Automatic artist/album artist thumbnails with their albums [#17031][#17033]

[drakinite]

Hi,

A feature I really like in MMA (As well as many other music apps) is that the artist/album artist views automatically create thumbnails from their albums. I'm used to that way of visually identifying albums, and it would be nice if undefined artist thumbnails would default to showing their album art.



Blank artist thumbnails showing the first two letters and a random color doesn't really do it for me, and I don't like the grid being filled with a bunch of faces (since most artist profile pictures are just pics of their face).

[Ludek]

Sounds good to me, actually the code for this already exists -- as originally the artists have been just collage of album images (like e.g. the genres are currently).

Added as https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=17031

[drakinite]

That's great; thanks!

Just wondering; what happens in the collage if the artist only has 2-3 albums, and it can't populate all 4 squares?

[Ludek]

That's great; thanks!

Just wondering; what happens in the collage if the artist only has 2-3 albums, and it can't populate all 4 squares?

Just like in Genres. It shows either 1, 4 or 9

[drakinite]

Ah, okay, I see!

Side note for future performance optimizations - Having all of the divs and images on the screen at once seems to cause a significant framerate hit when scrolling up and down. Compared to the albums screen, which scrolls smoothly except at very high window size, the genres view gets pretty bad frame drops when scrolling. If you pre-generate the collage images, then I think the scrolling framerate would be much better, because the browser won't have to render 4 to 9 times the images.

Also, I noticed that the browser seems to send local HTTP requests for every thumbnail, without caching. I think that if the browser is able to cache the thumbnails - Even if the cache has a timeout of just a few minutes - it would drastically improve CPU performance. I talked with jiri about a related problem on MMS here: https://github.com/mediamonkeyserver/mms/issues/35

This is what I see in the network tab of the dev console:
https://i.imgur.com/j13M8Y6.png

Of course it's not a high priority, but if you have some sort of to-do list for future optimizations, it might be good to keep this in mind.

[Ludek]

I'll verify it tomorrow, but it is caching the thumbs (in the temp dir) and also the thumb links in memory (unless there ia a regression)

But probably you tested genres grid when the thumbs haven't been cached yet and needed to be created?

Also based on my tests the scrolling was always smooth (until I run DbgView). DbgView somehow causes the scrolling to not be smooth. But I am going to re-test it tomorrow.

[Ludek]

OK, checking this today and there really was a regression introduced: MM is trying to repeatedly load thumbs for files with no artwork --> resulting also in the lags described by you. I have fixed this issue for 2272 as https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=17033 (details in Mantis)

Thanks!

[drakinite]

Ah, good catch, thanks for fixing it!

[drakinite]

How difficult would it be to add cases where there are two and three albums, like these (assuming that the additional images don't come with a performance hit)?



I was surprised how easy it was to make these by tweaking the existing 4-album gallery thumbnails.
For the 3-album one, I set all three thumbnails to 80% width; the bottom one has top & left of 0% and a z-index of -2; the middle one has a top & left of 10% and z-index of -1; and the frontmost has a top & left of 20% and z-index of 0.
Then for the 2-album one, I set both thumbnails to 85% width; the bottom one has top & left of 0% and z-index of -1; and the front one has a top & left of 15% and a z-index of 0.

I'm not sure whether including the z-index helps save processing time for the render engine or not. But if it does hurt performance, it could be omitted since the browser automatically layers them back-to-front.

I don't know how everyone else would feel about it, but I really like the look of the stacked album art in MMA and I think it would look great in the desktop app.

[Lowlander]

Stacked hides the Artwork mostly for all but the top Artwork.

[drakinite]

Yes; though I do think it's a nice aesthetic, and they're still somewhat recognizable to someone who is familiar with the albums.
Also I don't mean to replace the 4- and 9- album galleries; this is a suggestion for artists (and genres) that have either two or three albums.

[Barry4679]

Sounds good to me, actually the code for this already exists -- as originally the artists have been just collage of album images (like e.g. the genres are currently).

I do like what you have done here, but actually prefer Drakinite's original request.

Hi,

A feature I really like in MMA (As well as many other music apps) is that the artist/album artist views automatically create thumbnails from their albums. I'm used to that way of visually identifying albums, and it would be nice if undefined artist thumbnails would default to showing their album art.

Blank artist thumbnails showing the first two letters and a random color doesn't really do it for me, and I don't like the grid being filled with a bunch of faces (since most artist profile pictures are just pics of their face).

I reinstall MM5 so often during the alpha & beta, I have turned off the option to import artist images. ... There are around 4,000 of them, and I don't know what most of them look like. .. The screen becomes a bit like a rouges gallery of unknown faces, and in the case of groups, they are indistinguishable tiny faces. ... A messy jumble really.

I think that it is good that you offer the existing option, and many people will like it, especially for smaller collections. ... I like it for Composers, as I have few of them, as I have blanked the composer tag for all non-classical tracks.

I would prefer to have the option for MM5 to use album art collages for all (albumartist) artists, ie. not just the artists where you cannot locate an artist picture .... I do recognise the artwork from my albums. As drakinite points out this works well in MMA, and it will work even better in MM5 due to the greater thumb size.

It would be good to be able to recognise albumartist people in the Artist sub-node (ie. they would have a collage vs a face or a two alpha summary).
Or it would be OK if non-albumartist artists showed a collage of whatever mixed track albums they appeared in, if that is easier for you.

Possible?

[dtsig]

Sounds like a reasonable suggestion ...

[drakinite]

I would prefer to have the option for MM5 to use album art collages for all (albumartist) artists, ie. not just the artists where you cannot locate an artist picture .... I do recognise the artwork from my albums. As drakinite points out this works well in MMA, and it will work even better in MM5 due to the greater thumb size.

I thought that MM5 didn't automatically locate artist pictures (at least not by default, and I wasn't aware that it was capable of doing so). All my artist thumbnails were blank until I started manually populating each one.

[Barry4679]

I thought that MM5 didn't automatically locate artist pictures (at least not by default, and I wasn't aware that it was capable of doing so). All my artist thumbnails were blank until I started manually populating each one.

I think that it is intentionally off by default, because if on at 1st start up it gives a negative 1st impression of MM5, due to all the 1st through background processing and Internet access.

Maybe it will get mention in their Quick Start documentation.