In your examples but especially with classical music in a lot of cases there are long artist and album names which really dont need additional clutter.
One man's clutter is another man's essential tool! I rely on those track ratings. The first thing I do upon entering a new album into my library is to rate the tracks (and I'm now using JRemote for this). Later in the week I will have people over and audition music for them. I usually start with a prepared playlist but on the fly I'll pull up new albums and play the top one or two tracks. I do this by browsing in album view and looking for those rating stars. At this point, when browsing in album view, those stars are more important than the artist's name!
Before I even purchased JRemote, I stated the following on page one of this thread:
Here's my wish list before I can purchase/use this:
The ability to see and change ratings from the playing now screen. Also need to see the ratings next to song titles while browsing within albums.
Looking forward!
The immediate response from LesPaul was:
Thanks wombat, definitely on my to-do list.
Great!
Of course I purchased JRemote as soon as it was clear that ratings were enabled. Unfortunately the key element of seeing the ratings in album view is only in the iPad version. If I could fit an iPad in my pocket, I'd buy one today!
So yes, LesPaul, when you stated:
...
wombat66
On the iPad version you can see the rating, but not change it. Hovever you can change the rating from the metadata view.
On the iPhone, there is very little space, so as others have mentioned it would not really be appropriate.
However, i`see ll if i can find a way to show it in a discrete manner. In any case you would not be able to change the rating.
Yes! I'll take you up on any manner of showing the ratings in album view in the iPhone version! Like I said earlier, maybe make it an option that can be toggled in the settings, or like you suggested, something discrete. Either way works great for me. I'd even be happy with the option for this being an in-app purchase!
As Glyner said, "On a small, touchscreen device especially, form = function." But for me, function trumps form... always. If the function I need isn't there, I won't use it. In fact this is why I'm here using JRiver Media Center in the first place and not iTunes.
In the meantime, I'm still "porting" everything over to a Squeezebox library so I can use iPeng combined with TrackStat just so I can see the ratings on my iphone. There are a lot of hoops I jump through to get those ratings visible, but for me, they're not clutter, they're indispensible, so jump I must. But hopefully not for long, because the JRemote / MC / Whitebear/ Squeezebox route would be far easier.