Make no mistake, this is certainly not a dood-this-thing-suckz thread; MJ rocks, for sure, and I wouldn't have shelled out for it if I didn't think so, having looked around quite a bit at the competitors. I think that this kind of discussion only arises as a testament to MJ's power and flexibility: darn it sure does everything else, why doesn't it do this?
I too have a massive music collection, and MJ handles it admirably. I do believe, however, that the multiple-scroll-click-add-confirm metaphor for each track that's being pursued in the interface is inferior to the task I commonly put it to, which is to assemble a completely arbitrary collection of songs for burn to disc or to put on the Nomad.
Again, I'm not putting MJ down, but I think it's worth discussing, particularly if you power users have some tips to get around it. The process for me is something like this:
1) Select song.
--This involves at least three clicks and drags in the Media Library view per song; one to open the tree, and then further clicks to get to the artist and album I'm interested in. Due to the size of the open tree at that point, there's generally some scrolling involved as well. This part of the interface idiom is unavoidable, I think, and probably one of the best ways to handle it, so I've really got no problem there. A multiple window interface would have the same limitation.
2) Now, once I've got my track selected, I can do a couple of things: I can either send it to a playlist for collection and reordering and to see if I'm exceeding my space before I burn or download to Nomad, or I can drop it right on the Nomad's entry in the tree.
--In the first case, I'm looking at a three or four click process (right click for context menu, click to add to playlist, possibly optional click to select specific playlist, click to confirm). Yuck. Plus it's blind; I don't see feedback, the results of my process. I'm not reminded of what order or other tracks are already in the playlist, which is subjectively important in creating a flow of music and mood, and objectively important to whether or not I'm blowing the device capacity. So that makes me frown.
--In the second case, I can drag/drop directly to the Nomad or playlist, which is better in terms of clicks but worse because that file tree is frigging HUGE and drags that also force a scroll are really hard to control, in just about any program. The overall process is usually slower in time. When I'm dropping multiple files, the refresh/blinking and general kludginess of the operation make you think that MJ is going to crash at any second. And occasionally it does. And, still, we've got the same no-feedback blindness problem.
Now, if you had another window that represented the device's contents, you could in one swell foop A) eliminate the drag/scroll control problem and B) eliminate the no-feedback problem, PLUS provide a bunch of additional convenient functionality. In my separate window I could reorder right there, and I could see how my device was filling up, and delete from there too. If I had windows for both the internal and flashcard memory of my Nomad, that would just dominate. Blindly dividing them up in MJ as it works now is inconvenient.
I agree that some interface idioms require a cognitive shift, and once you've made the shift you're better off than you were in your old way, or your old square, et al. MJ's categories and smartlists are great examples of that, you're right. But these tools aren't the ones that I commonly apply to the problem I and datatrader were referring to. And on the other hand, I also think that some interface idioms are simply more effective and intuitive than others, and this multiple-window thing may be such a case.
When I first looked at the MJ interface, it's of course very similar to the MMC, the Microsoft Management Console, the backbone of 2000's management interfaces. I was surprised that it didn't have one of the nifty idioms of the MMC, the ability to right click on a tree node and say "New Window From Here". I've never needed or tried to use the classes that provide that functionality in any of my projects, but one would think there'd be a solid foundation to construct from in there.
Anyway, that's my .02. I think the point of this thread originally was 'does it do this, and if not what would you suggest', so I'd love to hear from power users and what tricks they use to accomplish these tasks. If you got this far, thanks for reading; sorry for the flood. Maybe I'll put this in the wish list. I'd love to see MJ dominate to the point where devices were coming out touting their compatibility with it, and it was crushing the competition.
I think that will happen because clearly these guys take suggestions and treat their users nice, and this particular user community is exceptionally friendly and thoughtful, unlike the other collections of rampant wingnuts you find out there.
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Topic: How to view two windows: 1 with all files, 1 with playlist. (Read 3912 times)