UI: How to make MusicBrainz dialog shine, or noob needs help.

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

I'm really sorry for the long dealy, but here are my 2 cents:

> On 28 Oct 2010 09:40 +0400, Sergey Ivanov:
> > 2010/10/28 Rick W. Chen <stuffcorpse at archlinux.us>:
> > > I'd like to have both options as well. In Picard these are called
> > > "lookup" and "scan". Lookup is generally much faster than scan,
> > > especially when done on a "cluster" (tracks grouped by album); it
> > > just looks at the album/artist names, how many tracks there are and
> > > find the closest results musicbrainz gives. Having a treeview instead
> > > of list helps with this clustering process.
> > > 
> > > With a treeview that groups by album, it can list all the tracks that
> > > belong to that album, and not just the ones that you have. It makes it
> > > easier to see whether that album is the right one. Showing more
> > > metadata supplied by musicbrainz also helps.
> > 
> > Initially my implementation had been very similar to Picard (2 trees
> > and 2 frames with old and new meta data in bottom), and also showed
> > complete track list for albums, and tracks had been dragable  to move
> > 'em between albums, or back to search list. But It was confusing for
> > people not familiar with Picard ( discussion log
> > http://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/100000/ ). :)
> > 
Ok, The Dialog can probably be improved but we still need to keep the focus on 
the user's task. We don't want to imitate Picard since it is too complex to be 
used in our case. Picard users use the application exactly for that purpose 
and thus are willing to accept a learning curve to fully exploit MB's 
potential. But tagging music is just a minor use case for Amarok, so we can't 
expect users to try to figure out a complex UI. The user needs to be able to 
complete her task quickly and intuitively, even if that means not using some 
of MB's functions.

Presenting several possible tag-sets for the user to choose from for each 
track does seem sensible to me, though.
Here is what I'd suggest for that:
Using a tree might make sense, but not to present albums. Instead, display the 
the tracks to be tagged in the first level, and for each track display 
possible tag-sets in the second level. Using different colors for different 
matching distances sounds like a very good idea here. The user can then select 
the correct tag set for each track (if the correct one is among the 
suggestions).

As for whether to use MusicBrainz or MusicDNS: I don't know how long MusicDNS 
search takes, but the ideal situation for the user would be:
Both services are used and the results from both services are presented with 
each track. I don't even think their actual source has to be indicated since 
the user just doesn't care where a result comes from as long as it is correct.

> > What kind of "supplied by musicbrainz" metadata I should also show?
> 
> Release date might be handy. Perhaps a clickable icon that opens the
> musicbrainz page for the track or release is also good.

That Icon would be really nice. This would allow us to keep information 
displayed in the dialog to a minimum without losing additional information MB 
offers.


Regards,
Thomas