We are currently working on a redesign of the browsing pages, and in the process we really appreciate your feedback. You are the end user after all
The goals of this redesign are:
Get to your content in less clicks
Have a more compact view (get rid of the big icons)
Have more room for tailored music discovery
Have a more beautiful and intuitive UI
In this design all the sources are displayed on the left. When clicked, a source will fill the right part of the screen. Here we can display multiple rows of content, each with a collection of categories. When a category is clicked it will fill the row underneath. When a category is clicked twice, the category will fill the screen.
Yeah looking sharp, for sure an improvement.
Some suggestions though:
Optional to place the sources on left or top. If you have a couple of source plugins, the left side canāt show them without scrolling. In those situations the top can handle more icons, avoid additional scrolling.
There have been a lot of request to have more control on how albums are displayed. Like ignore words like āThe, El, La, Los, Las, Le, Les, Het, Deā
Suggestion: an even bigger improvement for my use case would be to navigate directly to certain configurable folders of streaming services in one click (like Qobuz albums, Qobuz playlists and Qobuz artists). Would that be possible?
Looks very fresh and it is the part of the UI that needs some love. A couple of questions ā¦
Does that mean itās empty on the right until a source is clicked, or does it dispay the first source by default?
What does it look like on a phone screen?
Where a source (plugin) has folders, like YouTube or Spotify, will it show first the folders when you click on the source icon, or will it start loading everything?
Will media source plugins require any modification?
Very nice UI suggestions indeed. Perhaps a side line, but what I really would appreciate is a ārefreshā option, e.g. triggered by dragging the browser screen down, so that an inactive UI becomes responsive again. This freezing up of the UI happens to me several times during a listening session, both when using the Volumio app (iOS) or using a shortcut to reach a particular Volumio unit in my network. The only thing that helps is closing the app/browser and restart. Seems an easy fix (?)
Not on Qobuz, its not. Albums come in in no particular order, or last in shows first.In fact look at the visual above which is showing Albums in Qobuz in no particular order.
Important for me would be upnp search. To limit complexity, others such as dCS have limited the supported upnp servers to MinimServer. In my view it is better to have such a limit and to implement search functionality, than to support every upnp server and not have search.
Keep up the good work
Qobuz default is by date added, but also allows alphabetical (by artist in artist list, album in album list etc.) IMO it would be MUCH better for Volumio to use the alphabetical view!
I already added this to the features request thread some time agoā¦
Itās not clear to me from your UI example what you mean by multiple rows of content each with a collection of categories. Who determines the ācategoriesā and where or how are they defined? For example, I presume the āMy Musicā category pertains to music that I like so where and how is that determined and if Volumio controls how thatās done how could I create a category that is truly āMy Musicā (i.e., music that I wrote and published)? Can I define my own categories (e.g., Local Musicians, Music I Wrote, Experimental, etc.)? How is the āDiscoverā categoryās content determined? For instance, there are musical categories that I have no interest in and I may or may not be interested in discovering similar music based on my recent song selections if I was just poking around or trying to find an obscure song from the past.
Anyway, here are a few suggestions:
Enable the user to order the left pane sources list the way they want and to be able to remove sources from the list that they donāt use (with a Restore Defaults button or link and a way to add sources back and new source to the list as desired)
Provide a sort dropdown menu to the right of the Search box that enables the user to sort the order in which searched content is displayed. For example, sort alphabetically (ascending or descending) or by release date (latest or oldest firstāhow to deal with music that was never released; e.g., local musician music)
Enable users to create their own categories and/or decide which categories they want displayed according to their source selection
Add a forward and reverse button to the player so users can skip ahead or back in a song
Provide a user profile capability that can be saved that enables a userās customizations to persist across all devices. Perhaps even providing multiple user profile capability so each user can maintain their own customizations by simply switching to their profile
It would also be nice if there was a way that users could add their own musician images to content that cannot be derived from web music databases that Volumio would consistently display. For example, I have music from several local musician friends who never publicly released an album or a song, but Iād still like to have an image displayed for their music rather than just a bland āfolderā icon.
Interestingly, Iāve managed to get Volumio to display one or two of the images I placed in their album art data structures (i.e., /data/albumart/web/[artistname] and /data/albumart/personal/[artistname] foldersāthe personal folder structure appear to do nothing), but not others. And, yes, Iāve tried using the info.json file as well.
Further, when I click on an artist image that Volumio will display (either one that I added to the structure or one of a commercial artist that Volumio downloaded from the web including my own music), it may or may not display the artistās album images on the subsequent page (if they have more than one album) and it may or may not display the album image at the top of each album page and it may display the album image to the left of every song title on the album or it may just display a two note musical icon image. Very inconsistent and I gave up trying to figure it out.