blakeloth1,
Please don't use such language here. "Guest" is entitled to express his thoughts about MM. You might disagree but there's no need to put it that way.

As if mediamonkey is too hard to use for a 'normal' music listener. its so simple its funny!

Trixmoto: bad language removed!

Blakeloth1: Sorry about that. I was a bit annoyed at guest

You mean "The Bird That Is Farting Songbird?








Hehe, sorry, I'm tired today...

Sebastian78 wrote: My suggestions for MM:

1.

The "Two Button" feature : Chose between "Advanced User" view and "Normal User" view.

- This way, if I want to use the advanced features I can press the "AU" button and everything is revealed. BUT if I just want to listen to Deep Purple and have a nice view of the album art, I press "NU". MM would then remember which mode it was in when I last closed it.

PS: iTunes is the "defacto" standard in players and borrowing/lending design elements from it for the "NU" mode is not stealing. KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid

2.

Integrate some kind of tabbed browsing of the library. The tree is sometimes just confusing if you have a large collection. If you want to browse your albums, click on the Album Tab and everyhing else (Location, Title, Artist, Genre...) is hidden. Today, if you go deep enough, the hirarchy tree takes up too muh space on the left making it difficult to find what you are looking for. Did you understand that one? If I open up Library - Location - HD:C - Artist, 80% of the window is "tree lines"

- Tabbed browsing would make it easier and faster to switch between the above AND KEEP the staring points/tabs on top of the window at all time. This way you wont need to scroll up and down to change "starting point"

3.

Oh the pain, the agony. NO REAL (working) "Browse By Album Art" function. When I don't know what to listed to, the best thing is to flip thru my cd collection.

- Here you could in fact have a third useer button. "Album Art". Just the art, noting else. Easy, nothing to mess up the layout. It would be perfect for living room pc's....
- This function need to be implemented in both "AU" and "NU" interface.

4.

SEARCH FUNCTION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In iTunes, if you search for something, then erase the search. iTunes goes back to the starting point, listing up all songs. In MM the song window goes blank and you have to find the right tree again... HASSLE HASSLE....

5.

The player need to be resizable. In certain locations, it's not possible to resize other windows like Now Playing because the player "locks" everything...


6.

OH, sometimes when browsing for a song, I inadvertently change the artist of a song becaus I click in the wrong place. I fint this annoying....what if I dont spot it in time?

7.

Steal/borrow/lend from Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird.

- The way you can add extra features into these is amazing. It allows you to install functions in a much easier way then "Scripts"

I have a feeling that you will be very interested in Songbird when it comes out of Beta.

I wrote that people like cd's because they are simple, just pop them in and play music.

That's why iTunes was so BRILLIANT when it was relesed. NO "nerdy" layout, no hassle with "geeky" shortcuts. Just a hassle free music player. This WILL change a bit in the next release is my guess. Apple has "educated" the people and the people want more functions. BUT they will implement a function where you can have the old "simple" layout and a second for "advanced" users......

MediaMonkey has a too steep learning curve for new users and many "drop off" and stop using it because of this.... (I almost did....)

And we are talking "a program that plays and keeps your music organized" here. NOT rocket science....




I wouldent want MM or Winamp running in my living room. It would "oust" me as the Nerd-I-am (AND I would have to explain how people change music everytime. With iTunes they figure it out very quickly because iTunes is so intuetive...)

There is a Windows XP N version which doesn't contain WMP. I believe that they sold about 0 copies, lol.

I heard something about the european versoin of vista not including wmp, but i could be mistaken

Which is why Real fought against Microsoft including Windows Media Player with Windows. Most users use whatever their system comes with.

to be frank i only read about 2 thirds of this thread but im my observations people dont really use itunes because it is pretty or because it is user friendly (in my opinion it is not because it can't do what i want it to do)

The reason i have seen people use itunes is because it came with their ipods plain and simple. THey poped thier cd in and their world changed forever..... Or in extreme cases they didn't know anything else existed.

I dont just base this on this I have a friend that has a dell computer and guess what he uses.... MusicMatch.

Most people dont do research before they buy shit or chose a program

First of all no need to repost them individually, actually several are already on the wishlist.

1. Been request, party mode is a limited mode that you can customize.

2. Been requested. Don't forget the find more functionality which is faster browsing than iTunes as less information needs to be displayed. I use that in combo with search to find anything. You can also type the node in the explorer tree to quickly navigate to it.

3. Missed by many.

4. That's the horror scenario. In any application it takes a long time to display the whole library. So this request would make MediaMonkey slow.

5. Been requested, but is limited due to WinAmp compatibility. 3.0 probably will improve on this.

6. Party mode can help you protect against accidental editing.

7. Scripts work well, just different and for nerds. 3.0 should see this redesigned to be more user friendly.

Tabs are inherantly customizable, are't they?

So a "Favourites" tab would be a good one.....

sebastian, those are all pretty good suggestions, maybe you should post them "on their own" in the wishlist forum making sure the devs read them?

and your #2: how about a "favourites" tab, kind of bookmarks reffering to starting points?

