Murphy's dashboard

Murphy replied on July 03, 2009 04:44 to the idea "Store (restore) user specific info on library for rating and play counts" in Songbird:

It would be awesome if Songbird or an add-on could make a cloud solution for storing all of your library information, because I don't think any perfect way exists right now. You can use Last.fm and Vandelay Industries as a work around for backing up playcounts, but there is no great way to keep playcounts and ratings synced across multiple computers or backed up on demand.

This gives me an idea though- maybe Songbird could have its own version of Weave for keeping your personal information backed up and synced across computers. It could even keep track of your installed add-ons and feathers, basically making all of the information of your profile available online in case you need to restore it or to have an identical configuration across multiple computers.

Murphy started following the idea "Store (restore) user specific info on library for rating and play counts" in Songbird.

Murphy replied on July 02, 2009 17:05 to the idea "Colour-coding Songs and Albums" in Songbird:

This is another good topic about color coding your songs: http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

Murphy replied on July 02, 2009 15:03 to the idea "Tools for monitoring the quality of the audio files being played" in Songbird:

This topic had great ideas along the same lines: http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

I think tools like this would be really useful, since most people's libraries are filled with music from different sources and you can't be sure how well or poorly it was all ripped.

A comment on the idea "Awesome Library Bar!" in Songbird:

If Simon is coding this, he will be developing it as an add-on, which means it will not be part of the official program's code. The only way you will be able to test it is if he releases builds of it along the way. It could one day be something that they incorporate into the official program, but they probably won't work on feature suggestions like this one until they finish more high-priority items off of the roadmap. – Murphy, on July 01, 2009 04:38

Murphy replied on July 01, 2009 03:16 to the question "How to change the number of filters in medialibary?" in Songbird:

It works fine for me if I override compatibility on it using the Nightly Tester Tools add-on.

Murphy replied on June 30, 2009 17:00 to the idea "Awesome Library Bar!" in Songbird:

Simon, I don't know much about coding, but could you use the Now Playing List add-on to deal with making a custom playlist and things like enqueuing? I was just thinking that that might be easier than having to code your own system for creating a now playing playlist.

Murphy replied on June 30, 2009 15:53 to the idea "Build playlists without downloading files" in Songbird:

Here is another good topic about this: http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

A comment on the idea "Starting a new Add-On Project" in Songbird:

I love atreiu in the other kind of way... – Murphy, on June 30, 2009 00:06

Murphy started following the idea "Lightweight and quicker songbird" in Songbird.

Murphy replied on June 29, 2009 16:25 to the idea "Using Last.fm Metadata" in Songbird:

I think this is a great idea. All of the time I listen to a song and it shows up with a little green asterisk next to it in last.fm because the track or artist is named incorrectly. I think the Vandelay Industries add-on even compares your metadata with corrected data on last.fm, so I don't think it would be too much harder to have an add-on take those corrections and apply them to your library's metadata. It would be perfect if it could just give you a big two column list, one column with your current metadata, and the other with the corrected data, and you could just go through and select which changes you would like it to make.

Murphy started following the idea "Using Last.fm Metadata" in Songbird.

A comment on the idea "Awesome Library Bar!" in Songbird:

I think that if someone wanted to play a certain album or track, they would search for the name specifically. If I knew I wanted to listen to the album "Abbey Road" from the beginning, I would type "abbey road" into the search box, rather than typing "the beatles" and then navigating to find it. That's why I don't think hitting enter on the item should give you more specific options- it should play the item that you were looking for. There needs to be a way for someone to search for an entire artist or album if they want to listen to it, and quickly play the entire item from the beginning. This should basically function like the jump-to-file dialog in Songbird you get to by hitting ctrl+j or cmd+j, where you search for an item, select it, and then hit enter to play it.

