egd;201585 Wrote: 
> 
> Perhaps I'm asking for too much (I guess it is early days), but what I
> would like is a standalone music management application that puts my
> albums back in my hands, it's focus must be on browsing my music
> library, selecting music by genre, subgenre, style, mood etc, have the
> ability to link artists to one another/bands etc. 

I don't think it's asking too much (and don't think it's the early
days). The Transporter is impressive, but R&D should have been _poured_
into the interface before its release. Otherwise, people might have a
great piece of kit, but still feel (somewhat) cheated.  

That said, the architecture of the server/client is utterly brilliant.
It is great not to be locked into a particular skin, and to have
plugins to help where slimserver falls short- But frankly, I don't want
to have to install a plugin to make a playlist! There is really no
excuse for the default interface not being the best one, because there
must be at least one person being paid to make it so. I realize
drag-n-drop is asking for a lot, but is there even a way to add to a
playlist while playing an album? If I'm not mistaken, a third frame
would be required (like Media Monkey), or perhaps status.html could
have a dropdown menu to switch to other info... like playlists (and
'add' should default to the open playlist).

In a lot of ways the pieces are all there but not really linked, or at
least thought out. Clicking an album cover in the song info panel opens
the cover in a new browser. I'd prefer nothing, like Fishbone. OTOH,
there are a million things you could do there. E.g. load multiple
covers/photos from an art directory stored inside the album directory.


I believe most of the problem is that there hasn't been a lot of skin
development from a team of programmers and designers, which is a
project that would seem to beg for such collaboration, and be hard for
an individual to accomplish/maintain, yet individuals have outperformed
the slimdevices team (on the interface front) for years. Perhaps this
was by design in the past, and such as winamp's default skin is hardly
the best one, Slimdevices were hoping the community would take over.
However, they say first impressions are the truest, and I think, for
the sake of profitability if nothing else, the default skin should
leave a good one. So good, in fact, that it makes nerds feel cool AND
stupid people feel smart.

Hopefully it's all moot and Slimserver 7 pans out to be the second
coming, but somehow I doubt it (at least not for the default interface
from what I can tell). At the risk of suggesting something dead in the
water, what I propose is a community designed open source skin, whose
progress and design is charted in the wiki. That, or sending massive
amounts of cash to whoever can make it better than *Tunes.


-- 
Skunk
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Skunk's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2685
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=35229

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