Can the music player display be similar to Android TV?

[mard 0]

As the Android TV app is being deprecated in favor of the Android app, I've been trying to determine if my favorite features are or will be supported.

One of the features in the Android TV app which I have come to really like is when playing music after 1 minute of no user input, the currently playing song's album art is displayed with the song info (i.e. title, artist, and album) underneath and artist art rotating background. The clock is in the upper right, timer/total song time in the lower left, and the playlist position (current #/total) in the lower right. When the user selects "next" (by simply hitting the remote's right arrow button) the next song begins with the same display configuration. Simple, elegant, and yet useful. This is not the playlist view which contains many more options.

As far as I can tell, this (exact) display feature does not appear to be available in the Android app. The Android app seems to have something similar (i.e. playlist toggle). Yet it's different because all of the player options (e.g. previous, pause, stop, next, mix, repeat, settings) remain visible, the app's background (e.g. "Blue Radiance") leaks through and washes out the artist art, and the remote's right arrow button doesn't advance to the next song.

Is there a way for the Android app to currently match the Android TV app music player display feature(s)?
Would these (hiding player options and right arrow advancing the playlist) be new feature requests?
Would the background and artist art clash be considered an "issue" to be fixed?

[Luke 39654]

Hi, what player options do you want to hide?

[mard 0]

Um, all of them?   That's what the Android TV app did.

When I'm listening to a playlist I really don't need to see them because I don't use them. Also, having them there for hours and hours can contribute to them being burned-in to the screen.
If I want to use them I would be fine with clicking another button to have them displayed again.

[Luke 39654]

What exactly do you mean by player option?

[mard 0]

I apologize. Maybe player operations would be more accurate?

• Previous (bar w/ left triangle)
• Pause (two bars)
• Stop (square)
• Next (right triangle w/ bar)
• Shuffle (crossing line-arrows)
• Repeat mode (circling line-arrows)
• Settings (gear)
• Track options (three horizontal dots)

[Luke 39654]

OK yea I think a good next step would be to hide those things after some idle time.

[mard 0]

What about the remote's right arrow triggering the next song in the playlist?
I could see that being tricky. However, I do list having an easy way to skip the current song.

Also, is there currently an issue with the background and artist art clashing?
A workaround could be for me to just use the plain black background so the artist art isn't affected. But that's boring.

[EZEd 56]

Hello Luke, while you're at it and looking in to this, can you also add a UI toggle for this display that goes back to a request I had some years ago regarding the Android TV presentation where we don't have the album art hugely overlaying the background artist image? I had previously asked for a toggle switch where we can emphasize the background art and reduce the size of the album cover art and move it from center of screen to be down lower with the player controls (either bottom left or bottom right corner of the screen).  For those of use who primarily depend on the music player while viewing from a big screen living room experience this presents a much better UI/UX.  When I'm on my phone, and listing to music rarely is the Emby interface even visible.  The phone screen either goes blank to save battery or I'm browsing internet and doing so other task. So I'm not really looking at Emby.

But when in the living room and listening to music, I'm either looking at the Emby interface and more interested in the artist background images cycling or have switched to either a family slide show or brought up ProjectM visualizations (as a separate app) to fill the screen.  This last point was another request from years ago where we could have an interface to ProjectM inside of Emby so that we could see the artist/song information inside of ProjectM while Emby is playing music.

The functionality that I'm looking for in Emby was present as late as version 2.0.33g of Android TV but was removed when the great merger of Android and AndroidTV began.  Can we just get a toggle switch inside of the Android version that is more TV display friendly and emphasizes whole wide screen images (like backdrop/backgrounds) than album cover art?  It is good to have album cover art but I'd like to have a choice of whether or not is the most prominent thing on the screen.  This functionality and UI/UX goes back to even the old Media Browser inside of Windows Media Center days...please bring that back.  It was the best thing about Emby both then and now.

And again, I'll put in a plug for better/tighter integration with ProjectM visualizations before I go...

Thx again