choosing that could be displayed as a background or scaled graphic
\\Fanart\Music\Logo (where I could drop a band's logo and have it display somewhere)

I think since most people have the Album Art located with their music, that could be the one grabbed..



Grant

[pjpjpjpj]

Love the idea of a fanart background behind the "now playing" info (album art, artist, song title, etc.).

As for the whole 3D extender debate above, what about doing a vertical "scroll" on the right side? Where you would scroll through the artist list on the left, and then choose (select button or right arrow) and the albums (cover art, or art+name) would appear in a vertical line on the right, and the focus would move over to them, centered in the middle... as you moved up and down, the albums would scroll through (like a wheel) and the focus would stay in the middle.

When you selected an album, you would go to another screen - perhaps with artist fanart background, album art on the right and song titles listed on the left?

Hope that makes sense.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by DRB

You mean this isn't going to be released in time for the holidays?

DRB

Since I haven't started and Christmas is only 7 days away I'd have to have one heck of a team to get that completed that quickly. I'm going to get this done as soon as I can.

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by panteragstk

Since I haven't started and Christmas is only 7 days away I'd have to have one heck of a team to get that completed that quickly. I'm going to get this done as soon as I can.

I hear Plucky's looking for something to do over the holidays.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

I hear Plucky's looking for something to do over the holidays.

If anyone could do it, it would be him...I think I'll let him finish smm first.

[panteragstk]

Originally Posted by OneOfMany

I'm liking where this is going! I would prefer to use a nice Sage music frontend on my PC clients.

Just a quick thought. The documentation for BMT hints at using a central fanart repository for music, although there probably no APIs available for grabbing them.. I would love to be able to create a \\Fanart\Music subdirectory and populate it with

\\Fanart\Music\Background (able to drop some hi-res graphic of my choosing that could be displayed as a background or scaled graphic
\\Fanart\Music\Logo (where I could drop a band's logo and have it display somewhere)

I think since most people have the Album Art located with their music, that could be the one grabbed..



Grant

Just to let you know that when fanart was originally introduced to sage music was supported. I haven't messed with it since, but I will ask stuckless if he plans on some sort of scraper for backgrounds only. The reason I just want backgrounds is because we don't want automatic meta data fetching for music because of the variances of people's music collections. The potential for completely messing up a collection is way too high. Most tagging software will support embedded cover art as well as all other meta data. I'd like to use musicbrainz for fetching meta data, but it would have to be a manual process.

On the other hand I have used winamp since it came out and I recently added a test sample of my library to the winamp library, and one of the things I really liked was that it automatically loaded a bio and random videos for a specific artist. We'll see how to implement something similar.

[ptzink]

Glad my quick and dirty mockup could at least serve as a launching point of conversation, though it was never intended to be a 'final' design. Personally, I think you could do a 'stacks' approach that is 2D (on the right side) and still achieve the same functionality while being compliant with extenders. To me, you need not only the 'eye candy', but the functionality. That is why - for me - the wall view doesn't do much, though I understand that many may like it. In my opinion, you don't browse music like you do movies. With movies, for instance, sorting by title is fine without regard to director, movie studio, etc. I have a lot of music, and browsing in a wall view sorted by album would not be very useful. I'm not saying that a movie wall view shouldn't be included (many will enjoy it I am sure), just that a good list view/hybrid view is essential. My 2 cents.