Hullo lads!
This is a thought I had for amarok ( by far the best music player alive )

Since I'm not that good at mockups I'll try to describe it:

1) How about if the sidebar at the context tab window wasn't a sidebar but took the whole window taking the place of the playlist too... This way there would be a lot of space to have all the information given in the sidebar visible without having to scroll up and down. You could also have a lyrics pane and short info of the artist from the wiki.
Of course all the other tabs should have the playlist pane visible.

EDIT: I've made a rough sketch of what I mean



That is what's going to be shown on the main(context) window of amarok.

2) At the status bar the "Playing: Sthing by Foo on Bar" should be replaced by "Coming up next: Sthing Else by Foo on Bar, since I'm already seeing what's palying right now.


Well, what do you guys think? (You can vote for it http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=133340 )

1. Something like this?
(Read more here)

Your proposition sounds interesting. And indeed, a redesign of the UI is planned for 2.0 (to be released together with KDE 4).

As these experiments referred to by the last poster have shown, this is a matter that has to be addressed thoroughly, though. The changes back then were not well received. It will require quite some work to make efficient use of the additional space, and we could not do it in the small window between 1.4.0 and 1.4.1.

hans chen wrote:1. Something like this?
(Read more here)

Not quite like this.
This tries to be an all-in-one window. What I meant is the opposite, to make the context window  an info window.
Just remove the playlist and expand the information allready given in those tabs.

The usage of available space is really an important issue one has to think about before redesigning amarok's UI.
I can also think of having two main columns, and you can move all the tabs between them, thus if you like you can have the context browser on the left over the playlist window as you wish. That's just a rough idea to enable a more flexible placement, no clue how hard such kind of flexibility would be to implement.

Maybe it makes sense to use this thread to think about new and crazy idea how to change amarok's layout. People seem to be interested in this and it can make amarok even cooler (if this is possible).

for some people the playlist is more important than e.g. wiki-information or  the suggestions...

I looked at the pictures on the blog, but in the kmail type one with the text playlist at the bottom, the use of space for actually showing the playlist itself is just as bad as the old display.  For me, the big problem with the column based lists is the space wasted on redundant text (album name ten times down the column), and the fact that this causes the titles and comments to be shortened with ellipses (no room on the line).

If there were an option in the preferences to display a string at the start of each new album in the list, then a lot more could be visible.  The starting string might set in the options in the form "%artist: %track played by %comment" (just based on how I have my music tagged).  Then under that would be room for the full track names and the times (as it is, most of the long ones, for instance containing the words of an aria or chorus, get chopped).  Maybe a sum time for each album could be displayed next to the name.

I am not so concerned with trendy pictures and boxes, but I think a better organisation of existing text would be useful and much faster to implement.

A quick mockup of the new layout compared to the old is attached (can you see it properly?) - the same amount of room is needed, but more is shown and it is certainly easier to read.  What do you all think?

PS would it be possible to have some keyword like system to modify the text at the bottom of the screen (the bit that says Playing: 2: Adagio ma non troppo by Dvorak, Antonin on Cello Concerto).  You could modify it to say something like "%album: %track by %artist" if that scans better for the way you have tagged your music.