[mythtv] Proposed MythMusic Interface Improvements

[Eric A. Litman]

"Ed Wildgoose" <lists at wildgooses.com> wrote:

> Actually, the genre tag doesn't work for me really, I don't know the
> different between "Garage", and "punk soul", so I don't bother to
> classify my music like that.  However, if the interface had a good set
> of drill downs by various categories, then it would be nice to classify
> stuff by "screechy female vocals", "stuff the wife likes", "tat that I
> like", "party music", "easy listening late in the evening", etc.  This
> would be my type of genres.

The genre field in an ID3 tag can be anything you want it to be.  Insert
"screechy female vocals", "whiney male vocals", "sea shanties", whatever. I
don't use genre today either because none of the players I use offer an
intuitive enough UI to make them worthwhile, but a generic classification
field and a taxonomy that suited the individual user - in this case, you or
I - coupled with a simple interface for selecting content based on that
taxonomy could be be quite useful.

> To be fair though I only have around 200 albums, so I don't find it too
> hard to navigate even now.

I agree that at 200 albums, an hierarchical display is great. At ~8,000
albums (thanks largely to a long-term eMusic subscription) with ~60% of
those having valid, correct ID3 tags, it's so cumbersome as to be unusable.
Even 1/2 or 1/4 that number presents a large enough list to discourage
casual selection.

Here's an oversimplified example. With a collection of 2,000 albums and an
average of 3 albums per artist, we have a set of 667 artists. In the 0.14
interface with no artists expanded to show albums, a user will be presented
with a list of at least 668 elements (counting the root). Expanding all of
the artists increases the list to 2,668 (total albums + total artists), and
the count can go up by a factor of 10 or more if you expand albums to the
track level. At 19 elements per page (using
http://mythtv.sourceforge.net/mc/firstmusic.png as my reference, since I'm
not near a frontend), even 668 items can represent a considerable amount of
scrolling, particularly if the user hasn't alphabetically planned her music
selection process in advance. While the 0.15 interface reduces the primary
list to a maximum of 667 (assuming consistency in tagging and/or directory
naming - Various Artists albums wreak havok on this) and increases the
number of list items on screen, the end result is still a very long list,
particularly to a user employing a remote without PgUp/PgDn mapped.

It's possible that one could argue the likely infrequency of a user picking
Ani DiFranko, then ZZ Top, then ABBA, then Zap Mama, or that even in those
cases a bit of forethought would reduce the amount of effort involved, but
good UI design should strive to reduce the complexity of user interaction
and work in a manner intuitive for the task at hand. Ideally, picking an
album in MythMusic would require an effort on par with or less than finding
it in a similarly organized CD rack.

> However, I *would* rather like to be able to
> switch search methods more easily, eg drill down by "girl bands" to pick
> out those top tunes (...!),  and then drill down by artist to fill in a
> few blanks, and then drill down by "mood" (yeah we don't even have that
> yet), to fill in a few more songs.

I think we're speaking of essentially the same desired result. If I read you
correctly, you'd like the ability to select and sub-select content based on
a variable set of criteria (sometimes by artist, sometimes picking only
"scratchy female vocals", etc.). I'd like to do so based on a similar, but
perhaps slightly different set. I'd bet a penny (USD$0.01) that others still
would present alternate preferences. Create a simple, flexible UI for
applying that set - be it in the form of a tokenized search interface,
pre-defined category selection, or some combination of the two - and those
differences in preference diminish in significance.

I'm profferring the notion of a "Google-style" query syntax because I have a
particularly large collection and I have a keyboard plugged into one of my
frontends, but I realize that my set of use cases are not unusual. It's by
no means necessary to support the UI changes at the core of this discussion,
and I fully recognize that it will be available just as soon as I implement
it. :)

> So for me, just a few tweaks to the existing system so that you can
> drill down via any category would be my favourite improvement, followed
> by having multiple categories, eg mood, marks out of 10, fast/slow beat,
> etc.  That's all I use on Winamp, or any other desktop media player, to
> find my songs...

Fortunately, it seems like a UI to support simple selection by "category"
(I'm using that term broadly) would not require a radical departure from the
current operation of MythMusic. It would be a bonus if in the process of
adding those new features the overall selection interface could be updated
to more closely match the remainder of the MythTV UI.

This leads to a question highly relevant to this discussion. What are your
(that's the royal "you", meaning anyone reading this) thoughts on using a
variation of the Program Finder UI to support those "tweaks"? Would you
prefer to stick with something closer to the 0.15 MythMusic interface?

Kevin Kuphal made this comment:

> I think that Program Finder is one of the nicest UI pieces in MythTV and I
> would love to see it utilized in more places.

Do others - particularly those with CVS write access - align with this?

-Eric