Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Song browsing

[Matt <glorytoad gmail com>]

Hi All,
 Frequent Lurker, Rare Poster here.

The idea of a "tag cloud browser" sounds interesting.  How would you
describe such an interface?  Would the songs be related by which songs
are requested to be played before and after a particular song?  I know
sometimes it can be jarring if I'm listening to one song, and a
completely different genre of song is played next.  Techno followed by
Rhinestone country can be a bit jarring.  Would this be entirely
graphical and animated, or text boxes floating around an interface?

I'm thinking out-loud here, but what about a similar genre/tag type browse mode?
Have a list of songs, with all tags that are attached to it.  Maybe
the tags could represent the genre types that that particular song
sounds like it belongs to.  No more "Altern Rock", "Alter/Rock", or
"Alternative Rock" genres.  Make the songs have Alternative, And Rock,
And 1990s, and maybe a few others.  When's the last time you saw an
artist's album that all the music was exactly the same genre?
Song1.mp3  tag1, alternative, tag3, playlist1, playlist2
song2.mp3  alternative, tag4, playlist1, playlist3.

you could click on any tag, and it would either show everything that
had that tag.  I don't know how you could store all of this
information, but it would make for an interesting way to sort your
music.  Make the tags completely user defined.  Similar to the way
F-spot does tags for pictures - except, have ways of making
auto-playlists based on these tags.  One problem that I can see with
this would be from those of us with more than 1000+ songs in our
libraries that we don't really listen to.  Who would want to re-tag
those songs?

What about combining these two ideas, and have it somehow magically do
some of the work for us.  For instance, if one song is repeatedly
played "near" another (Say, one or two songs later), link them
somehow.

Okay, enough of my wild ideas for now.
-M

On 7/6/07, William Jon McCann <mccann jhu edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> If we assume that the album as a unit of distribution and
> categorization is on the decline then what does a next generation
> "browser" mode look like?
>
> This is one of the reasons why our primary interface is search based.
>
> Most browsing based interfaces still use an album browser despite the
> fact that songs are increasingly acquired individually, from
> collections, or from multiple albums.  In many cases where songs are
> released directly to the net they never even appear on an album.  Also
> even when you buy an album of songs online you don't necessarily have
> a strong association between the album art and the songs so browsing
> by album art isn't always very natural.
>
> How can we do better?
>
> A tag cloud browser?  An artist browser with artist info, summary, and
> most played/favorite songs a la last.fm?  Any wild ideas?
>
> Jon
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