Cover Bling to Help Rediscover your Music

[Sébastien Laoût]

Hello everybody,


I understand your desire to bring something as beautiful as Cover Flow to 
Amarok, and at the same time, do not copy it all.
So here is a mockup I'm proposing, with explanations of why I think it has a 
good usability and usefulness.

Here is the mockup:
http://slaout.linux62.org/kde-wishs/cover-bling-proposal.png


Here is how I came up with that proposal:

Advantages of Cover Flow:
- It's beautiful
- It let you "randomly" browse your collection visually by covers, so you can 
stop scrolling when you notice a cover you remember is associated with good 
music
- It is like a shelf, where you look at "physical" albums. I know old people 
who still must burn all audio CDs for them to be more real even if choosing 
music to play on a computer is waaay faster. Having that "virtual shelf" is a 
must for them.

Advantages of the current Amarok Collection browser:
- Brand names are written in recognisable and readable text (not cover 
images!)
- There are "graphical" titles for each letter of the alphabet, letting you to 
quickly switch to a letter you want

Disadvantages of Cover Flow:
- All covers are mixed, it is not clear to which artists belong the covers. 
Covers should be grouped by artists so it's more organized
- Covers are sometimes somewhat mysterious. It is better to have the artist 
and album name printed in plain text

Disdvantages of the current Amarok Collection browser:
- Cover arts are sometimes more speaking than artist names. Sometimes I do not 
remember if the artist or album XYZ is containing very great songs. But I 
remember more easily with a cover. A cover image convey more emotion than a 
text. By browsing my collection by covers, I could more think "hey, I 
remember it, it has great songs, let's play it"
- It is hierarchical. Trees are bad usability wise. Same "hierarchycal" effect 
can be applied by grouping all albums of the same artist. Cf. the mockup

Disadvantage of both:
- If you know the artist you want, you have to scroll until you find it. They 
does not offer a way to click a letter to directly go to artists starting 
with that letter


So it's in the spirit of joining the beautiful of CoverFlow (with images, 
animations and cover arts) and the usefulness of the current collection 
browser (with plain texts) that I propose that mockup of CoverBling.


PS: I'm not subscribed to the mailing list. Please CC me.

Best regards,
Sébastien Laoût.