Nick,
I'm SOOOooooo happy to see the work you are doing with the MythMusic
theme. I find the old theme completely unusable -- at least in my
case. It may have been good for navigating or creating playlists for
a couple hundred songs, but my music library is over 2300 songs --
most of those are 2 hr long sets -- and navigating the current theme
is a nightmare.
At first glance, I like your theme much better. Unfortunately I can't
try it until I update (I'm running .16.1) but I have a few comments
to pass along, that hopefully you or someone else will find useful...
- I've always admired Apple's UI in iTunes' browse mode and thought
that a derivative of that would work well in MythMusic -- simplified
for remote control access, of course. In some ways, your theme seems
to already provide some of those benefits. See an iTunes screen here:
http://homepage.mac.com/bdolman/iTunes_Screen.png . In particular,
the Playlists (which includes an all-music "Library" listing), Genre,
Artist, and Album can easily be selected to narrow the list of Songs
in the lower panel. This works incredibly well. You can narrow the
listing by changing any of the panes from its default "All" setting
and the other panes update to reflect the changed selection. For
example, changing setting the artist to "Felix da Housecat" shows all
songs by that artist and updates the Albums list to only the albums
by that artist -- the song listing can be further narrowed by
selecting one of the albums, which then only shows the songs from
that artist on that album. See a screenshot here: http://
homepage.mac.com/bdolman/iTunes_Screen2.png
- For really long listings, I thought it would be beneficial if
MythMusic let you use the remote as a keyboard to jump down the
list... 2 = abc, 3 = def, 4 = ghi, etc. So highlighting one of the
lists, such as artists, and pressing 8 twice would jump down to the
beginning of artists that start with "U" ("Underworld"). Navigating
the listing for a large number of songs is my number one complaint
with the current theme (you try scrolling through several hundred
songs from a remote!)
- I know I'm totally dreaming, but if MythMusic could read the
playlist files generated by iTunes, particularly "smart" playlists,
I'd be in heaven. I just store my entire iTunes library on my Myth
box and connect to it over the network from my computer (works great
and frees up lots of space on my computer). I manage all my playlists
through iTunes anyway, so if MythMusic could just read those files it
would take a lot of the burden off creating the perfect remote
accessible interface. Smart playlists are amazing -- you can set a
playlist that, for example, lists all songs by a particular artist
which is updated automatically if you ever add more songs by that
artist (basically these are playlists defined by rules instead of a
fixed list).
Ok, I've written enough. Sorry for the long post... I just got
excited... I love the changes you've made so far. I can't wait to
check it out!
Brad
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