Messages

1

Questions / Re: Most unnecessary complicated music player ever!

« on: August 07, 2016, 06:55:47 AM »

And incidentally, the reason I popped back into the forum here is because I just put a CD into the drive... and I have no idea how to play it in MusicBee. Come on. That is ridiculous. These are UX red flags...

I've decided MusicBee (at least, v3) is not for me. The levels of frustration in just trying to do the simplest things are through the roof. I do not want to spend thirty minutes going through all the menus, then checking forums, then potentially asking for help, just to play a CD. I want to relax and play a CD, not tear my hair out.

I love being able to customise a music player. It looks like MusicBee embraces that philosophy wholeheartedly, and I applaud that. But the execution is — sorry — just terrible. I am uninstalling it.

I am going to try v2.5.5804 as I do want to like MusicBee and don't like giving up.

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Questions / Re: Most unnecessary complicated music player ever!

« on: August 07, 2016, 06:53:00 AM »

Also, I think the thread title is just right for getting eyeballs on the topic and, one would hope, soliciting additional comments or suggestions.  The OP was assholish about it, but his point is not entirely without merit.

Skoop is spot-on: this is exactly how I found this thread. Through frustration! I vented in the search bar: SO UNNECESSARILY COMPLICATED! Ha ha.

Also, on the suggestion of pre-defined layouts... I was actually looking for that. I see by this thread that it doesn't exist, but the fact I was looking for it does suggest some newbees would do the same.

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Questions / Re: Most unnecessary complicated music player ever!

« on: August 02, 2016, 08:38:24 AM »

I strongly recommend spending some time with the Panels Configuration window (the live version) ...

By the way, what does that mean? The "live" version? Have I been using a different version?

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Questions / Re: Most unnecessary complicated music player ever!

« on: August 02, 2016, 08:34:34 AM »

Thank you both for your encouraging replies. I read through some of the appreciation thread, and that provided further encouragement. Clearly a lot of people really believe in this player. Honestly, it strikes me as a great player, too. Out of the box it works great, and the import of all my (thousands of) albums was seamless. It's really just the customisation that completely does my head in.

Hiccup, I've only been using MusicBee for less than a week, but I've made no headway whatsoever in understanding the panels configuration. Things disappear and come back, and settings I select don't do anything or do things that seem completely unrelated. Maybe it's just the way I learn things, but I like to dive in and play around, getting my hands dirty to get a baseline understanding of how a piece of software works, before drilling into more specific detail. None of that has borne any fruit. Not yet, anyway. I appreciate your advice that I'll just have to put in a bit of time to try to get my head around it.

I strongly recommend spending some time with the Panels Configuration window (the live version) to get familiar with the layout.  The different pieces are named and highlighted for you in the diagrams: http://musicbee.wikia.com/wiki/Panels_Configuration

Thanks for the recommendation, Psychoadept. This is what I was doing. It seems I'm just going to have to put aside a day rather than a just few hours, knuckle down and study.

PS. Not sure how I got the impression it's an Open Source project. Learning that it isn't doesn't help me understand the design approach, other than to respectfully say that the sole designer needs to go back to first principles.

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Questions / Re: Most unnecessary complicated music player ever!

« on: August 02, 2016, 07:42:01 AM »

Although the OP's post does not invite any help, I am wholly sympathetic with his frustrations. I am completely new to MusicBee (having been a Winamp devotee for decades) and thought I'd try it out based on Lifehacker's recommendation after upgrading my OS to Win10. Here is my experience of trying to customise the layout:

   "What - the - actual - f#$@??"

I am so completely overwhelmed by the highly unintuitive interface settings—I repeat, highly un-intuitive—that I don't even know where to begin in asking for help. I click things and it does things or doesn't do things. Then I click other things and it does exactly the same thing as clicking different things, so why are there different things?

In genuinely trying to understand it, I seek out the Wiki. People have clearly devoted a lot of their free time in assembling the information and trying to explain the interface. But they are hamstrung by jargon. Caption bar. Header bar. Top panel. Tabs bar (aka toolbar). Ticked elements. Stacked elements. Thank you, Wiki contributors; I really do appreciate the effort, but I don't know what you're talking about. It's like studying a new subject in university, but I am not interested in devoting that kind of time and effort to something of such inconsequential importance as customising a music player. If I wanted to put in that amount of time, I'll learn a new language like C++.

Honestly, this really is my experience. Complete bafflement. And I'm no slouch with computers. I am just so utterly befuddled by the unnecessarily complicated complexity.

This is very poor UX design. The fundamental rule of design is that it should be intuitive. But as this is an open source project, it strikes me that the design has been, effectively, by committee. That's a real shame because I'm a great believer in open source. But I wonder if there were ever any design principles dictated in such a flat hierarchy as open source development. Development still requires guidance.

So, I'd love to ask for help, but I am so far off the learning curve on this that I don't know what to ask. I'll likely uninstall MusicBee and dabble with Music Monkey or whatever it's called before reverting to the old, outdated but comprehensible Winamp.