Over the last few weeks I have been finally putting together my HTPC. I have been looking at several products for the interface, including MC with Hairstyle and MyHTPC. As I have been toying with these programs, I have noticed a common problem throughout both of these menuing systems:
With extremely large collections of media, these interfaces are not efficient at selecting a specific song, album, or (if the collection is large enough) artist. Let me give an example:
In a library with 20,000 songs and 7,000 artists
I am sitting at home on my couch and think "I would love to here Panama by Van Halen".
Scenarios to accomplish this:
Through both Hairstyle and MyHTPC you would have to at least navigate to a Artist Menu. At this point Van Halen is at the end of the alphabet, so you will have to page down through all the other artists (maybe 5000 or so). Then you either select an album from another menu, or browse through a list of ALL Van Halen songs (again lengthy if you have 100 or so individual Van Halen Songs). You get the idea...lots of paging down, lots of nested menus.
It would seem that breaking all artists down according to letter of the alphabet would be a solution. The problem with this approach is that it adds another menu (selecting a letter of the alphabet) adding to the complexity of the system. Also, with 7000 artists, even an alphabetic sub menu (a,b,c...) would be lengthy.
Generally, I think a typical user must navigate no more than 3 menus to select an item for a system to be usable. But for the life of me, I can't think of a way to allow a 3-click navigation to a song.
Voice recognition could possibly help this, but....think about trying to use voice recognition at a loud party. Also, I truly think most people prefer using a remote to speaking out loud....many people are embarassed to speak out into the air in front of others.
Anyway....anyone have ideas on how to handle this problem? I would love an ideas on this from the forum.
Thanks,
-h3dge