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[h3dge]

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

[NoCodeUK]

Some kind of search ability would be a start.  That way you could select what field you wanted to search on and then enter the first three letters using your remote...like the TV search in my HTPC only for music

Adam

[Matt]

With a fixed number of items, it'll always be a trade-off between length and depth.  (lots of leaves makes for a big tree)

However, by breaking things logically, it may help.  Could you make some view scheme groups filter to just artists or genres you listen to often? (with playlists)

Could you break things into like 10 main genres so each artist list was a tenth the size?

Anyone else have some ideas?

Thanks.

[NoCodeUK]

How about a view scheme that filtered artists by letter and then with a grouping of the first three letters... That might work... so you could say go to V then Van...  Don't know if this can be done easily or not.  I will see what I can work out...

Adam

[NoCodeUK]

Okay, I have just had a little go at this.  You can set up a View Scheme that is artist/Album with a grouping level of 3 on the Artist but set to not show individual items and the Album level set not to group and to show individual items.  This then lists all albums in the tree but in 3 letter category blocks eg all A,B and C Artists albums together.  This could be simplified further by adding a group level to the album as well.  So if you wanted Van Halen 5150 you would first go to the Artist V-X level then to the Album 0-5 level where you could select that album.  Hope this helps!!

Adam

UPDATE:  I have tried the latter version with the two grouping levels in HS and it works very well.  You pick the letter grouping of the artist and it displays thumbnails for all the relevant albums in the right hand pane.  You can then go to the next level and make it even more specific meaning you see less albums and the "search" is closer to what you want!

[NoCodeUK]

Okay.  Another idea.  I just found out you can use multiple instances of the same field in a view scheme.  I had never thought of doing this before so therefore you can set up a view scheme like so - Artist/Artist/Album
Set the first one to group to 3 levels and not show indivdual items, set the second to group to 1 level and show indivdual items, then set album to not group and show indi items.  This should solve your problem,

Adam

[NoCodeUK]

After rereading my initial post I realise I may have come across rather badly so I just wanna reiterate how much I love your guys work and that I think MC is the best Media Program available

Wouldn't want you guys to think I didn't appreciate ya!!

Now that I have tried out the above methods they actually work really well and make HS naviagtion much better...on a only slightly related note is HS written as Hair Style or Hairstyle??  Cheers

Adam

[sraymond]

Adam,

Did I miss something?  Your initial post said:

Some kind of search ability would be a start.  That way you could select what field you wanted to search on and then enter the first three letters using your remote...like the TV search in my HTPC only for music

Adam

That doesn't seem bad in any respect!  Have things gotten that sensitive around here?

Scott-

[NoCodeUK]

I thought maybe the "for a start" bit might have sounded like I was being critical...  And I don't wanna upset the staff

Adam

[JimH]

I thought maybe the "for a start" bit might have sounded like I was being critical...  And I don't wanna upset the staff

Adam

grrrr....  

No, Adam, your posts are always helpful, never a problem.  Thanks for thinking of it, though.

[h3dge]

Thanks for the suggestion.   I have been trying the double artist view and that is about as good as I think its gonna get.  With massive music collections we are just gonna have to partition like crazy.  Thanks for the help.

-h3dge