Currently the cover manager just displays the cover, however, I would like to set the cover manager as my default interface and select and play an album straight from the cover manager. This is similar to browsing the Cds on the shelf, the cover helps me remember what\'s on the disc.
Also, another vote for increasing the maximum size of the album image.

Totally agree
+1

Thanks for Amarok ! Great job 

Yeah, and I think the cover manager really could need a face-lift.

It's strange how it opens in its own windows...dunno but it's not really integrated into Amarok.

"however, I would like to set the cover manager as my default interface"

well...there should be another way to use covers for that...sth like cover-flow on iTunes maybe.

showing the covers like in svn is already a step forward...but Amarok is not there yet... 

glepore70 wrote:Also, another vote for increasing the maximum size of the album image.

and yes, totally!

I love coverarts...too bad I can't really *use* them with Amarok...sigh

stokedfish wrote:Yeah, and I think the cover manager really could need a face-lift.

It's strange how it opens in its own windows...dunno but it's not really integrated into Amarok.

I think this is a very good starting point. As there are people who really love browsing the collection by covers and people that really like the way it is done at the moment, there could be these to alternatives.
This would mainly mean moving the cover manager from its own window into Amarok (as a tab somewhere).
It is unclear how the cover browsing could be done in a nice and fancy way, maybe there are better ideas than cover flow (after all I think Amarok is already miles ahead of iTunes and why should someone copy features then, there might be much better and more eye-candy ideas out there. If you have one, tell us here!).

Maybe we can collect some of these "use covers to browse the collection" ideas here.

Another vote for 'play from cover manager' for me too. I asked about this a few months ago, and you can 'sort of' by dragging and dropping the cover into your playlist. Not bad, but not quite as nice as -right-click- integration, IMHO.

Here is a small program (for Windows) which manages covers and does a very nice job of integrating with your default media player.

Two other huge plusses about it:
1) it's incredibly fast (or at least MUCH faster than the cover manager in amarok)
2) it's only 44Kb!

link?

I think this is a true test for Amarok to shine into 2.0.

iTunes integrated this exact thing in its recent release. But if you've used it you can get a vibe that it could have been done better - much like Amarok is done better than iTunes. It is so effecient.

If the Amarok devs could outdo iTunes on a cover browser it will be a truly fantastic effort - make a 2.0 release really worthwhile.

stokedfish wrote:link?

Ooops! http://www.uberview.org/

I agree about 2.0 as a milestone for re-inventing the integration of covers somehow, but it would be nice to have the current cover manager improved a bit in the meantime as well.

Seem like right click options to play album & append to playlist are no brainers. This should be there already.

Also, the pane to limit by artist is almost totally useless. The whole beauty of the cover manager is that it lets you see lots of covers at once. It seems that what's needed instead is a means by which to sort the covers similar to the collection browser, where you could chose to sort covers by genre, then artist, then album, for example.

Also, the option to choose what information is displayed beneath each image would be nice. I would be willing to give up some display space to have

Artist
Album
Year: tracks - total time

or some such under each album cover.

As it stands, the Cover browser seems to be the least polished aspect of the Amarok interface, so I hope we don't have to wait for 2.0 to see some improvements.

For 2.0 I think it would be nice to preserve an improved cover manager as a separate window, but also focus on better ways of integrating covers into the collection browser in the main window.

It would be nice if the collection browser had tabs, much like the context browser. So you could have the straight up listing like it is currently implemented, then also a cover-inhanced listing like the stuff people have been doing lately in svn, and then perhaps a third mode that is more cover-heavy that could look similar to the way albums are displayed in the context browser, with album info alongside the covers. And then perhaps some fourth view with yet-to-be-determined kick-itunes-to-the-curb innovation in visual browsing.

And a pony.

more luck on the pony than major changes to ANY of amarok before 2.0