Select album to play via album art

First off, I'd like to say great work on Mobile Impact. Its by far the cleanest and fastest carpc frontend I have used thus far. Thus far, I only have one request/suggestion for it. I personally have all my music stored and ofganized on one drive as "Drive_Letter:\music\artist\album\*.mp3

In each album I have the artists album art for that album. What I am putting on my wish list is a way to either a) browse to the artists directory and just have each album art shown in a grid and then all you need to do is click on that album art for that album to play. b) or alternately, and even better IMHO, is to have a db of some sort and have all the album art displayed on the same grid all on one page and scrollable via scrollbars or up/down arrows.

Hopefully this makes sense. Centrafuse works this way, but its awfully slow on my via ml10000.
Do you feel that this might ever make it into Mobile Impact? If it did have this capability it would truly blow away the competition. Frodoplayer has something similar to the "a" option above, but frodoplayer is a pretty ugly player no matter how its skinned. Your frontend has a much more simple and organized layout to it and a much more professional feel. But no offense to the makers and developers of Frodoplayer, its just my opinion and preference thats all.

Keep up the good work. Even without an album art browser I'll probably stick with Mobile Impact

Gumby

here is a screenshot of the centrafuse album art viewer in case you have no clue what I am talking about.

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Originally Posted by xGumbyx

First off, I'd like to say great work on Mobile Impact. Its by far the cleanest and fastest carpc frontend I have used thus far. Thus far, I only have one request/suggestion for it. I personally have all my music stored and ofganized on one drive as "Drive_Letter:\music\artist\album\*.mp3

In each album I have the artists album art for that album. What I am putting on my wish list is a way to either a) browse to the artists directory and just have each album art shown in a grid and then all you need to do is click on that album art for that album to play. b) or alternately, and even better IMHO, is to have a db of some sort and have all the album art displayed on the same grid all on one page and scrollable via scrollbars or up/down arrows.

Hopefully this makes sense. Centrafuse works this way, but its awfully slow on my via ml10000.
Do you feel that this might ever make it into Mobile Impact? If it did have this capability it would truly blow away the competition. Frodoplayer has something similar to the "a" option above, but frodoplayer is a pretty ugly player no matter how its skinned. Your frontend has a much more simple and organized layout to it and a much more professional feel. But no offense to the makers and developers of Frodoplayer, its just my opinion and preference thats all.

Keep up the good work. Even without an album art browser I'll probably stick with Mobile Impact

Gumby

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Im very glad you like it. Its very gratifying hearing your comments that reflect exactly what I tried to accomplish with the interface.

Regarding the interface, the program has the ability to view album art, it shows in the visualization area when you click on the directory. If the program is set to find album art, it looks for the folder.jpg file in the directory that you open. It also has the ability to switch between album art and visualization with a delay that the user can set. Check in the instructions for a more exact description on how to set it up. Regarding suggestion number 2, This is a really cool feature that centrifuse has and I can see where it would be really helpful while your driving to be able to just identify the album by cover instead of trying to read text. I kind of like the idea of having a database and then the program would know where to go for the songs according to the data. I might toss this around and see what I can come up with, Im thinking of kind of a jukebox interface, but with the Ipod library organization potential in mind, where you can view by Genre, or Artist etc. Thanks for the input.
Thanks for the input.

Yes, I've already looked into the viewing of album art. What you have for album art viewing is not quite what I mean but I think you realize that. What soft of timeframe do your releases have? Are you seriously going to look into an album art view for adding to playlist and if so do you have any idea how long it would take to impliment? I'd be interested in helping you test and debug it if you do eventually implement it. Not meaning to push here, I'd just be super excited if your software included this feature :)

Feel free to send me a message if you like.

Gumby

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Originally Posted by xGumbyx

Yes, I've already looked into the viewing of album art. What you have for album art viewing is not quite what I mean but I think you realize that. What soft of timeframe do your releases have? Are you seriously going to look into an album art view for adding to playlist and if so do you have any idea how long it would take to impliment? I'd be interested in helping you test and debug it if you do eventually implement it. Not meaning to push here, I'd just be super excited if your software included this feature :)

Feel free to send me a message if you like.

