guitz
10-18-09, 05:58 PM
Well I purchased the WDTV Live last week, and have spent many fruitless hours trying to get something as simple as getting SOME kind of cover album art to display. I've tried everything I can think of, but cover art just refuses to display using the Artist and Album views.....And more bizarre, a certain handful ARE displayed when using the folders view. I have done everything I can possibly think of in terms of checking each files tags and making sure there were SEVERAL different .jpgs , naming some folder.jpg and others the name of the album and/or artist and making sure they were contained within the artists folder and using media monkey and other auto tagging programs...To add to the whackiness, I have two albums by the shiny toy guns...one displays the album thumbnail art for EACH individual song from the album view (yet DOESN'T display the overall album itself before you click to get to the songs, goofy!) yet the band's other album displays the default icon for each song! I triple checked each albums folder in windows...EXACTLY the same files and .jpgs per album...makes no sense.
So, aside from getting no album icons from any views except a sporadic few from the folder view, the useability of the interface is disappointing......for starters, once you have a song playing , there does not seem to be a way to add the next song to the queue to play next ...huh? That HAS to be possible , even for the most rudimentary player otherwise the usefulness is severely limited. To clarify, you can click on the next song you want to hear, but, it immediately starts playing it, cutting off the one you were listening to...their has to be a 'now playing' queue which you can add to on the fly.... Next, from the album view, in addition to no art thus far being displayed, you only get the album name , which if you can't see the cover art to identify it, can be hopeless trying to figure out what artist the album is by...example: if you have several albums titled 'greatest hits' from the album view, there is no way to distinguish which is by who...you still need to have the artist name displayed too...Next, the default view per artist or album , is two rows of icons..this is insufficient...for those of us with large collections, you've GOT to make the icons scaleable in size, so that you can view more than two rows at a time...it is VERY tedious scrolling thru your entire collection , two rows at a time, alphabetically, to get to something....which brings me to.... it appears the only way your songs/files/artists are arranged is alpahbetically...which is another tedious thing when you want to target specific songs/artists/etc....give us the capability to reorder these things WITHIN wdtv2...give us the capability to also retag things WITHIN the wdt2 or give us the capability to add art in SOME way OR make the whole process more intuitive and/or add thumbnail support for ALL file formats...this shouldn't be too dificult now with net access....next, a 'split screen' of sorts, where by you can pop back and forth between views or click and add songs from one screen , your library maybe, to the other side by side screen, your 'now playing' queue maybe or the artist/album/file view....Improve the search feature by using predictive text or make it work like windows media player does, it's far too tedious and cumbersome to use it repetitively as it is...
So there's my wants...getting the art sussed out is probably the most critical thing. I'm sure the designers are smart fellas, and probably are aware of some of the things I've mentioned...Maybe future upgrades will address some of these things. I'll leave all the potential eye candy possibilities and functions specifically for the music player for another thread Thanks for enduring all the tedious commas, but I thought it'd make the overall read easier to digest :D
So, aside from getting no album icons from any views except a sporadic few from the folder view, the useability of the interface is disappointing......for starters, once you have a song playing , there does not seem to be a way to add the next song to the queue to play next ...huh? That HAS to be possible , even for the most rudimentary player otherwise the usefulness is severely limited. To clarify, you can click on the next song you want to hear, but, it immediately starts playing it, cutting off the one you were listening to...their has to be a 'now playing' queue which you can add to on the fly.... Next, from the album view, in addition to no art thus far being displayed, you only get the album name , which if you can't see the cover art to identify it, can be hopeless trying to figure out what artist the album is by...example: if you have several albums titled 'greatest hits' from the album view, there is no way to distinguish which is by who...you still need to have the artist name displayed too...Next, the default view per artist or album , is two rows of icons..this is insufficient...for those of us with large collections, you've GOT to make the icons scaleable in size, so that you can view more than two rows at a time...it is VERY tedious scrolling thru your entire collection , two rows at a time, alphabetically, to get to something....which brings me to.... it appears the only way your songs/files/artists are arranged is alpahbetically...which is another tedious thing when you want to target specific songs/artists/etc....give us the capability to reorder these things WITHIN wdtv2...give us the capability to also retag things WITHIN the wdt2 or give us the capability to add art in SOME way OR make the whole process more intuitive and/or add thumbnail support for ALL file formats...this shouldn't be too dificult now with net access....next, a 'split screen' of sorts, where by you can pop back and forth between views or click and add songs from one screen , your library maybe, to the other side by side screen, your 'now playing' queue maybe or the artist/album/file view....Improve the search feature by using predictive text or make it work like windows media player does, it's far too tedious and cumbersome to use it repetitively as it is...
So there's my wants...getting the art sussed out is probably the most critical thing. I'm sure the designers are smart fellas, and probably are aware of some of the things I've mentioned...Maybe future upgrades will address some of these things. I'll leave all the potential eye candy possibilities and functions specifically for the music player for another thread Thanks for enduring all the tedious commas, but I thought it'd make the overall read easier to digest :D