My own opinion on this:

1) Cover Flow itself looks nice, and it's useful with a small number of albums (maybe 50). However, with a large collection (5000 albums) it becomes mostly a useless toy.

2) Even if Apple had not patented this, I would have felt bad about putting a direct copy of it in Amarok. I think we can do better than this. Where is our creativity?

3) We should innovate, not copy. If I were Apple (as much as I dislike them) I would be a bit grumpy about this too. The same goes for copying Amarok features in other applications. Let's try do it better. Mamarok made a start with some brainstorming. Do we have other ideas?

hmm, if I could chime in here, what about a CD store look? So the albums would like they're in a rack, and fold forward as you scroll through them? The advantage of that method would be that the tops of the next 10 or so albums could be displayed with the artist-album info. Clicking on that album would then flip through to it.
This idea also opens the possibility of having several columns, which could be ordered by genre, or in alphabetical groups, or age etc. Other columns could be hidden optionally to keep the clean coverflow look.

Sorry, I don't have any programming skills, but maybe it's an idea?

Cheers,
Rich

Just a reminder - any visual access to the collection using covers needs a search/filter function else for users with large libraries else it would be pretty useless.

A scroll bar would be helpful too

Here is an idea, but I fear it looks to similar to Apples Preview application, or does it?

Maybe there should be an option to sort the albums not just by name but also by release date and the date it was added to the collection.

And maybe only display the small albums when the mouse moves/scrolls and display it on top of the big albums?

Not the best drawing I've made, but http://imagebin.ca/view/pmvjUta.html It's a bit similar to lil_rich suggestion.

There are 2 columns (well number of them should depend of width of the window) each pile representing different sources. In mockup 1st is filled with e.g. top 50 albums by user rating, next the ones from the playslist. Hovering pile extends it vertically for browsing.

If thats still too mac'ish might be http://imagebin.ca/view/pMOrXE.html (with a better proportions to create realistic perspective effect)
it differs from the first in a way, that in last one covers always faces user with their front. In the original one the more cover is far away form center, the more t faces the user its side corner rather than front

p.s. I we came up with really great idea, might be it could be mate reusable in e.g. digikam and other

p.p.s how this differs from apples one? blog post is 1 year ago before patent process was started...

@my idea:
Maybe the big cover should be some kind of magnification of the marked small one so when the small albums scroll down the big album slides out and a new one in. Movie strip like.

Lukas. Yeah, something like that. I was previously thinking of this more as a collection browser, but including playlist functionality would really strengthen this applet.

Here is the kind of thing I meant in my post. Sorry, I'm not too good with the graphics, but hopefully you get the idea.
http://imagebin.ca/view/L8WmlSA.html

Cheers,
Rich

lil_rich wrote:Here is the kind of thing I meant in my post. Sorry, I'm not too good with the graphics, but hopefully you get the idea.
http://imagebin.ca/view/L8WmlSA.html

Interesting design however I'm thinking do we need scrollbar? If it is technically easily doable, a some sort of kinetic scrolling could be nice. The closer to the top/bottom, the faster it auto-flips in that direction.

Moving this thread to Development, which is more appropriate to the current discussion.

Lukas wrote:

lil_rich wrote:Here is the kind of thing I meant in my post. Sorry, I'm not too good with the graphics, but hopefully you get the idea.
http://imagebin.ca/view/L8WmlSA.html

Interesting design however I'm thinking do we need scrollbar? If it is technically easily doable, a some sort of kinetic scrolling could be nice. The closer to the top/bottom, the faster it auto-flips in that direction.

Cool! I like it.

Wow, these CD Rack / Pile mockups are really amazing!
I'd love to have that in Amarok.

For quite a while now I'm looking for any media player that lets me easily sort albums into "piles" or "racks" without having to rely on ID3 genre tags (too unflexible). So whenever I have a bunch of new albums, I usually listen through them (the "new stuff" pile) and then I'd love to be able to move them to other piles. Thing is, with a collection of more than 20 000 songs I easily "lose" albums because there is currently not a simple and easy way to highlight / "tag" an album (bookmarks work only for single songs).

The "Album Piles" concept as in the mockups in this thread looks like the perfect solution for my usecase. It really highlights the "album" notion and lets you organize your stuff as you would do with your regular CD or vinyl collection. Plus the advantage to be able to e.g. put albums into multiple piles.

I kinda like this idea too

Frando wrote:The "Album Piles" concept as in the mockups in this thread looks like the perfect solution for my usecase. It really highlights the "album" notion and lets you organize your stuff as you would do with your regular CD or vinyl collection. Plus the advantage to be able to e.g. put albums into multiple piles.

+1. Great idea, I hadn't thought of it like this. Although, this "piles" method could also be another sorting method in the collection browser, too. The problem with a coverflow frontend is that it's pretty resource hungry. I would never use it on my netbook, for example. I would still love this functionality in amarok, though. What if we could customize Pile/Genre/Artist or Genre/Pile/Album sorting?

Should this be opened as another idea?

Frando wrote:Wow, these CD Rack / Pile mockups are really amazing!
I'd love to have that in Amarok.

For quite a while now I'm looking for any media player that lets me easily sort albums into "piles" or "racks" without having to rely on ID3 genre tags (too unflexible). So whenever I have a bunch of new albums, I usually listen through them (the "new stuff" pile) and then I'd love to be able to move them to other piles. Thing is, with a collection of more than 20 000 songs I easily "lose" albums because there is currently not a simple and easy way to highlight / "tag" an album (bookmarks work only for single songs).

The "Album Piles" concept as in the mockups in this thread looks like the perfect solution for my usecase. It really highlights the "album" notion and lets you organize your stuff as you would do with your regular CD or vinyl collection. Plus the advantage to be able to e.g. put albums into multiple piles.

Frando, I think you are onto something. The "piles" could be controlled by labels, right? New, and moods, or tempos, or instuments/voice types, etc. Or a "needs re-ripping?" pile. Many possible uses for this.

Valorie