Solution for organizing the new playlist

Wednesday, July 4. 2007

Solution for organizing the new playlist

Leinir sketched up an idea to replace the column headers:

The idea is quite nifty. I've gotten as far as creating a QWidget class skeleton and making a QHBoxLayout... but I really don't know where to go from here. I've had very little luck with drag and drop in general (you would drag around the Artist, Album etc) so I'm not quite sure how to proceed. So I decided to blog about it instead.

In other news, today's xkcd is awesome.

Posted by Ian Monroe in eean at 06:05 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

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Do you get the full cover+artist+album box for each track in the playlist? That sounds like a LOT of stuff, especially if you play a 20-track album where all the information is redundant..

I don't really get the purpose of the top breadcrumb widget, could you expand a bit about that?

I'm very interested in researching better ways to present playlists in music players. So far, I think some of the Foobar2k styles I've seen are the best alternatives around.. have you considered and analyzed those from a UI POV?

#1 theefer (Homepage) on 2007-07-04 22:58 (Reply)

Nope, I really hate to boot into Windows. But if you could point us to screenshots of these styles, we'd be willing to take a look.

#1.1 Mark Kretschmann on 2007-07-05 02:53 (Reply)

I strongly suggest that you take a look at some of the threads in their forums, it's quite impressive (or scary, even)

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=49783
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=30988 (older)

Granted, their system is oriented towards customizability, and I haven't yet checked how the code for themes looks like. But there are many interesting ideas and a lot to analyze and think about in those imho.

#1.1.1 theefer (Homepage) on 2007-07-05 03:10 (Reply)

I'm not impressed, to be honest. The playlist looks fairly oldskool, like the playlist in Amarok 1.x works. What I do like is how some of the skins show the album column (one big item for all tracks from the same album). However, Amarok 2.0 doesn't use columns at all.

#1.1.1.1 Mark Kretschmann on 2007-07-05 04:59 (Reply)

If you're referring the kind of design in [1], yes it's kind of column based (and requires a rather wide space).

Something like [2] is more compact already, as images are inlined.

But I was more interested by designs such as [3], [4], [5], or [6] (probably one of the best), which avoid duplication of information by collapsing the album metadata in a top row. If you play multiple tracks of an album in sequence, it's really good (and avoids a lot of redundancy); in case of playing mixed albums, I guess one would have to have a clever alternative display.

[1] www.mccartney.com.ar/cepi/new1.png
[2] img285.imageshack.us/img285/9388/indextv1.png
[3] xs.to/xs.php?h=xs109&d=06460&f=Foobar2000_focus.jpg
[4] schluepfer.adrenalin-clan.de/fb2k.jpg
[5] img177.imageshack.us/img177/3397/pic02ey1.png
[6] img170.imageshack.us/my.php?image=foobaryb3.png

(sorry about the urls, the antispam thinks I'm a porn bot, apparently)

#2 theefer (Homepage) on 2007-07-05 22:19 (Reply)

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