In case someone does want to start playing an artist or album but from a more specific point than the beginning, I showed in the mockups that there could be an option for them to navigate further into the results using keyboard arrows. They could see more specific results for an item, such as the individual songs of an album, and then hit enter on one of those results to start the album from one of the specific songs. This is how Quicksilver and Quick Search box function, and I think it works well. – Murphy, on June 29, 2009 16:16

A comment on the idea "Awesome Library Bar!" in Songbird:

In this mockup I planned on "Web Results" just being history and bookmark items, since those are what the awesome bar already provides the user with. Ubiquity functionality could eventually come to the awesome bar in a Taskfox type of integration, but I think that should be separate from this project. I think this project should just aim at getting library results into the awesome bar (along with the usual web results of bookmarks and history items). However, atreiu said earlier that it might be easiest to provide this functionality as an extension of the Ubiquity add-on, so maybe they will end up being a unified project to make the awesome bar even more awesome :). – Murphy, on June 29, 2009 16:15

A comment on the idea "Awesome Library Bar!" in Songbird:

In this mockup I planned on "Web Results" just being history and bookmark items, since those are what the awesome bar already provides the user with. Ubiquity functionality could eventually come to the awesome bar in a Taskfox type of integration, but I think that should be separate from this project. I think this project should just aim at getting library results into the awesome bar (along with the usual web results of bookmarks and history items). However, atreiu said earlier that it might be easiest to provide this functionality as an extension of the Ubiquity add-on, so maybe they will end up being a unified project to make the awesome bar even more awesome :). – Murphy, on June 29, 2009 16:13

A comment on the idea "Awesome Library Bar!" in Songbird:

The url bar in Songbird is considered the awesome bar because it can show both history and bookmark results. However, this topic's idea of using it to show library results is not yet implemented. In the comments of that bug I think that they are saying that there are too many ideas in that one post, and that they need to be separated more specifically. I think we need to make a post just suggesting that library results show up in the awesome bar, briefly describe how it could work, and link to this topic for more discussion on it, instead of a numbered list of separate ideas. – Murphy, on June 29, 2009 15:51

A comment on the idea "Awesome Library Bar!" in Songbird:

Simon, thank you for considering working on this. It is exciting to see ideas come together in the community and even more exciting if they actually turn into something more.

I think if you hit enter on a result, it should play that item. If you hit enter on an album, artist, playlist, genre, or tag, it would just start playing the first song of the list unless you have it on shuffle. The hardest decision is what to do when the user hits enter on a song result. I don't think people would want it to just play that song and have playback stop when it is finished; most people would probably at least want to listen to a few songs on the album after that song, so maybe it would be best to play the song within the album that contains it. It's probably not a good idea to play the song within a list of the entire library, because Songbird takes a few seconds to generate this list if you have a large library.

There could also be an option (although we might need Moshy's help with this) to add an item to the now playing list by hitting a key combination like shift+enter. This way you could create a playlist quickly by searching for and enqueuing songs.

As I also showed in my first post with mockups, you could maybe hit right when on a song to navigate to some options of what to do with the song. This would enable you to do more than just play the song if there is something else you want to do with it. – Murphy, on June 29, 2009 05:19

Murphy replied on June 28, 2009 19:43 to the idea "Awesome Library Bar!" in Songbird:

I changed some things around and added web results. I think that having the awesome bar showing in the library and being able to open websites from it would help people access the browser in Songbird, something that might confuse new users right now because you can only do it by creating a new tab from your library or by opening a bookmark. I kept the web results separated from the library results; I figured that when you are in the library they'll appear at the bottom, and when you are in the browser they'll appear at the top.



I also wanted to clarify from my mockups before that I only had it so that items appear in the results if they match the term exactly. The reason these Beatles albums are showing after searching "beat" is because the album titles contain "beat". Abbey Road would not show up, even though it is a Beatles album, because you are probably not searching for it if you typed in "beat".

A comment on the idea "Awesome Library Bar!" in Songbird:

I was thinking that the search/filter bar would be a little redundant too, so I removed it in my mockups to see what it would look like with just the awesome bar. Google Chrome incorporates search into the url bar to simplify things, and it is possible that Firefox will eventually, so maybe this will be the way things end up. The Taskfox video shows how different search engines could be used in the awesome bar: http://vimeo.com/4062903?pg=embed&sec=

Maybe I will try to make a mockup where web results also come up when you type a term into the awesome bar. Perhaps to avoid confusion, when you are in your library and type a term into the awesome bar, it will show music results first and then web results at the end, but when you are in a browser tab, it will show web results first. – Murphy, on June 28, 2009 16:15

Murphy started following the idea "Have Songbird watch for duplicates when adding songs to a playlist" in Songbird.