User interface suggestions for Music

[swandruski 11]

Hi,

 

I've got a suggestion for the music player interface. Once the background art work comes on, I think it would be nice to have the option to have the cover art still displayed, perhaps as a thumbnail in the lower left area. I like the clean appearance, but having a quick visual reference from the cover art would be nice. I also think that having the option to have the audio format of the track displayed would be nice. I know you would want to make sure it doesn't create a lot of clutter, but knowing that a track is a FLAC 96/24 5.1 surround mix, versus a 44.1/16 Stereo file would be nice.

 

Related to this, I spent the last weekend getting Jellyfin up and running to see if there were any advantages with that system. For me there are too many issues with the Android client for me to use it. But one thing I did notice was that Jellyfin was A LOT BETTER at finding artist information. For my collection, both Plex and Jellyfin found more artist information than Emby right off the bat with no particular input from me. None of them were 100% since my collection is pretty eclectic, but the difference was notable. 

 

Steve

[ebr 14910]

Hi.  Yes, we've had this suggestion before.  We'll look into it.

 

Thanks.

[rechigo 293]

+1 Agree, Emby has never been the greatest with music metadata scraping. Hopefully it will be improved soon

 

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[swandruski 11]

I thought of another idea that might also be applicable for movies or TV episodes. When I first saw the Roon website it looked like they were making a big deal about the additional information that their database would give you, but honestly looking closer, it doesn't look like that much more then what Emby can provide if it has picked up artist information, or you've added it manually. 

 

What I thought would be really nice is an option to have more album-specific information available. I discovered that Emby can have backgrounds and other images connected to the album, separate from Artist backgrounds. I thought this would be a cool place to put period-specific artist pictures and album cover art so it would come up as a background, but also this would be a place to put that cool gatefold cover art that made looking at LP covers while the album was playing a part of the music experience. You could imagine going further and putting the pages from a CD booklet into backgrounds too. However, while that works fine for images, the backgrounds cycle and would not be a good way to provide content that someone would want to read. For that kind of content, a separate reading pop-up window would almost be necessary. Or perhaps put this into the album data displayed at the album page and have an easy way to go back and forth from the player window to that information.

 

I'm sure some thought about the UI would be needed, but this would be great for anyone who really wants to box up those physical CDs, but still wants to look at the information from the booklet. BTW, I notices that the MusicBrainz database had details about musicians who played on an album and so does Discogs, so some of the "booklet" information has been captured in these online resources and could be scrapped. Also, I'd imagine that going beyond a certain level of information would require more computing horsepower and might only be an option available for certain hardware.

 

Anyway, just some ideas.