Murphy's dashboard

Doh- ignore that the scrollbar isn't actually between B and C but the artists showing are. I don't know how I didn't notice that while I was making it. – Murphy, on March 12, 2009 20:56

iTunes was updated tonight, and I don't know if this is a new feature, but I just noticed it so it is new to me: you can go to View and click on Group Albums to get them so they do sort by artist.



I think this method is good, but it doesn't make very good use of space. I still think the last one I posted might be more effective in terms of separating artists and making use of the space inside of the program.

Goodness! ( ) is my favorite album and I didn't even notice yet that it doesn't show up in the filter pane.

I use Songbird as a media player now, and iTunes has become my "iPod manager" out of necessity. I want to see the iPod and last.fm addons get more attention because right now they just aren't functional enough to use.

I keep trying out ideas to find the best media view. I made this one today because I realized that having the album covers displayed equally in a grid solves a lot of problems with spacing them out; for example, with the overlapping-covers idea I posted before, when the artist runs onto the next row, a full cover would have to be shown again.
But I still tried to improve the grid from what iTunes and the Songbird addons do right now by separating albums by artist. It isn't a very drastic change from the way they are now, but I think that distinguishing artists like this would be useful. I also incorporated the letters into the scroll bar to help you scroll through the library to find artists quickly.

I think someone should make an addon that allows people to do different things to audio files, such as allowing pitch alteration, slowing/speed up a song without altering the pitch, and reversing it as well. Slowing down a song can be useful for learning it on an instrument, and speeding it up, reversing it, and altering pitch can all have interesting results with different songs. You can try a demo of Amazing Slow Downer to try changing pitch or tempo (it can't actually reverse songs though, which is what this thread was about in the first place :P, but people could do that easily with free programs like audacity for now)

I agree with you Duncan. I don't think hiding a menu pane in a program is something that an addon needs to do for it, especially when the button is already there, just disabled. I assume it must be disabled because it is thought that someone who is new to the program could accidentally hide the main pane and not be able to get it back and never be able to navigate again, but I just don't think this would happen. Laura, I know what you are saying, because I will always be fine downloading an addon for myself to get a certain functionality, I just make these suggestions because I think they would be in the best interest of the program itself. Nearly every program (except iTunes) allows you to customize it to the point where you can hide every component of the program and just have the content. Firefox even lets you hide the navigation bar, and I don't even know why you would want to do that! I just feel like a number of threads here have shown that a majority of people do want certain features, but the team still decides that they are more addon material (such as the playlist pane). I'm fine with this because the coders are the ones who should ultimately have a certain vision of what they want the program to be. But what is the vision for Songbird? How is it determined what the true purpose of the program will be and what features should be default features? Is it that Songbird is just a media player by default? No, because then browsing the web and cd ripping would be addons. Is it a media player that is trying to help people interact with the web more? That is what I thought, but people seemed to think that integrating native torrent support into the program wouldn't be right because it is bloating the media player, despite the fact that torrents are probably the most common way of getting music on the web. I love the open nature of Songbird and I love watching it grow, but I think that while the project is open source, it doesn't seem to be open minded. I think the vision of Songbird as of right now is to have it be iTunes by default- that explains why it is a media player that allows cd ripping and burning, but doesn't have the native ability to hide the navigation pane or make a playlist pane. Maybe iTunes is the best media player out now, but that doesn't mean it is perfect. I think that many of the suggestions here for features that iTunes doesn't have would still be beneficial to the majority of the people downloading Songbird, and it would really set Songbird apart as the better player, before any addons are even installed.