SoongNoonien
commented
3 months ago Thank you very much! I appreciate the effort you put into this design suggestion. But I have to say that I don't like it while I know that the current design isn't perfect either. I'll try to list some of the problems I see with your proposal:
- MPD always manages its playback trough a queue. So it is not feasible to completely hide it and indicate within the browser/library what is playing. The queue has to be exposed and it should be separate from the browser as those two components are not related in any way.
- Turning the sidebar into a lyrics view is a very weird I thing. The sidebar is usually too narrow to read the lyrics and it wouldn't be possible to continue browsing while glancing at the lyrics from time to time.
- Allowing to show all albums of all artists has severe performance implications. When connected via network, transmitting the album covers is very slow. So even with a relatively small collection as mine (~400 albums) this can take up to several minutes. And MPD users tend to have collections which are way larger, a factor of >10 is not unusual.
- I think the cover of the current song is to small. One of the reasons why I started this project is that most players only show tiny covers. I consider covers to be an essential part of music. But maybe you portrayed a collapsed version of the player and with larger window sizes there could a bigger cover somewhere?
- I suppose the small circles next to the artist names symbolize artist portraits? I think almost nobody has artist portraits stored locally like album covers. So these would be empty most of the time or they would need to be filled trough some shady online service. And I'm always very confused when I open for example gnome music and see pictures of the artists which are 40 years younger than the music I have of them.
- The shuffle and repeat buttons in the lower right corner don't reflect the capabilities of MPD. MPD also provides a consume mode and a separate single mode. All four modes can be combined freely. So another client could configure a combination which is not representable by these two buttons.
- Displaying only the songs title and artist in the search results has the disadvantage that different versions of the same song are hard to distinguish.
bragefuglseth
rien333
Breakout thread from the ongoing GNOME Circle review of the app.
The main layout of the app currently consists of one unified header bar, a main view with three panes, and a bottom bar with player controls. Things are generally shown all at once, with no pagination whatsoever, and this can make for a cluttered and confusing experience at times. One way to improve this would be by e.g. splitting the app up in separate views instead of presenting every element at once, and consolidating related information in one place. Here's a suggestion that you can use to stake out a general direction, taking advantage of modern GNOME design patterns and widgetry:
If you're interested, I can adapt the above to mobile as well.