> ... the use of the Composer/Conductor/Band tags ... > it seems to be well less than ideal.
I agree. > Thought, anyone? Two points of view: Since you posted the Beginners guide to classical music,I have been thinking about how you might select classical music from the one line display of the Squeezebox and the remote. The SB/remote combo has major limitations: 1) the one line display makes picking from long lists very tedious. 2) The one line doesn't display many characters. Horizontal scrolling takes time. 3) the remote keyboard is not useful for typing more than a few characters. (One for me.) The UI needs to work well within those limitations and to scale well for larger libraries. How I'd like to select things: I'd like to make a series of selections each based on the value of a different tag. This might allow me to keep the list managable at each stage. So I want a browse/search strategy implemented by menu text and actions taken when I click on the right arrow which include a database search. I might want more than one such stratgey available. One approach: new menu choice on the top level menu: Browse music by tags (Say the user selects it with the right arrow button.) Action: Display a list of available tags to browse: artist, album, composer, etc. One menu choice in the list should be for displaying all files that meet the criteria at this point. The text should show the number of files that meet the criteria sop far. (Let's say the User selects Composer with the right arrow key.) Action: Display a list of DISTINCT composer values. The user would then select one with the right arrow key. (Beethoven for example.) Action: Display the list of available tags again for the next level of selection. (Say the user picks Album title at this stage.) Action: Display a list of DISTINCT album values for the Composer value specified at the earlier step. (Say the user picks Sym. 3) Action: Display the list of available tags again for the next level of selection. (Say the user picks Artist title at this stage.) Action: Display a list of DISTINCT artist values for the Composer value and Album value specified at earlier steps. (Say the user picks Szell.) Action: Display the list of available tags again for the next level of selection. (Say the user picks Artist title at this stage.) If there is only one file at this stage, the server should skip the menu and go directly to displaying the file's name. (If there are 4 files left and they correspond to four movements of the work chosen at an earlier step, the user might just press play to play them all in order. This approach requires more levels of selection than the current scheme; it alternates between choosing a tag to browse on and choosing a value for that tag. It is quite general and it lends itself to streamlining. A Streamlined Approach: The server could provide a setup page that allows the user to build a browse by picking one tag from a drop-down list for each step of the process. The user would provide a top-level menu name for his browse and the name would then be displayed in the top level menu. This approach gets the job done with one selection level for each tag used. Every list displayed would be uncluttered and compact. ---- I think the first approach is good for casual use. The second approach is good once a user decides he will use a particular browse strategy regularly. Typing the first letter of an item in the list to jump to the coprresponding list position would help make lists manageable. (I've used it with the current Browse Artists method.) --- I have no idea whether this approach fits with the internal structure of Slimserver or the Squeezebox. I can certainly see how it translates to SQL Select statements. Bill -- Listener ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Listener's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2508 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=18767 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
