+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).
ProblemThe 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 requestIn 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.
ExplanationThe 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 features1. 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 screensI 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.