Notices

This thread has been moved from talk:brainstorm.
Brainstorm items for this thread:
for "track rating" http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=39866
for "gapless-play & sleep-timer" http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=428704
for "auto-pause" http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=419937

Original post below.

Got my N900 this week and would like share my thoughts on the media player. The media player has experienced a total make over compared to my previous phone (n95) which also was marketed as a media phone.

As N900 has a lot raw computing power compared to current symbian phones these improvements are possible and the phone could execute these tasks smoothly

Suggestions

1. Adding rating option to the music player
Description: a simple 1-5 stars (+not rated) option which can be turned on / off depending on the user



2. Adding autotag songs eg. from Amazon
Description: This feature is already in several PC based media players and once you have tried it you can't live without it. With a few clicks you can make your mobile music library a flawless experience.

3. Adding Album Art (Download eg. from Amazon)
For me personally, seeing the music player album view full of blank album art makes me feel I want to do something about this.
There will always be couple albums which you forgot to edit while copying your music library to the new phone. Instead of fixing this problem at home you could do it on the move.

4. Adding tagging option to Videos
Description: For me one of the N900's best new features compared to symbian phones is the Tagging and Sharing option. It's so smooth and works like a charm. This unfortunately doesn't apply to videos. Even though you can share the videos, you can't edit their metadata (Tags, geotags, rating, name)

5. Better Organizing of the Video Files
Description: I bet that the N900 wasn't the first media phone for the majority of N900 owners. I as well copied all the N95 photos&videos to the N900. I immediately noticed that the videos don't have the same chronological sorting like the images have (eg. no sorting by Months) even though videos have the option to sort by date, this does not seem to be working.

6. Creating thumbnails in the video section
Description: I'm positively surprised how fast the N900 updates the media library even though I moved over 10gb of media into the phone. Like I have said before, the phone has a lot of computing power. I think this should enable the option to create small thumbnails of all the videos in the phone (eg. Option to start making thumbnails, as this takes time it would not be automatic and could be done for instance over night while charging.)

Please share you views about the media player. I'm no maemo developer (are these technically doable?), just a keen user wanting to make Maemo a better experience for all of us.

For music:

Creating playlists:
Have an option by pressing the menu bar, "add songs to playlist", which allows you to select which (multiple) songs at a time to add to a previously or "now playing" playlist, similarly to how you can "share" multiple photos at a time by selecting lots of photos and then pressing the "share" button.

Editing playlists:
The ability to edit playlists more than is possible now, such as deleting a song from an existing playlist, or re-ordering the playlist.

Changing metadata/tags on the phone itself:
Allow right-click or mass (see above as with sharing multiple files) changing of tags. For example, if you've loaded a lot of music and haven't had the time to create tags, you can at least add things like "Album titles" or "genres". This would also be useful in File Manager for those (like me) who sort music into folders.

Album art:
My N82 allowed attaching album covers (or any picture) to a song when it was on the phone. These images weren't embedded into the music file - something I would personally prefer, as you can use a big high quality image without it being replicated in each song of an album, and inflating the size quite a lot.
Having read:
http://live.gnome.org/MediaArtStorag...ding_media_art
I would suggest this could be done on the phone by moving to a separate folder (if not already) and putting in a file called "cover.jpg" with the selected album art.

Quick search of songs/albums/artists by typing on the keyboard:
This doesn't seem to work too well at the moment. I have roughly 2500 songs on my N900. I'd hope that typing would bring up pre-tagged music/video files by album, artist and song name. It would be ideal if the typed in characters were searched for in any part of the string in the filename/song title/album/artist such as in a Symbian search of the complete phone. Sometimes, you only remember part of the name of a song, etc.

For videos:

Playlists:
These are useful for watching a bunch of TV shows sequentially (especially with TV out and lazing on the bed with the N900 way out of reach), or for watching short clips - anyone seen Dexter First Cuts? 4 episodes of 2-3 minutes each would be much easier with a playlist.

Tags:
As original poster has said. It doesn't necessarily have to be embedded in the video file. The N900 could have a data list of filename, location, tag. eg. TV, movie, documentary, music video etc. These tags would have to be added on the phone itself though, unless a file can be created externally or some sort of syncing to do this.

Optional User-defined Thumbnail:
You should be able to manually put in a thumbnail for the video if you are not happy with the default one. What happens if you have Basic Instinct on your N900, for example, and it randomly attaches the infamous crossing legs scene as the thumbnail?

Video grouping for Genres
I'm not sure about this, but I have videos on my N900 in separate folders, eg. movies, TV, cartoons, documentary, music videos, etc, which I use in File Manager to play the file. It's a lot easier that way than the visual method of finding what you want quickly. Perhaps the folder names could be used as Genres or Groups in the Video section, though I would think as a user-selectable on/off option.

Quick search of video clips by typing on the keyboard:
This could search for any part of the input string in the filename and filter by that. This would work for things like if you have TV shows on your phone. eg. All episodes of The Office have that in their filename, and all episodes of The Big Bang Theory would have that in their filename. This would help filter down to what you are looking for.

(edit:
added editing playlists)

I agree with many of these suggestions. While tagging sounds like a great idea, I really must stress the importance of video playlists. I would also like to be able to view videos organized by folder and add all of the videos in a folder to the current playlist. I'll comment more later when I'm at a bigger keyboard.

just a heads up on the video playlist, kmplayer has this functionality

i agree it would be nice on the native media player

That is indeed my #1 enhancement request for the media player (and a sorely missed feature compared to Apple's offering...)

Question:
How should compilations albums be treated ?
It would be nice to have the album come up as a Various Artists album (eg. for a soundtrack) but when playing or searching, be able to display/search for the actual artist as well. This one seems a little more complicated and perhaps a general problem with tags.

I already have the problem of multiple songs from one soundtrack appearing as different albums by different artists at the moment.

Edit: I think it shows up "Various Artists" automatically if there are multiple artists with the same "Album Name". Be careful with multiple "Greatest Hits" albums, and rename them as "Greatest Hits of <artist>" where artist is the name of the artist.

How about "drag and drop" from artist/album view to basket/playlist icon to make playlists creation faster/easier.

How about adding some more functions that the n95 media player had.

1.- Custom equalizer.
2.- Surround sound.

SUBTITLES support for videos!

i want to choose which output to use