Murphy's dashboard

I can't wait to see how it is turning out Simon. To improve performance while searching, could you index all of the information needed from a person's library as a database, so it doesn't need to be gathered while the search is taking place? I don't know much about it, but I believe this is how a search engine or search on your computer is performed. For example, every once in a while, the add-on could index, or calculate the number of albums per each artist and songs per each album, and store the numbers in a database. Then when you perform a search, it could just retrieve the information it needs instead of having to calculate it on the spot.

This database could also hold sorting information. Every time you type a certain query and then choose a result from the drop down list, you could add to a tally for that result in the database, and results could be ranked based on how often you choose them in a search. For example, with Quicksilver on OSX, the first time I searched for the term "fi", Finder was the first result and Firefox was the second result. But since I select Firefox from the results more often than Finder, Firefox is now the number one result when I type in "fi" and Finder has been moved down to the second result. This makes it so that you can find and select the result you are most likely searching for more quickly. – Murphy, on July 13, 2009 18:34

I think this is a great idea. The HTML 5 audio and video tags will make the web a lot more media friendly, and Songbird easily has the ability to handle any codec someone wants to use with them, even though the main browsers are rejecting certain codecs for different reasons.

I read this article about the topic just the other day and it is very interesting.

I think this would be more useful than renaming as well. I posted an idea a while ago to make playlists easier to play, because I think there should be some way to play one that you want quickly from the beginning.

I think that the team should focus better OS integration in a release. I run Songbird in OSX and it has some oddities. Its default skin looks very good in OSX, but it could still match better, such as using the standard scrollbars and the highlight color of the operating system.

klint, thanks for the tip. That is a neat feature and I've never seen it before- it's like having favicons for songs :D. I think there should be a way to add columns to filters, so you could, for example, have it display the album art and year as columns in the album filter (as long as all tracks in the filter agreed on the information), like I put album art in the filter in this mockup: http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

It seems to make more sense to have album art next to the album names to help you find one, versus having it next to songs.

Ah yes, great idea. I didn't even think about what would happen if you went to edit the tags for multiple items and they didn't share certain tags, which is a very likely scenario. I think just showing their shared ones, as you suggested, is a perfect solution. – Murphy, on July 08, 2009 16:27

Here is another topic about this: http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

Some topics about enqueuing:
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

And one for making an official playlist pane (like Winamp has):
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...

I'm hoping that Songbird gets fast enough that people don't have to wonder whether they actually clicked the icon or not. But I still don't like splash screens all that much because they aren't very useful; they just let you know what the program is loading up while you wait. Like with Firefox, I am used to waiting a few seconds for it to open, and I just do something quick in the meantime while I wait for it. I wish instead that Songbird could draw the window immediately and just show the contents of your library as it loads them, but I don't know if that would be possible.

I was going to suggest it, but I was afraid that I must have been mistaken because your post's signature was so confident, Paradox :P. Have you tried the Now Playing List add-on? Is there something you are suggesting that the add-on can't do? (aside from being compatible the as-of-yet-unimplemented features of tags and awesome bar support)

Atreiu asked if I had any ideas about how a tagging system could work in Songbird, and I made a mockup of what I think it would look like if it were officially implemented. I thought it might be worth sharing to give anyone ideas.



I figured you should be able to add tags to songs quickly and frequently, so I made a tag bar separate from the metadata editing box because I thought it would be easier. I based it off of Firefox's Find bar. It could be shown or hidden by clicking on the tag button in the status bar or with a keyboard shortcut. I made it treat tags exactly like last.fm does; after typing a comma and space after a term, it turns it into a single item that can be removed by hitting the x on it. You should be able to tag whatever songs are selected, not just the currently playing one, because I'm sure people will want to be able to select a bunch of tracks and add a few tags to all of them.

As you add each term, it could be added to the Tag column in the song list. I thought this would be important to have, because it would allow you to see what tags your songs currently have. I also replaced the Genre filter in the media view with a Tag filter, because I think this tag system would basically be an improved genre system. I also thought it was important to have have the tag filter along side the usual Artist and Album filters, because I know I would be using them interchangeably, not just one or the other. For example, sometimes I would probably just want to listen to a specific album, but other times I might be in a certain mood and decide to listen to a particular tag.

Finally, I have the last.fm icon at the end of the tag bar because I figured last.fm could provide some important functionality to the tagging system. If you could click it, it could give you the option to sync the tags of the selected tracks to your profile. This would allow you to download tags if you have already added them on songs in last.fm, and if your last.fm profile didn't have any, it would add your library's tags to it, giving you a way to store your tags in the cloud. It could also give you the option to view the popular public tags that people have added to tracks and download them if you wish.

Like, you could type in a search query for the song and Songbird could give you results from different sources to listen to it? That sounds like it could be a neat idea. I generally have specific sites I download music from, but every once in a while my dad or someone asks if I can find a more obscure song online, and it would be neat if you could search for a song in an add-on or something and it would compile a list of sources where you could listen to the song. It could show which results have an mp3 available, which results you can just stream it from, and which results contain the song in a video. Instead of just setting the search bar to a specific site like skreemr, you could set it to "Search all sources", and that way, you could find a song more quickly by comparing sites that offer it.