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.
