New method for displaying playlists

I think that music players could be simpler by using the most of the program's space so the user doesn't have to navigate around as much. The main cause of this "navigating", or going into different places in the program, results from the way that many music players handle playlists. I think this is the reason why many people suggested incorporating a Now Playing list into the program: it relieves the burden of finding the list of music that the program is playing from when you are "somewhere else" in the program, such as viewing your library.

I think that Songbird could solve the problem by changing the way it handles playlists. A playlist is simple: it's a list of songs. Yet when you click on a playlist, your library is replaced and the content of the playlist takes up the entire window. I think this method might be a little excessive and creates more of this navigating to and away from your music library.

Anyway, here is my idea:


Rather than creating a new content pane to display a playlist in, as the now playing addon does, use the existing navigation pane in the program since it has little content to begin with. Currently, the program lists your playlists there, and clicking on one takes you away to a new content area. In this mockup, you would click the playlist name and it would expand into the column, showing you all of the information you really need to display for a playlist: the artist and song title. The album art was added to the songs for easy identification, and the now playing song has larger album art, which enables the program to remove the usual album art pane and free up space in that column. This also incorporates the now playing list (called temporary playlist in the picture) in a simple, convenient way.