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So obvious I wonder why I didn't think of it before
Corrosion - 12-5-2003 at 10:27 PM

I think if we're gonna bother writing a date on every mp3 on our collection, we might as well see it in a nice fancy way in the Now Playing section, right?
And you could turn off display of the date for each mp3 also...

Fishy - 12-6-2003 at 12:37 AM

(...) "as well see it in a nice fancy way in the Now Playing section, right?"

I think this sounds great.. But, how should this fancy way look? :) Personally I would also like to see the mp3 comments as well. I have a lot of tags edited from amg, which includes reviews of each album. Would be nice to optional have these displayed in the playlist area.

Could be made possible with the "playlist in songlist" sollution?

jhlurie - 12-7-2003 at 05:56 AM

I'm not sure I understand this conversation at all, so I will address individual points.

Quote:
I think if we're gonna bother writing a date on every mp3 on our collection, we might as well see it in a nice fancy way in the Now Playing section, right?

1.) I think that showing a date in the Now Playing area might clutter it up. But my biggest concern is that even with the improved lookup features the date is the item which is most often wrong, so showing that in Now Playing will kind of be "in your face".

Quote:
And you could turn off display of the date for each mp3 also

2.) However, even if this is implemented--if there is a nice way to show it in Now Playing, why would you need to turn that off for individual MP3 files? Isn't that a bit complicated? I must be misunderstanding this.

Quote:
Personally I would also like to see the mp3 comments as well

3.) It would be nice to be able to view MP3 comments, I agree. But I think it's unlikely that the playlist area will ever have room to show them, unless it includes a field which can "scroll"--and that might use too much CPU.

Fishy - 12-7-2003 at 10:32 AM

hmm.. You are right. The playlist is already to small and having comments or dates there would be overkill. As an alternative one could display this information under the coverimage or something in the songlist. But, it's not a musthave feature for my use really :)

Pirk - 12-7-2003 at 11:07 AM

Except if the current playlist area was exclusively used for the comments or the lyrics when availables! There is just enough room for that in this restrited panel!
And the playlist would be displayed in the songlist panel - using a different (dark) layout to avoid any confusion with the songlist - as a new possible selection among the main menu buttons. Nice, no?:)

However i think we should keep the display of the next song, with its image! It's a great feature which maybe could be also transfered in the songlist panel... Unless that be built-in in the new home page!!
Well, there are many possibilities...

Corrosion - 12-7-2003 at 06:10 PM

Well let's say it was off by default, you can turn it on for each mp3 you want to see the date displayed on top of the bottom right corner of the cover.

Fancy way? I don't know, something that looks 70's for the 70's, 80's for the 80's...

Sure you can see it on the album list but I never turn on extra-wide view and it could be fun to have that extra info in the Now Playing...

Fishy - 12-7-2003 at 07:07 PM

hmm... would be a nice feature. However the ej panels begins to become quite filled with stuff so I just don't know if there is space in there? I remember audiosoft mention something about a 1280 mode in a thread earlier. And since they got a habit of implementing what they promise I guess we will see that soon.

Then there might be more space to implement things like suggested in this thread and maybe do something about the famous playlist which have been a subject of hot debate lately :)

Fishy - 12-8-2003 at 06:53 PM

hmm I have been giving this a little thought. And I think it would be cool to have the release year of the album displayed in a lower case font beside the albumname in the now playing panel, as suggested in the beginning of this thread.

It would also be nice to have comments displayed in the songlist underneith or over the coverimage where there is room. The latter would make it look better when a album got a lot of songs and the coverimage align itself in the middle of the list. Having comments above the coverimage would make this feel a little more "natural" so to say.

Or one could even display the comments as a "tooltip" when one hold the mouse over the cover? Whatever the sollution should be, I find reviews and comments to cool to not become used in a creative way inside ej :)

Any feedback on this?

Pirk - 12-9-2003 at 09:59 AM

Displaying the release year in the now playing panel... i'm for it!
Until now i have put the release year in the album names, so i have the year displayed everywhere! But i would like eJ could do this itself (optionally). That would avoid me to alter all my tags...
The only thing is years in the id3 tags concern songs individually, not albums. What a shame!

The comment under cover images in the songlist... hmm... why not, but maybe that would overload a bit the layout. Moreover comments may be differents for each song. If the comments was displayed in the current playlist area, they could correspond to the song played!

I'm not against a tooltip displayed when one hold the mouse over the cover, but the comment of which song of the album should be displayed then?

That's my feedback! :)

Fishy - 12-9-2003 at 03:26 PM

The major problem with comments are that they are often very loooong. The sollution would have to be a scrollbar or a quote and a hotlink to the complete comment. Something like that, just had an exam so I am quite unable to think right now :b

fooo - 12-12-2003 at 08:54 AM

Just by reading some of these threads, an obvious answer is a much more customizable skinning system. Audiosoft can release a few examples and recommendations, but then, if you YOU feel like you want the date, then you can do it yourself or have someone do it for you who understands XML or whatever format the skin would be in. The path of having infinite checkboxes for cutomizing the interface is one frought with tons of maintenance and usability headaches.:)

Pirk - 12-12-2003 at 10:07 AM

...an obvious answer is a much more customizable skinning system: Until now, only the songlist is skinable using a CSS file - named .dis in eJukebox - and that only concern fonts and colors! More skinability was planned for the other panels... but projects on this seems to be a bit halted. I hope the idea is not abandoned?
I don't know if the .dis files could also manage the display of the years!