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[Frobozz]

I was at Classical.net looking at the composers timelines they have and thought how cool would it be if Media Center could organize my music collection in a timeline view.  That would be so cool.

Have a timeline with bars for years active for bands or birth dates and death dates for composers.  Breakouts for album releases or opus along the timeline.  Of course, to be useful it would need to be fed data for all the dates.  If it could get the data from an online database like YADB.  Then I thought what if the database also had data about genre for each album, musical period for composers and other useful things so that the timeline could be grouped or have additional breakouts by genre, style, period, and other such things.  That would be so cool.

[darichman]

I love this idea...
I'm always looking for new ways to view data and something like this would be perfect (especially considering I spent hours entering in many of the fields you mentioned!)

A fuzzy map of genres / styles etc could be cool as well... Large bubbles or clouds for big musical groups, containing smaller ones for styles...

I am not, however, optimistic about seeing this anytime soon

Edit: If any of the organisational ideas in the "And Now for Something" thread come to fruition, something like this would be a perfect visual frontend...

I'm thinking mindmaps and flowcharts as well as timelines....

[JimH]

So many geeks, so little time.   

Just kidding.  More views of data would probably be good.

Dates in our YADB database are probably not very accurate.  Allowing users to correct data is a wonderful and, at the same time, scary thought. 

I'd like to hook a wiki for metadata, but that's a big project with uncertain payback.

[darichman]

So many geeks, so little time.   

Just kidding.  More views of data would probably be good.

Dates in our YADB database are probably not very accurate.  Allowing users to correct data is a wonderful and, at the same time, scary thought. 

I'd like to hook a wiki for metadata, but that's a big project with uncertain payback.

I think a lot of it comes down to the problem of consensus on standards for things like this... what is "date"? Is is the year the track was originally released? The year the album was released? What about compilations? Should all tracks have the same date, even though many were written decades before?

And what about classical? Date composed, date recorded, album release date etc etc

The same goes for other fields (Artist vs Composer, Performer, Featuring, Band, Conductor, Lyricist etc etc)
Until we have separate fields by default for all these things, and until YADB supports submission of each of these separately, there will continue to be inaccuracies, as you mention, because people will have their own definitions for fields like "Artist" and "Date".

I'm not sure about a solution... I like wiki's... I've never submitted content to one though. Does the MC community have enough of a user base to support setting up the infrastructure for something like this?

[JimH]

... I like wiki's... I've never submitted content to one though. Does the MC community have enough of a user base to support setting up the infrastructure for something like this?

If we did one, I think it would be wide open, and not just for the MC community.

[darichman]

If we did one, I think it would be wide open, and not just for the MC community.

I think that's a great idea... user generated content can grow really quickly once the word gets out.
If it gained popularity outside the MC userbase you might find yourself attracting new users anyway, particularly if it were well integrated with the program...

I'm not sure how you'd go about integration with the database in its current state though... I know I've been angling for a change in database structure for a while now (no one's told me to shut up yet ), but if this is the direction you guys are headed I'm happy to come along for the ride...

Have a timeline with bars for years active for bands or birth dates and death dates for composers.  Breakouts for album releases or opus along the timeline.  Of course, to be useful it would need to be fed data for all the dates.

Perfect example... to do what you propose, there needs to be a way to tag a 'Composer' with 'Birth Date' and 'Death Date' etc... there is no way to do that currently.

Info on relational database proposals here:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=44339.msg303399#msg303399
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=44381.0

[Frobozz]

So many geeks, so little time.   

It's all because I like MC so much.   

The timeline view does have me thinking it would be a great way to get a new overview of my music collection and an understanding of new relationships between composers or bands based on time or period.  It's that aspect that makes me think "wow, this could be neat."  The challenge though will be in creating, getting and maintaining the data to fill in the dates for bands, composers, discography, opus, and other needed info. 

[ThoBar]

I think I like this idea.... new ways to display data in a useable format are always good... Would you be suggesting a whole new display interface for it though? I guess so, as you can *kinda* do it already...

[Frobozz]

I am thinking of a timeline chart with lots of horizontal bars similar to how classical.net has their composers timeline.  I don't know if it would be a new display interface or not.  Just that it gets displayed somehow in a useful manner with necessary interaction.  My vision has been big picture and I haven't thought about details yet.

[Doof]

A timeline would be a natural for photos, too.