Several suggetions to improve user friendliness (queue, genre-filter, metadata)

Volumio Development Suggest a feature
1

Hello everyone

I’m new to Volumio. So first of all I would like to thank the developers for their work, and for making volumio available for free.

While in general I found volumio very straightforward to use, there are several things that impacted my overall impression of the software quite a bit. And most of them could probably be fixed easily. So let me suggest a couple of tweaks which would make the software more user friendly:

  1. Currently, when playing an album, it is added to the existing queue, to clear the queue and play the album one needs to use the sub-menu.

That the opposite of how every other music player works. Could “Clear and play” please be the default behavior when playing an album? Currently we have a queue that keeps increasing and increasing, I can’t imaging how that could be useful to anyone.

  1. The “Genre”-page first lists artists (not albumartists!), then albums, and at the end tracks.

I find the artist-list in that context pretty disturbing, specially if you have a big collection. With classical music in particular you’ll end up with an incredibly long list (due to the fact that albums are recorded by a large group of artists and that therefor there are many different artist combinations). On top of that there seems to be a bug that sometimes clicking on an artist in that view returns an error message (Error - No results).
A simple solution could be an option to simply hide the artists via the settings.
A better approach would be to get rid of the genre page, and add a genre filter on the artist and album page.

  1. Volumio currently has extremely limited metadata support.

When ripping CD’s, I take the time to make sure I have complete metadata, but volumio can’t take advantage of that. Could you please support extended metadata, such as composer, conductor, soloist, publisher, comment etc? I realize that there is credit discovery offered by MyVolumio Superstar, but will that read additional metadata from my files?

As the FAQ states, the more people are using volumio the better it will get. But for that it needs to improve on its user friendliness, right now I would be reluctant to recommend volumio to most people. These suggestions are standard features in pretty much all available music player software.

I hope you will find the time to include them in a future release.

4 Likes
2

Thank you very much for your feedback!!! This is really precious and helpful.

  1. I was thinking exactly the same. From next release the default action will be clear and play.
  2. I agree on removing the tracks from the genres
  3. We are reworking entirely the database engine to allow for more fine-tuned metadata control and browsing (free for everyone). This feature is about 60% completed and will see daylight Q4 2020
3 Likes
3

Wow, thank you for your fast answer. I’m very pleased to hear that.
Regarding number 2, personally I would also like to see the artists go, or at least have the albums in the first place (and preferably display album artists rather than artists). Regarding the bug I mentioned, it seems that volumio is taking the artist tag and then searching for an album artist. It consistently happens when artist and album artist are not the same.

4

I would like it to have it in Playback Mode Continuous also :slight_smile:

+1

5

+1 for the 3 points it will be awesome , but also keep in mind the qobuz and tidal UI.
Regards

6

Good news, in next release you’ll have:

  • Replace and play as default action
  • Removed tracks from genres list, albums shown before artists

We left the listsing by artist (not albumartists) since it seems more appropriate for artists listing of a genre (and albumartists are listed on albums)

1 Like
7

Perfect, thank you very much :+1: :+1: :+1:

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thank you :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile: