Summary - My experience with MusicBee - Not Intuitive (enough)

[Stamimail]

Intuitive - People can guess how things work and how to do without need for reading documentation.

MusicBee looks like a Powerful Tool, but currently it isn't so easy to use. It is not so easy to realize the potential of it.

[hiccup]

dear Stamimail,

I have been biting my tongue for a while now, reading all your postings lately. Some of them contain sensible observations, but many are difficult to understand. (more difficult than using MusicBee in my opinion ;-)
Also your tone often strikes a bad chord with me (but perhaps I'm a bit to sensitive here)
You keep expressing yourself like: MusicBee should this... MusicBee should that...
I know you are a relatively new MB user, and it's positive that you seem to be enthusiastic about it (looking at the torrent of comments you are posting) but I would suggest that maybe you put some more effort in learning how MusicBee works, search the forums before you spill your guts, and respect how far MusicBee has gotten with all the work and effort of 1 developer.
You could maybe try to adept yourself a bit more to what you can do with MusicBee, and learn and appreciate how it functions before commenting on every little thing that you believe 'should' work differently.
Or maybe, if there is really so much you think is wrong with MusicBee, it is better for you to move to something else?

B.t.w. this is a completely personal opinion of mine, I am not speaking on behalf of being a mod, or representing anything or anyone else.

[Stamimail]

Hi hiccup,
Thank you for your reply.
You must underatsnd that English is not my First Language, so things might be sounds other than I meant to. Maybe it makes it more difficult to understand what I wrote. Nothing here is personal.

As for your claim:
"but I would suggest that maybe you put some more effort in learning how MusicBee works, search the forums..."
That's exactly my claim about Intuitive. You reinforces my point. (BTW, I tried your suggestion, but still I found it's difficult to me to get anwswers to my questions. Look here for example: http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=17735.msg106088#msg106088)

"and respect how far MusicBee has gotten with all the work and effort of 1 developer."
I do respect. As I said, nothing here is personal. I posted a lot to improve things, otherwise i didn't do so. I tried to give you as much as possible the experience of a Newbie. I think you need keep going in this way, to know how newbies experience with the program, to know how to make things more simple (learn what you could do to avoid the user problem) and to help the user to get more easier what he looked for, so that newbies won't need your help - Intuitive.

[hiccup]

Those are all valid points, and I do appreciate your intentions and the effort you put in it.
But please do realize it is basically a one man job, and I believe it is a small miracle and a gem how good it is.
It is not a commercial product, nobody is paid here, and the focus is on delivering the best possible music player/manager.
Which it is, by the account of many.
But pleasing everybody is of course not a possibility.
Any advanced software has a learning curve, and unless somebody writes a complete tutorial, or posts dozens of YouTube video tutorials, you will have to learn by just doing, and searching and using the forum and the wiki.
And yes, even MusicBee will have some limitations, but many are there for a reason, which you will probably learn to understand if you used it for a longer time.
I do believe any new user putting in a little effort and intelligence should be able to enjoy MusicBee's basics very quickly.
Diving deeper in the near endless possibilities will require some effort indeed.

For those not interested or capable in making such effort, just let them enjoy Windows media player, iTunes, etc. etc.
To each his own.

Asking questions (as you do) is of course also a great way to learn.
But there is not something as 'a right to an answer'.
All you can do is to hope somebody with specific knowledge will happen to read it and make the effort to reply. Chances on a response will of course be bigger if the question is focused and explained well, and shows that the person asking has considered it well and has put some effort in it before asking.
It is not useful nor generally appreciated to push for answers, but feel free to 'bump' it after a reasonable while. No answer still? Than that's just a pity which most users will survive.

Enjoy!

[psychoadept]

To be fair, the forum search is and always has been horrible, and the wiki is woefully incomplete.

But hiccup is right: this is a 100% volunteer project, and even though Steven is WAY more responsive to user input than any of the "official" music programs or even media monkey, etc, he can only do so much.  The good news is that it means you can get involved in making things better, especially documentation & support.  I started working on the wiki because I wanted better documentation for my own sake.  Anyone else can jump in on that project, too.

My experience is that Steven gives more weight to input from users who contribute to the community and can take no for an answer when he's unable or unwilling to fulfill particular requests.

[Stamimail]

I think I found a solution to make "MusicBee panels Configuration" more intuitive. You can find my suggestion here:
http://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=17850.msg106681#msg106681

As a fan of Freewares, I wish also MusicBee will become as a World-Wide/Multilingual/International software.
There are such freewares of 1 developers already done it.

[watdub]

As mentioned already, musicbee is the work of one guy.

To get started, all you have to do is click Musicbee/File/* and you've got a basic music player with default settings.  One or two clicks and it will play your music.

If *you* want to to customise the view etc, that's up to you.  Steven can't read your mind but he has given you the tools.  *You* will have to do some work/reading/learning or try some skins that volunteers have made.

Re the language options, I'd imagine volunteers write those & not the computer programmer who wrote the software.

[phred]

Re the language options, I'd imagine volunteers write those & not the computer programmer who wrote the software.

Correct.  Language files are written by users.  I assume one reason why they're not included in the base install is that it keeps the file size smaller.  There's really no need for each user to have to download a number of languages when they'll only be using one.