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[gkerber]

About once a week I try the 9.1 beta, and then go running back to 9.0 (which itself is quite buggy).

9.1 is simply harder to use than the 9.0 version that CNET said was difficult to use....

The main difficulty (still) revolves around the tree vs pain issue.

It's getting better, now that trees are still available, but still, it's harder to use, it may have more power (as others say), but who will use that extra power?  Not the average user.

I think the fix is to allow a black and white choice per view scheme for trees or paines.   When the tree is created for a view scheme, the panes keep coming back and going away for that view scheme.  One or the other is best (per view scheme) - the mix is clunky.

And I used to be able to click on an item in the tree to have it expand, now I must cick on the little + to get the tree item to expand.

I think it's time to step back and ask if 9.1 and it's interface is progress for the masses or just progress for the hard core power users, and who are there more of?

I do believe it's possible to please both camps, but it takes a desire to make the power user features hidden for the non-power users, otherwise they are just in the way.

I can't stay with 9.0 forever, it's too buggy, and 9.1 is way harder to use.  I'm scared of the future.

[nila]

Hey

what ur asking for is already there - it's an option (yes - an option - I love them!!)

Maybe as default it should be turned on, I dont know.

To turn it on go to:  tools/options
then look at where it says Tree

Choose 'auto expand tree'.

If your finding this very complex ask matt to turn this option on as default and I'm sure he wont mind, its not a big deal one way or the other - if it helps beginners if it's on then so be it.


The idea behind the panes being there is that you can have the pane as an option, but then can instantly move into tree mode when you start using the tree - it's like an auto hide type feature

It might be a bit tricky at first but it means u get to have the pane as both things and not just one or the other.

[gkerber]

Hey

what ur asking for is already there - it's an option (yes - an option - I love them!!)

Choose 'auto expand tree'.

The idea behind the panes being there is that you can have the pane as an option, but then can instantly move into tree mode when you start using the tree - it's like an auto hide type feature

The autoexpand tree option is good, I did not know it was there.

I have no use for the panes, period, ever.  I have tried and tried to like them, I can't find a use for them for the way I use MC.

So, I'd like a way so I never have to see them, ever.  The choice could be global or by view scheme, but I never want to see them.  As it is right now they just keep popping up and then going away.

This may seem minor to the users that like the panes, but to those of us that have no use for them, having them popping in and out is annoying and distracting.  

Okay, I've figured out how to get rid of the panes, totally removing the panes frame.

Thanks for the autoexpand option note, let me play around with it this way.

[nila]

One question with the panes:

are you trying to use your old view schemes from v9?

Because if you are, thats probably why you hate them.


I'm not sure how  you choose what music you like to play but here's my main view scheme for audio using panes (This one is directed mainly for finding albums or artist/albums - not for genre or anything like that)


Year/artist (group 2)/artist/album(group 2)/album


If you try something like that - you'll see I can get to any artist within next to no clicks VERY fast with no scrolling.

I can see all the artists what released songs in any year.

The beauty of panes is that with tree's I have to first choose a year with that view scheme before I can choose an artist. With panes I can ignore the year field and just go straight to artist. Or even ignore the artist and go straight to album.

With the tree's I used to have to have view schemes for each one (ie:   Year/Artist/Album   -  Artist/Album   - Album) because there was no way of not using the first item.


It takes a while to get used to panes, trust me, I didn't like them to begin with, but once you do, they're great and VERY fast.

Also - dont think about using your old view schemes from v9 - they just dont cross over very well, when I tried to cross mine over I didn't like it either - when I dropped it and built totally new ones - boom, it was a lot easier to use

[phelt]

A conundrum for Nila:
But would you give up panes if that was the only way to get splitscreen?

On topic:
I think the utility of panes differs according to each user's tastes, not only for navigation but the type of view schemes that they use. To me, panes are kind of nifty but not awesome. I don't use a lot of view schemes or multiple libraries, so I can't comment on their utility in those situations.

I do find it odd and highly annoying when I do a "locate" on something and it takes me down the tree instead of maintaining the panes. Perhaps there's solid reasoning for this that I'm simply not aware of.

[LonWar]

I found 9.0 hard to use.
The panes is what convinced me to buy this program...

But I guess to each there own!

[gkerber]

One question with the panes:

are you trying to use your old view schemes from v9?

Because if you are, thats probably why you hate them.

I'm not sure how  you choose what music you like to play but here's my main view scheme for audio using panes (This one is directed mainly for finding albums or artist/albums - not for genre or anything like that)


Year/artist (group 2)/artist/album(group 2)/album

I use
Artist(group 1)/Artist/Album
as the only view scheme.  Sometimes I use
Genre/Artist(group1)/Artist/Album

But that's all for me.  I find the panes annoying.

