Author Topic: Theme and features that work really well on HiDPI screens AND on touch screens  (Read 1782 times)

TheAndyMac

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Just moving from Groove, now that Microsoft have all but killed it off as a player, and MusicBee is looking like a great alternative, allowing me to sync my playlists and music to my phone and also across devices (on OneDrive, downloading the files) and off to my car.

As I have a number of Windows tablets and devices that have touch screens, and others with HiDPI screens, it would be awesome if there were options to provide themes aimed at these use cases - and maybe adjust some behaviours like the width of the tabs (or am I missing the option for this) as they start to cut off the text of, for example, a connected mobile device, when the font size is increased.


MBisFantastic

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+1

MusicBee is a such a great music player and organizer  :-* . I have been enjoying the power of MusicBee for over a year now and am amazed that this is the work of a single developer as it outperforms most other programs, not just for music apps, developed by entire teams!

On to the issue at hand... MusicBee seems geared towards controlling the interface via mouse or trackpad. MusicBee can also be controlled via a touch screen, but unfortunately it is a bit fiddly sometimes. Much can be solved by fiddling with the settings and touch-friendly themes, but I have not found a workaround for the following issue.

Situation
With MusicBee 3 Skin, main panel set to Tracks (or Album and Tracks). Artwork size set to medium (which is the maximum size setting).

Problem
The problem is that it is tricky to select and play a new track by touching (try double clicking or long-pressing) the track listed. It will often result in a right-click triggered context menu.

Feature request
In the main panel for Tracks (and Albums and Tracks), add an optional column with a big Play icon (triangle) in front of each song. A brief click on this icon should result in that track starting to play. Given the aim of controlling this via touch, the icon should be a decent size, equal to the size of the possible artwork (preferable large size, which is currently not available) next to it.

Suggestions for setting user preferences

    - This behaviour could be optional via Edit prefereces > Player (or Now Playing), or

    - The play button could be a Displayed Field item that could be added via Set Displayed Fields.

Explanation
The feature request above would seem the easiest solution from an end user perspective, but maybe not from a design or coding perspective. If the above request is not feasible, the following alternatives might be worth investigating.

Alternative solutions / additional features

1. Adding an option to make the size of Artwork in the main panel in Tracks view to Large in the MusicBee 3 theme. Currently, the maximum size is Medium. The side panels do allow for Large artwork. Larger artwork would help because it makes it easier to select a track by touching the larger artwork.

2. Long press (or double tap) on the artwork to play track in main panel in Tracks view.  This behaviour could be optional via Edit prefereces > Player (or Now Playing) Possibly, just in "Main player: lock down" view, so that the behaviour does not interfere when a user is editing and managing their music library.

3. More often than not, a double tap currently results in a context menu (interpreted as right-click, I suppose). The font of the context menu is quite small, which makes it difficult to press the "Play track" item in the context menu. Being able to customise the size (and/or listed items) and a adding big play now icon would help.

Other challenges with touch screens
I realise that the following challenges can be solved via touch-friendly skins, but the default MusicBee skin is perfect in any other way, so the ability to customise the default skin would be the preferable way.

- The progress bar is too narrow to grab to jump to a different part of a song. The option to make the progress bar a little higher would greatly help here. Same goes for control bars for scrolling.

- The tabs on top are too narrow to select by touch. The option to make them a little higher and wider would greatly help here.

sveakul

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- The progress bar is too narrow to grab to jump to a different part of a song. The option to make the progress bar a little higher would greatly help here. Same goes for control bars for scrolling.

If you were already aware of this my apologies:  have you tried the "Enlarge Progress Bar" option (right-click bar, expand Panel Options)?

Also, scroll bars can be made quite a bit wider by adding to the xml skin script: https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=25745.0 .
Last Edit: April 17, 2019, 05:56:09 AM by sveakul

MBisFantastic

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Hi Sveakul,


Thanks for your kind and quick suggestion. I just checked and I had already used this option. With a high resolution 10" tablet screen, the progress bar is still too narrow to operate comfortably. For this issue, I will have to look up the XML skin script.

My main feature request remains though:

          How to start playing a song by simply tapping a song once using a touch screen in the track list?

Double-clicking is iffy when using a touch screen, I don't know why or what settings influence this, but I often end up tapping the same spot 8 times before a track starts playing. Maybe it's because Windows interpretes the taps as being in a different spot and therefore not a double-click... Either way, the current way of working isn't that useful for a touch device and cannot be fixed by changing the XML skin script. If it can be fixed using the script, please let me know. I'd be happy to give it a go.


Thanks and best regards.
Last Edit: April 19, 2019, 09:26:59 AM by MBisFantastic