I love MediaMonkey and it's advanced functionality, but I'm the type of person that tries every menu option and every config option when I install a new program so that I know what's possible. I don't disagree with your post.

Probably the best analogy I have is Nero. You can either use Nero Burning ROM for hardcore users, or they have Nero Express that allows just the basic Copy CD, Make Audio CD, Make Data CD options... but they all use the same burning engine. I think a simple UI that can be layered on the same Database... something like Steegy's Library Panes would be a good mix.

Oh, and I do agree with the need for a script manager akin to Firefox's way of managing extensions. Supposedly that's on the way, so I'll wait with baited breath.

So you think I would be better off signing in when posting here? Hehe, don't know why I didn't, just lazy I guess. Anyways I'm "Guest" and I'm back to elaborate on my first post.

I'll try a stupid analogy here, so "follow with" as we say in Norwegian:

MM is like the girlfriend you can't see yourself marrying, there's just something "missing". She's to complicated and needs to work out more. Humor aside, here's what I mean.


I can agree that MM is for more "serious" music listeners, but my guess is that the MM team has a broader user base in mind. IF this is true, the layout lacks something and is currently too complicated. MOST people (I'm not in that bag) like to play cd's, to watch television, surf the net, use iTunes and zu weiter on a dayly basis. Thats because cd's are easy, just pop them in and press play. They watch television because at the press of ONE button (usually) they can waste a couple of minutes. They use Explorer because it's easy to read the newspaper or surf for porn. They use Google for the same reason. Yahoo got too complicated and along came "simple" Google. They use iTunes because it's not much harder to use then a cd, it's friggin brilliant.

THE KEY WORD IN EVERYTHING POPULAR IS USER FRIENDLINESS!!!!!!

Today, MM has all the functions in the world crammed into one page layot. Each function has it's reason to excist, but even for me it's sometimes too much if I just want to play a record. I feel like a nerd each time I "fumble" thru the "tree" looking for something to play. It's easier to find a cd of use iTunes when I'm in that kind of mood. If I need the advanced functions, MM's great. But usually, thats 70-80% of the time, I want to play music. (To me Winamp is no longer on the playing field, because it not good at large libraries. When I had 2 GB of music, it was ok. Not when I have 120. Worse still, it looks even more "messier" then MM)

They way I use MM, I somethimes have to use Explorer to find music I want to listen to.






My suggestions for MM:

1.

The "Two Button" feature : Chose between "Advanced User" view and "Normal User" view.

- This way, if I want to use the advanced features I can press the "AU" button and everything is revealed. BUT if I just want to listen to Deep Purple and have a nice view of the album art, I press "NU". MM would then remember which mode it was in when I last closed it.

PS: iTunes is the "defacto" standard in players and borrowing/lending design elements from it for the "NU" mode is not stealing. KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid

2.

Integrate some kind of tabbed browsing of the library. The tree is sometimes just confusing if you have a large collection. If you want to browse your albums, click on the Album Tab and everyhing else (Location, Title, Artist, Genre...) is hidden. Today, if you go deep enough, the hirarchy tree takes up too muh space on the left making it difficult to find what you are looking for. Did you understand that one? If I open up Library - Location - HD:C - Artist, 80% of the window is "tree lines"

- Tabbed browsing would make it easier and faster to switch between the above AND KEEP the staring points/tabs on top of the window at all time. This way you wont need to scroll up and down to change "starting point"

3.

Oh the pain, the agony. NO REAL (working) "Browse By Album Art" function. When I don't know what to listed to, the best thing is to flip thru my cd collection.

- Here you could in fact have a third useer button. "Album Art". Just the art, noting else. Easy, nothing to mess up the layout. It would be perfect for living room pc's....
- This function need to be implemented in both "AU" and "NU" interface.

4.

SEARCH FUNCTION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In iTunes, if you search for something, then erase the search. iTunes goes back to the starting point, listing up all songs. In MM the song window goes blank and you have to find the right tree again... HASSLE HASSLE....

5.

The player need to be resizable. In certain locations, it's not possible to resize other windows like Now Playing because the player "locks" everything...


6.

OH, sometimes when browsing for a song, I inadvertently change the artist of a song becaus I click in the wrong place. I fint this annoying....what if I dont spot it in time?

7.

Steal/borrow/lend from Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird.

- The way you can add extra features into these is amazing. It allows you to install functions in a much easier way then "Scripts"




iTunes is by no means perfect,not by a long shot. So I'm not pulling MM down in the mud and putting iTunes on a throne. It's not perfect mostly because of the limitations it has built in as a feature, but also becaus it somtimes just is to simple. THATS WHY I WANT TO BE ABLE TO CHANGE BETWEEN TWO MODES.



Phu, long post...I need something to drink. BTW, I'm using MM now to play "The Beatles - Revolver - Eleanor Rigby"

i agree with lowlander, it's important to remember that pretty doesn't equal user friendly. but still, nomatter how high the learning curve, there are ways to make the newbie happy and still satisfy the expert. take a common app as word, everybody knows how to write a document, but only experts use macros.

and i'm really excited about the chnge announced for 3.0! any roadmap for this?