I am not trying to rekindle the tree-hugger and payne-monger debate, we all have what we want now.  For my use, panes are not useful, for others they seem very useful.  

[nila]

I'm surprised you dont find panes good for that view. I'd have thought they would have been good.

One question - do you usually navigate with the keyboard or mouse?


Phelt - That's impossible to answer!!!

Grr - talk about rock and hard place.

Panes = ability to skip fields and start browsing directly from whichever field we want. Grouping is a lot more useful as we can choose to avoid the grouping and see the whole lot. They're also PERFECT for tagging list types for like people for images.


Split screen on the other hand would give us the ability to browse the library while playing songs, the ability to create playlists in the orders we want by dragging and dropping, ability to see whats on a CD we were compiling while we were compiling it and browsing the library.


Grrrrr - U SUCK!!

U choose one! Lets see if you can make the choice

I'm guessing gkerbhert would chose split as he doesn't like panes lol.

[phelt]

I would choose splitscreen, instantly.
Panes are marginally faster for me, but I'm fine with navigating a tree for content. Panes don't currently help me very much with the way I would like to interact with video or photos or music or playlists.

Sorry for the partial thread hijack, gkerber. A question for you: what do you mean when you say

When the tree is created for a view scheme, the panes keep coming back and going away for that view scheme.

Does this mean that in your day to day use of MC the panes appear and disappear? If so, is there any apparent logic to it?

[digitaltrapper]

I hardly ever use panes and would love to turn them off, if i could. I have a very large collection of mp3s and I have spent a great deal of time trying to accurately update their tags, however the YEAR fields and GENRE fields are almost always wrong (Thanks emusic for using "Blues" for almost every genre!).

[nila]

Digital - You can turn them off - just hide the panel like you can do with all the other MC panels - by clicking on the little 'thingy migicky' in the middle of it - they'll be hidden and 'gone' for you


phelt - he means when ur at the root of a tree you see the panes - as soon as you start navigating it the panes disappear (or at least I think he does).

[rocketsauce]

Thanks emusic for using "Blues" for almost every genre!

I recall that this has something to do with the differences in ID3v1 and v2 tags. In v1 tags, you are limited to a set of predefined genres, Blues being the first one in the list. In v2 tags, you can put anything you want in the genre field. Now, if I remember correctly, if you are adding both v1 and v2 and if you leave the v2 genre blank, the v1 tag interprets blank to mean "genre 1", which in the list of v1 predefined genres is Blues.

Anyway, I'm not sure I have it exactly right, but I think that's the basic idea. There's some old threads on this topic.

Rob

Listening to: 'Oye Como Va' from 'Oye Como Va!: The Dance Collection' by 'Tito Puente' on Media Center 9.0

[KingSparta]

what it is:

with ID3v1 Tags Genre Value "0" is Blues

If this value is not set, it will be Blues

[jam]

I'm surprised you dont find panes good for that view. I'd have thought they would have been good.

It's just simple.  I don't want to move my eyes/neck horizontaly to look over panes.  It's physically challenging to me.  I have no disability around neck but it's still challenging to me.

Grouping is a lot more useful as we can choose to avoid the grouping and see the whole lot.

Grouping is useless to me.  Non English title/artists/album names are not grouped.  Those are even not sorted because Unicode is not sorted in non English area.  Let me see, 80% of my music files are not in English.  It's around 5500 songs.  So, in general, I'm looking at 5500 of random songs, 550 of random titles, or 300 of random artists.  There is no way to organize this in current MC9.1.    

I guess Gerne and Year will work well.  I didn't enter those information yet, though.

[fex]

It's just simple.  I don't want to move my eyes/neck horizontaly to look over panes...

It's very hard to find an argument against this one .

But I like the panes over all. They give me the possibility to find every track in a minimum of time. With a large library this is not possible within the tree. The tree just never ends. So you scroll and scroll and scroll and...

[gkerber]

Digital - You can turn them off - just hide the panel like you can do with all the other MC panels - by clicking on the little 'thingy migicky' in the middle of it - they'll be hidden and 'gone' for you


phelt - he means when ur at the root of a tree you see the panes - as soon as you start navigating it the panes disappear (or at least I think he does).

Yes that is what I meant and I have finally learned to make them go away completely - works great so far.

I like your name, the "thingy migicky", thats as good a name as I could make up, I wonder what the official "windows" name for it is?

[gkerber]

I'm surprised you dont find panes good for that view. I'd have thought they would have been good.

One question - do you usually navigate with the keyboard or mouse?

Always the mouse.

I guess I just play mostly albums, by artist, so it's natural that I need to "drill down" without needing ever to go directly to an album.

