Just installed, using it to play tunes already...
Looks good, it is going in a good direction. Some first observations follow.
Good:
1. New skin is very nice and clean - looks like Windows Vista...
2. Many dialogs are redesigned to be more useful, eg. Handheld options is now much more usable
3. Move to more album-centric design is good
4. Much faster
5. Enhanced DVD playback options are great - I have already solved a long standing problem using this feature.
Bad:
1. Sudden crash when accessing "Drives & Devices"...
2. Fullscreen mode is gone - this was useful when in "sitting back" mode, esp with G-Force running, which provides song info by itself. Also pretty key for playing video and DVDs.
3. Favorites are gone - granted, they'd been somewhat neglected and had become less useful, but it might be good to revisit them
4. Double-click on an album does not play it - very confusing, esp when this is the defined behavior in options...
Ugly
1. The mode icons at the top of the tree are good - there was little point in having the mode icons AND the tree sub-branches. However, the marker used to indicate expansion is the little triangle, which usually implies that multiple branches can be opened. In fact, the media mode buttons are exclusive (you can't actually open the triangle for more than one) so you might as well make them buttons or tabs, which more accurately reflect exclusivity.
2. "Keyhole surgery" for editing smartlists - why force editing smartlists into one line, when you are allocating about 20% of the screen to an area for notes, which is rarely used. I would encourage shameless copying of the iTunes interface in this area...
3. Since "Favorites" are gone, the "Navigation" sub-menu is now somewhat redundant. Why not move the sub-items in Navigation directly under the view menu? Some of them, like Find, should be first level menu items.
4. Action Window - like I've said before, make it a more comprehensive collection of Actions, not just a grab-bag of functions. Possibly make it customizable like the toolbars. I'm thinking that a lot of what goes on in the Action Window can be converted to a right-click or drop-down on items in the tree. Export Playlist belongs in the AW, under the Playlist button.
5. Invisible management of images in playlists. Right now playlists and playing now seem very focused on music. You can in effect have a "playing now" of images, but there is no way of visualizing what's in it.
6. The "Find CD" and "Artist Info" options stuck under Playing Now seem a bit out of place. Isn't Find CD a candidate for the action window?
7. Still heavy reliance on accurate drag & drop, or multi-level nested menus - hard to use if you are using a wireless keyboard & trackball mouse. My suggestion - whenever an obvious drag target is on screen (say a playlist, a portable device, writeable media) have a clear button on the screen labelled "Add Here". When that button is pressed, the current visible selection is added to that target. So for example, to add stuff to a playlist, you'd open that playlist in the action window (its "Add Here" button would be visible), then you'd browse the library, whenever you saw something you want to add to the playlist, you'd select and then press the playlist's add button. Same for CDs, and handhelds. The Add Here button could *also* act as a drag target. Note that you could have multiple targets visible at once, and could easily add the current selection to any of them with a single button press. The key point of all this is to avoid complex mouse moves with a button held down - it is very, very hard with a wireless trackball!!!
8. Difficult to access switch between gapless and cross-fade playback - you need to define the alternate playback options, and then switch using that. While I like the alternate playback system in general, most of the time I'm only switching between cross-fade and gapless. Might be worth putting a button (next to shuffle) for this function alone.
9. Left-click and right-click do the same thing in the Playing Now display. Shouldn't one of them toggle the text display, and the other bring up the menu?
10. Generally consistency stuff - the Playback Options submen has as its second item... Playback Options. Clicking Build Playlist in the AW shows a list, where the first item is... Build Playlist. This is generally a bad practice, you are telling the user they can get something done, when they still have to go one step further.
11. DSP studio (digital signal processor studio) is a needlessly elaborate (and inaccurate - it's not a development studio for DSPs) way of describing a function that a lot of users need. Why not call it Sound Control, or Sound configuration? Why not add it to the action window, calling it "Adjust my sound"?
12. Action Window buttons should respect (and use) the current selection. For example if I select a bunch of tunes in the library then press "Burn CD", it should add the current selection to the CD burn list. If I press Build Playlist, it should make an "untitled" playlist with the current selection (and perhaps prompt to rename the playlist).
Wishlist
1. Ability to define image and video playlists with a soundtrack that overrides the original sound in the video - I very often want to play back videos or movies with a completely different audio playlist composed by me. (Documentaries about dinosaurs are great with tribal house.)
2. Keep the UI on one screen while showing visuals, cover art, etc on secondary screen (s). MC11 is actually excellent in this area - it lets you be a "video DJ", cuing up stuff on the main screen while showing the output on a second screen that goes to a projector. It worries me that Fullscreen mode is gone in MC12, because I do this quite a lot.
3. Scripting - check out Sony Media's Vegas Video, that can be completely scripted using Javascript.
4. 3D visuals - the existing 3D visualizations are very quick and well coded - would it be possible to 3Dize more of the program?
Other thoughts
1. As long as we have a closed beta, why not put in a function to log user actions, and use this to drive the design of menus, the action window, and the various buttons on the UI? I'd love to see how often people edit a playlist by right-clicking on it in the tree vs opening it in the AW.
2. The Action Window is the only UI element labelled in all CAPS. I've mentioned this before - is there perhaps a secret reason?
3. There is currently an option to use VMR9 for DVD playback - why not extend this to all video?
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Topic: First impressions - MC12 (Read 9256 times)