I have been using Play for a while now and have developed a new image grid view that I've integrated into Play that shows a grid of scalable cover art (see attached screenshot). Was interested to see what people thought of the idea and the general look of what I have.
The basic idea is that if you have a lot of albums (>300) you can visually scan the grid for what you are looking for in a similar way to browsing a physical cd collection. I worked out that you could easily show 1000 albums at 24x24 (which is surprisingly ok if you know your cover art).
I've wanted to do something like this for a while as previously as soon as I've uploaded about 100 albums I fail to use whatever player it is anymore as I cannot easily browse for something randomly that I feel like playing any more. Lists just don't cut it for me.
The basic UI is made up of an extra panel in the main window that shows a grid of album art which is manually arranged by the user.
Current interface is pretty simple:
- right click for a context menu to play all (copes with multiple discs) or individual tracks
- if editing then can drag albums around (multiple selection, rubber-banding)
- else drag pans around scroll area
- album art is found by looking in the directory that the stream files are in (assumes only one image file will be found and directory is accessible)
- new albums or non-arranged is shown in an extra section/shelf below the main area ready for moving around
- you can hide albums you don't like (for shared libraries)
- mouse-over to view artist/title/large cover (if your icons are small)
- layout stored in your personal application preferences area
- computing what tracks are in an album is done a bit adhoc using artist/title and mcn number (which is what I have to work with using my flac files).
Interested in suggestions/feedback/interest. Very happy to post code or whatever, only problem I can see are changes to nib files which I've been led to believe are binary format, so not simple to merge/review. Otherwise changes are extremely additive (new classes, new methods in AudioLibrary, new image files). I have not yet upgraded to Leopard so the build that I have patched at home is off an old build (svn tag 982) as I've not managed to get the latest to build on Tiger (not spent enough time on that yet to claim it's not possible).
I've been using this patched version for a while now and I really like it (but then I would

Oh, and Happy New Year,
Cheers,
David.