Murphy's dashboard

One of my least favorite things to do in music programs is import music. You drag files or a folder into the program's window, and when you drop them, you aren't even always sure if anything happened; you usually just see a quick import progress bar show up. If you downloaded the songs, the metadata might be incorrect or missing, and you will have to scavenge your library to track them down. Even if you do find them labeled with the appropriate information, you often have to make a few changes like adding album art.

I think that there should be an "import assistant" in Songbird, that makes you more in control of the process of importing tracks. When you drag tracks into the Songbird window, it could visually change to look like a "drop site" so that the user gets the sure feeling that dropping tracks there will have the desired effect of importing them. Here I have the window getting darker and displaying the message "Import media" so you know what will happen.



Once you make the drop, a window could slide down just like the edit metadata window and let you make any changes you need to before importing the tracks. If you were importing a lot of tracks, like the first time you add your collection to your library, it would obviously need a scroll bar so you could see the entire list.



If you decided for some reason that you don't want to import a few of the tracks you dropped into the window, you could just uncheck them. You could then select any tracks with incorrect/missing metadata and fix them manually or retrieve the information from a web service like Gracenote. Also, you could input album art manually or retrieve it automatically from an online service. Once all of the tracks are ready, you could press the import button and finally import songs into your library with the confidence that they are ready to be there.