joux's dashboard

The last.fm addon submits my "love" and "ban" clicks on a track. But I like giving 1 to 5 star ratings, too. What do you think about an option to automatically add a tag on last.fm, whenever I change the rating of a playing song? It could read "3outof5" or "songbird-stars:3/5". Maybe just tag the tracks I rate 5 stars, because they stick out.

Just an idea to make my last.fm account reflect better what I do/like in Songbird.

There is an issue that annoys me from time to time about the "all" selection in the filter pane view of my library. I'll describe a situation, so you can follow:

What I am doing:
I'm browsing through the "artist" column of the filter pane, looking for some nice music to listen to. I select "DJ Shadow". The album column is then updated and shows all albums containing tracks of DJ Shadow. I want to listen to his songs featured on the "my way to me" compilation(!), so I select that one. The songs meeting both criteria (DJ Shadow AND my way to me) are displayed.
Now: As I am reminded of this cool compilation, I want to listen to the full album, including songs of other artists. So I want to remove one the criteria and select "all" instead of "DJ Shadow" in the artist column of the filter pane. But the "album" column is reset to "all", too. Now I have to scroll all the way down to "my way to me" again or use the "search library" field.

So this is my problem:
The three filter columns are in a hierarchy from left to right: Genre > Artist > Album. Whenever a column is reset to "all", the columns to its right are reset as well. As my example shows, this behaviour does not always make sense, as the relationship is not always hierarchical. One artist can be in several genres, one album can feature several artists. Plus our browsing through the library is not always very logical ;-)

Some questions:
- Does this occur to other people, too, or is it just me who finds it annoying?
- Should the filter pane criteria just be independent?
- Are there downsides of this, which I have not considered?
- How does iTunes handle this?

My suggestion would be:
Changing one of the three criteria never changes the selection in the other columns (of course the available options are still adjusted). Except when the combination would return Zero results, then the criteria are reset to "all", starting with the lowest ("album") until there is a matching result.

What do you think?

Despite all the great music on my hard drive and out there on the web, I'm keeping a nice vinyl record collection. And sometimes I would just love to scrobble my played vinyl tracks to last.fm, too.

I'm also using discogs to keep a list of all my non-mp3 music. How about an add-on that integrates all these tracks into my songbird library using the discogs api? When I "play" one of those in songbird, it would of course just keep silent, but scrobble it to last.fm.

This might sound a bit weird, but hey, it is another step to get all my music into my songbird library..

Many search sites let you hand over search parameters in the URL. Songbird should have special tags that you can use in web addresses, like $title and $artist. And we need an option to refresh websites upon song change.

This way, I could have a website open, that always shows me the results for the current song/artist, for example blog posts on technorati, or the artist page on last.fm or discogs.

I know, there is the songbird API, which enables websites to get this information, but sometimes mashups go the other way round.