Gumby

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How about something like this?
http://www.thequiltcupboard.com/mobi...bumartshot.jpg

Close to what I was thinking of but not quite. What I had in mind was moreso the album art viewable when you are wanting to add music in the playlist editor. The way I had it invisioned was a person would go to the playlist editor and choose something like "View by Album Art" and then instead of directory listings appearing in the right hand side it would show album art of the whole music database. Then the user would either a) highlight that album and choose "Add to Playlist" or b) just click on that Album cover and have the Album automagically added to their playlist. This isn't so great for adding individual songs, but then a person could go to a "View by Directory" option in the playlist editor if that is what they wanted to do. I know when I am in my car I usually tend to listen to albums, if I wanted to listen to individual songs I would probably just create playlists before I started driving. Making the playlist editor browsable by album art is a more safe way to add/change a playlist while driving (in my opinion). It takes less time to view a quick image or even to read the artist/album displayed below the image you have there in your example. I am guessing that a persons mp3 collection would have to be fairly organized for this to work. ie: their music would have to be sorted by Artist/Album/songs.mp3 and that the album art would have to be within the Artist/Album/ directory as a default filename ie: default.jpg. If there is no album art present then possibly a default logo would appear.

What you currently have in MI for viewing the album art (top left corner of auidio player screen) once the music is playing after being added to the playlist looks great to me. Hopefully I've explained what I see to be a great feature better this time.

Gumby

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Originally Posted by xGumbyx

Close to what I was thinking of but not quite. What I had in mind was moreso the album art viewable when you are wanting to add music in the playlist editor. The way I had it invisioned was a person would go to the playlist editor and choose something like "View by Album Art" and then instead of directory listings appearing in the right hand side it would show album art of the whole music database. Then the user would either a) highlight that album and choose "Add to Playlist" or b) just click on that Album cover and have the Album automagically added to their playlist. This isn't so great for adding individual songs, but then a person could go to a "View by Directory" option in the playlist editor if that is what they wanted to do. I know when I am in my car I usually tend to listen to albums, if I wanted to listen to individual songs I would probably just create playlists before I started driving. Making the playlist editor browsable by album art is a more safe way to add/change a playlist while driving (in my opinion). It takes less time to view a quick image or even to read the artist/album displayed below the image you have there in your example. I am guessing that a persons mp3 collection would have to be fairly organized for this to work. ie: their music would have to be sorted by Artist/Album/songs.mp3 and that the album art would have to be within the Artist/Album/ directory as a default filename ie: default.jpg. If there is no album art present then possibly a default logo would appear.

What you currently have in MI for viewing the album art (top left corner of auidio player screen) once the music is playing after being added to the playlist looks great to me. Hopefully I've explained what I see to be a great feature better this time.

Gumby

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I understand now. The main Audio/Video module file list works the exact same way that the Playlist module file list works, so it would be no problem to add this feature, however one small difficulty is that you would have to set up album art/genre viewing mode in the settings to tell the program to view in folder/file mode or in album art list mode. I could put a button on the Audio/Video module to change the mode, but there isnt any space for it. So if you wanted to create a playlist using the album art list mode, you would have to go into settings, set it for album art/genre list mode which restarts MI to be able to create your playlist using album art, so after making the playlist you would have to go back into settings and change it back to file list mode to be able to see the playlist. Album art relies on the folder.jpg file as you know and there can only be a single folder.jpg file in each music folder. This wouldnt work for a playlist as the files are in different folders. You also wouldnt want the files to be moved into a single folder either. So the only thing that prevents making it easy to use is the lack of physical space to place a mode changing button. Any ideas?

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Originally Posted by reddeath30

How about something like this?
http://www.thequiltcupboard.com/mobi...bumartshot.jpg

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This is hot!! RED whens a new release coming?!?! I can't wait!!!

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Originally Posted by juve021

This is hot!! RED whens a new release coming?!?! I can't wait!!!

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My goal is by the end of the month. There will also be a genre view that will take you to the Album Arts.

So what you are saying is get our requests/wish lists in to you soon :P

Gumby