I originally would write this as a reply to a prev. thread
http://www.musicex.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=MediaCenter;action=display;num=1058348242but I thought it is a sufficiently different idea to have its own thread for discussion. I think it also addresses some of the issues mentioned there.
GOOD:Album view is very useful if you play whole albums.
BAD:There are two major problems I see with album view, that does not make it as useful as it should be for other tasks.
1) It does not help to select individual songs visually.
Even if I know that a song is in an album that I know very well visually, locating the album cover from album view does not help selecting the song. I use detail view (or name filter in 9.1) in addition to other filter (genre, album name, etc..)
2) Causes inconsistent selectionsIf you filter some songs in an album (i.e. rating=5), and click on some albums in album view, not only the songs with rating 5 are played, but the whole albums. Especially troubling is that album view and detail view selects different songs in this case. View change should not cause selection change.
Here is a simple, yet very clean solution to both of these problems.
Album View should be a filter (i.e. just like the album names filter). The lower window could be splitted into two, album view filter on the left, details on the right.
To locate a song, just like you would select the album name from album filter, you can select some of the albums in album view, reducing the number of songs in detail view. If you want to play whole albums, click play; if you want to select individual songs, select them from detail view.
In short: I want to be able to use album view to help me to select individual songs.
Now is the time:In 9.0 and before, this idea was more difficult to implement in MC, but I think it fits in new 9.1 scheme perfectly.
What do you think? Any disadvantages? Hey, MC folks; would this need a lot of change or is it reasonable to implement? Who would like this, raise your hands