[gkerber]

I hardly ever use panes and would love to turn them off, if i could. I have a very large collection of mp3s and I have spent a great deal of time trying to accurately update their tags, however the YEAR fields and GENRE fields are almost always wrong (Thanks emusic for using "Blues" for almost every genre!).

Well, after everyone helped out today, I have them turned off!  Everybody has what they want now, I like that.

If you  have not figured out how to turn them off from this thread, chime back in and we'll explain it.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions.

[nameless]

I made a little video to help illustrate how to hide (and reshow) the panes.  I am sorry that the download is so large (even zipped), but we all work with the tools (in this case, the video codecs) we have...

http://snurl.com/panes (1.9 MB, zipped AVI file)

[jam]

Thank you for the information of this trick.  

BTW, in curious, does this save CPU time?  Even if I hide those pane, MC9.1 looks like updating some un-visible information.

For example, I have about 550 individual titles and 300 artists.  If I click Artist/Album in tree view, MC9 display all information in 3 sec, mouse cursor once become arrow and become a sandglass again, then after 2~3 sec later, it become arrow again.  So, I needed to wait 6 sec.  On the other hand, if I click smartlist contains all songs, MC9 takes 2 sec to display everyting and 1 sec in a sandglass.

[Kurt Young]

<snip!>
But I like the panes over all. They give me the possibility to find every track in a minimum of time. With a large library this is not possible within the tree. The tree just never ends. So you scroll and scroll and scroll and...

Amen.  At it's height, my library was closing in on 5,000 songs.  I've heard reports of exponentially larger libraries from some of the folks around here.  That's not just a tree, folks, that's the frikkin Yggdrasil!

Chop down the tree!!  Give me stylishly-moving buttons on the left, not that same old "tree-of-nodes" setup.  Panes on the top right, list on the bottom right, properties on the bottom left, just like it is now (floatable and hidable), and then...

... replace the tree with a smaller muy pretty miniature Hairstyle in the top left!!!  

Tree-And-Node is so 20th Century, anyway.  And don't forget, MC's drawin' itself these days, aye?


While I'm on a roll, eliminate the Start and Playing Now "nodes" altogether, default it to start in the library and make some kind of... button... that...

...causes the entire Mega-Me to transition into the Playing Now screen.  3-D transitions like a rotating cube, polygon or plane, sweet stuff like that.  Heck, you could even float the Playing Now "side" so that you can see it at the same time as the Library, Devices TV, Playlists and Radio "side".  (hrmm, that side needs a better name, )

And don't get me started on my hyper-realistic mind-blowing futuristic idea for the right-click context menu.  It's a good one too!


-kurt

(thanks for listening, it's not often i have the 'net at home, hehehe)

Listening to: 'Vampires' from 'Awake' by 'Godsmack' on Media Center 9.1

[rocketsauce]

...3-D transitions like a rotating cube, polygon or plane, sweet stuff like that.

Please.....noooooooo.........  

Rob

Listening to: 'Down In A Funk' from 'Music Fiction' by 'Rithma' on Media Center 9.0

[LisaRCT]

MC9 and MC9.1 are both difficult for many folks who aren't 'power-users', but then again my g/f has difficulty using MJ8   ?

But anyway, I do think there needs to be a switch for "power-user/geek" vs "button pusher" so as to allow an 'idiot-proof" interface for the 'button pusher'.
This could be done either by allowing MC to be opened in full-function mode or an ortion for 'simpleton mode' which could be very fundamental.
This could also be achieved by using a 'jukebox skin' as has been requested previously by others.

I love the power of MC9 (both 9.0 & 9.1), but it is overly difficult for those who are not computer savvy or have taken quite a bit of time to learn the MC9 interface.  But I have to be the one to play the music as others here have too much difficulty using the program.

[gkerber]

I love the power of MC9 (both 9.0 & 9.1), but it is overly difficult for those who are not computer savvy or have taken quite a bit of time to learn the MC9 interface.  But I have to be the one to play the music as others here have too much difficulty using the program.

It's not a matter of  "computer savvy" vs "button pusher".  I consider myself quite comptuer savvy, however, I have no use for some of the more complex features of MC, and don't want them in my way when using MC.  Most people simply won't need much of the power of MC, I'm glad it's there if I ever want or need it, but right now, I just want an easy to use jukebox, like v8.  However I can't stick with v8 due to lack of cd-burner support.

My personal wish is for MC to finish and polish what they already have before moving on to new power-user features.

Reply Gain needs work.
Cover Art display for playing now needs work.

[xen-uno]

'sauce > In v1 tags, you are limited to a set of predefined genres

Your memory serves you well. I was about ready to dispute ...until I found these v1 specs. Genre's are indeed indexed number based (1 byte or 256 possibilities). V2 tag spec's look good, though (never had a problem with them). Pretty good hack on a horrible foundation.

10^-27