Now Playing - Customizable Sections

[dhallag]

So as an avid Muso user, the now playing screen is the most important screen for me. Muso is really fantastic in it's own right and without it, I would really be hurting. Here are a few things that I think would make this a more useful page. Would love to know if others agree.

1. Ability to add or delete sections. For example, I don't really see a need for the "Amazon" or "Google Image Search" section so having the ability to not have this would be great. In addition, sometimes the now playing screen shows similar artists, sometimes it doesn't... not sure why as last.fm always has similar artists. Also, although I wouldn't use it, I could see some people wanting a section that lists the other songs on the album (which I know you can get to easily by clicking on the album title)
2. Customizable size of sections. For example, it would be nice to have the "Artist" and "Album Summary" be larger to show more content. Plus the "lyrics" section always seems to be way to large or way too small. Not sure why on some it displays many rows and on some it barley displays a few...
3. Ability to move sections to different places in the page. I always seem to have some space on the right most column (under "you might like" and "wiki pages") and this could be used for something such as:
4. Would love a section on "Album Credits" which would list out crediting contributors. Michael Herger has a great plugin called "Music and Artist Information" which does show album credits. Going one step further, it would be great if there was a way to see if other albums have the same person.. so for example, a bass player in a jazz trio... maybe a right click that bass player goes to "other albums with..." as I like how now it brings up a wiki section.
5. Ability to place 2 album covers on the Now Playing. Another one right under the one that's there would be great. Many times there is a front and back cover at least and I would use this to place the back cover below the front cover. And/or maybe instead of having a separate page to go to with all the pictures associated with the album, to have a row of small icons that display and when you move over them with the mouse, they get larger... very cool... so like it is now but without the extra step of going to a separate page.
6. As I am getting more FLAC hi-res albums, they are including .PDF's which give a lot of detail. I love how when you go to a last.fm page via the "read more", it does it within the muso frame work. would be great if it did it with these .PDF's as well or anything else that's in that folder.
7. Hover over section to display all content. So right now when clicking on the wikilyrics page, it displays a page which is kind of messed up in windows 10 (although I see and agree with the direction you're going in here). is there a way to do like a hover when you hover over it, the window get's larger and displays the entire lyrics? And do the same with content from album and artist so it pulls the entire content, does a short paragraph like you have but then on a hover, expands to display all content?
8. Screen Saver splash screen for the Now Playing. So Zune did a really good job of having a "screen saver" screen when the system was idle. It showed a translucent picture of the artist in the background and who the artist is, while having information move across the screen in different ways on album, song, etc.. it looked really cool. it even put up different tile sizes of other like artists in my collection...

Thanks so much for everyone opinions here and of course for this great application.

[dhallag]

I guess I am the only person who thinks these would be useful features?

[DuLac]

Being a jazz fan I second you on #4. I would love to be able to see a given musician works at the click of a mouse.

[RichG]

Hi dhallag,

On point 1 - some of this (removing Amazon and Google search for instance) is achievable by editing the theme .css file, but it can be quite involved to work out what to change. I'm pretty busy atm but when I get the chance I'll try to put together something to point you in the right direction.

Unfortunately there is no way to control what is shown inside the 'similar artists' section, only how it appears. The LastFM lookups do appear to be a bit quirky in what they show - I think a lot of this may be down to matching of tags but I'm really not to sure.

Point 2 - again the .css file has some influence on this, at least in terms of how wide the sections are.
Not sure why the amount of lyrics shown changes - probably just down to the web service Muso uses to retrieve them, so it would be difficult to change.

Point 3 - it may be possible to move sections around with css but this would be very tricky to achieve without breaking other areas of the display.

Point 4 - nice idea, but would only be achievable by having user created tags for all the credits, unless there is some web service that could provide them - seems like a lot of work either way.

Point 5 - again nice idea.

Point 7 - tricky css again.possibly.

Point 8 - This I would really like too.

I spent some time a while ago trying to get something to work for this. There are programs around which allow you to display a web page as a screen saver, and because the now playing display in Muso is essentially a web page you can get the screen saver program to point to the now playing file.

Unfortunately when I tried this the results didn't quite work - the page would show but was missing quite a lot of sections and/or would not update dynamically as the song changed so you would be left with it showing the song that was playing as the screen saver kicked in.

I'm sure this could be fully achievable - maybe we just need to find the right screen saver program... (or push Jez into coding it for us ). One small point - what should it display if Muso isn't running or has stopped playing ??

[MDE]

I would like to add a vote for point 6.

[dhallag]

as it's been a few months, just wanted to follow-up here to see if anyone else has any opinions and if these are being considered for future updates?

[musoware]

I think there would have to be greater demand for these features than have currently been exhibited, as I don't see anything simple here, they would mostly involve quite a bit of effort.

[musoware]

So some good news : I decided to start work on a screen-saver feature. I haven't seen how Zune does it (or used to do it), but have some ideas on how I want to do it anyway.

[musoware]

Screensaver is in 2.6

[DuLac]

Well done, Jeremy! Thanks.