[mythtv-users] Ideas for MythMusic rewrite

[Christopher Kerr]

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 11:53 PM, Paul Harrison <mythtv at sky.com> wrote:
> We'll probably regret this but we would like your opinions :-)  We are
> in the process of  switching MythMusic to MythUI and would like to take
> the opportunity to make some much needed improvements to the interface.
>
> We don't necessarily  just want a list of feature requests, although
> every idea will be considered, but also how they should be implemented,
> what the interface should look like etc. If you can provide mock ups of
> how it should look or links to images of how other players do things
> then all the better.

At the moment I'm using Squeezeplay as my HTPC media player - it
solves a lot of the remote-control interface problems, so there's some
things to be learnt there.

I think the most important thing is to lose the archaic seperation of
music browsing and music playing. The interface, ideally, should be
based around browsing, and since we're talking about a TV interface,
primarily visual. Album art browsing makes the most sense to me,
whether it be Windows Media Centre style tiling or Coverflow style
horizontal layouts. For very large collections, this obviously becomes
impractical, and some sort of filtering becomes necessary, whether it
be a 3 pane iTunes style layout or some method of applying filters to
the graphical browser.

The squeezebox solution to this is to offer multiple entry points into
the browsing mode, so you can come in at Genre and browse through
albums, or come in at Artists, or Decade, or whatever. I suspect that
the ability to do this from a menu + the ability to set a default
would make most users happy - I nearly always want to browse by
Artist, for instance, but occasionally just want to see all the
albums.

Default action should always be to play the selected album if an album
is selected, or to make the album the playlist and start playing from
the selected song. Seperate functionality, preferably available
directly rather than through a menu, would allow for queueing of
tracks on current playlists.

Note: The above assumes that the primary use case for MythMusic is as
a CD jukebox playing albums. That assumption may not be ideal.

Sorry if this all comes across as half baked, it's 4AM New Years Day here.

- Chris