♪Photo

Really nice idea! Something I'll use on a daily basis for sure it's when finished.

It's simply AWESOME ! Stevel you are creative :) I like the background :p
One thing : it would be great to be able to resize pictures and to spin them manually ;)

I am upgrading yo 0.8pre just so i can give this a try!

@stevel, great !

for the background I discover ;) wood is cool too.

Really impressive. Puzzling because I have never seen anything like it and have no idea how you could have come up with this technologically, or fundamentally for that matter. Certainly over my head, but definitely a keeper for me. Again, absolutely impressive and I am sure will make wave on Songbird 1.0 debut. I am liking very much. Thanks Stevel.

@stevel
This is a must have, it must be somehow on Songbird 1.0 or as a recommended add-on !

I don't get any artworks, only the default image :-(
Shouldn't the add-on fetch the artwork automatically? Or do I have to do something?

Thanks for this innovative plugin Steve. We need more people thinking outside of the box like this.

Just wanted to report a performance issue, I have 831 artists, and when I switch to the muzPhoto view, none of the images show up initially. The artist names pop up in the lower left as I move my cursor around, but the images just aren't there. Not until I try to drag one of the "invisible" images does it refresh the whole collage and I can see everything.

Also, with this many artists, there is a significant (about 5 second) lag when trying to drag anything. After dragging, the photos stay in the same place, the cursor is frozen as a multi-directional arrow, then five seconds later the image appears where I had dragged it. If I click and hold on an image for more than five seconds, however, it then seems to "grab on" and allows me to drag it around freely and smoothly.

Using WinXP with Songbird nightly 20081025012214, 1GB RAM, Pentium 3GHz.

Absolutely fantastic! Definitely recommended for showing off to your friends. The good people here for Songbird should seriously consider this as an alternate media view.
The absolute only thing I had even a 2nd thought about was the resize overlays, simply because they were slightly obtrusive and made small pictures hard to see. However, all credit is regained by having a setting for it!
A+!!

I think this could be the perfect view to use with album art. I think there should be an option to scale all album art to a certain size because it can look weird having a lot of albums with different cover sizes. It would also be cool if when you double click on an album the cover spun around and the tracklisting was on the back.

Hey Stevel this is amazing. I don't have any suggestions for this add-on. I find it to be quite perfect actually. I always saw stuff like this in movies like Eagle Eye and The new 007 on touchscreen interfaces. Seeing how Windows 7 will be touchscreen anyone who gets Songbird and this add-on with it will really appreciate the hard work that you've done as I do without have the ability to be touched yet.

Thanks

OK, after using this wondiferous add-on, I have finally figured out what is missing! A shuffle button! I read all the comments from the last 6 months and nothing similar (I don't think) has been mentioned. 'tdmurphy' really got me thinking about it with his suggestions (good ones!) and I think a reshuffle option would be a good comprise for both our situations; hopefully it would not be very difficult to implement.
Please keep the good work up, as awesome extensions like these are what really give Songbird its backbone!

Seeing that photo scatters the albums.. nicely of course.. is it possible to implement an artist search feature, where, it would not remove the other artists like the default search does.. but simply bring that artist to into view?

Yeah, I am believing you can do anything.
 
With faith the size of a mustard seed, all you have to do is tell a mountain to move to the sea, and it would do just that. :)

OH, and the ability to drag images from photo, onto album art, like your Mashtape allows (Just discovered that in mashtape)

Honestly, I simply prefer some of the album art images in Photo to what comes with the album, so I would like to drag a few onto album art.

And while I am at it.. rotflol.. maybe at some point Songbird implements a feature to the album art.. so that if one has more than one album art per album, it would or could flip through them, if the flip/rotate or whatever, is enabled.

Stevel,
Today is Thanksgiving day... one has to be thankful for minds like yours that make things like these possible.

Love the add-on, probably the best i've seen for any music player.....but is there a way to change the artist image to something I choose. Something stored locally would be perfect. I only ask because I like indie music so i've got a screen full of black and white photos of moody looking groups with messy hair. No idea which band is which! Cheers

Hi, just wondering what I need to do to make the artist images appear - at the moment all the artist images are the default guitarist dude. If I click into an artist tho, the album art for each album appears fine tho.

Also had a couple of suggestions for you to consider
- some way of being able to pan around the screen, perhaps holding a key and dragging, so that when there's loads they can be spread out over a bigger area than will fit on the screen
- general zoom in / zoom out. I know you can resize the individual images (which is very cool) but would be good if you could zoom in or out on the whole thing
- when i click into an artist, to my mind at least it feels like you should be able to double-click on the background to get back to the artists view. I know you can do it using the right-click menu, but I think double-clicking on the background would be quicker and a bit more intuitive

Cheers for giving us all these extensions - my songbird wouldn't look half as funky if it weren't for all your hard work!

I also don't see anything besides the default artist images. I've tried loading it after the player's been open for a while and I've tried using it on a small playlist, but nothing. The images resize/move well, but even when playing one of them, it never retrieves the images. As everyone else has said, it looks awesome though!!

correction: after the player being on about an hour, images have started to show up. strangely, all of the photos of one of my large playlists, but only a few photos in my smaller playlists, are showing.

Yeah, I am also seeing artist pics now. Sorry for the impatience!!

Am still getting quite a few not showing up tho because the name on the mp3 isn't a single artist or is slightly different to that on last.fm. Eg, Oscar Peterson is found but the Oscar Peterson Quartet isn't. It'd be cool if it could just work from album art rather than the artists. Just another thought...

Cheers

hey stevel.
this Add-on looks really cool, i'd love to use it...
if only it'd work!

i'm having the same problem as atreiu: no images are fetched, only defaults are shown. also - when the view loads, only the background is visible, and if i move the mouse to cartain places, i find i'm actually "hovering" over an image. if i then drag it - it appears.
(weird)

this is the error in my Error console:

Error: SQLite compile step: 
SELECT imgUri FROM artists WHERE artistName = "Damian \"Junior Gong\" Marley/Snoop Dogg"
caused the error
near "Junior": syntax error

any ideas?
10x

I have a bug to report. When I right click on a picture and select "Play all song by ..." and then I press ctrl+shift+L to show the current playing track, the list of song narrow down to only the ones of the artist, so I can't see any other songs and I can't get back to the list with all the songs. I have to change this add-on view to another one, and open this one again to see the whole list again. Right click on the picture or anywhere else to show the context menu and select "Back to Artist" is not available. So re-starting this add-on is the only way to get to the list of all songs.
Double clicking on the artist picture does narrow down the list, but the link to "Back to Artist" works there and the list of all the songs is shown again.
I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 32bit, Songbird 1.0.0, Build 860 (20081124135530) and Photo 0.0.6

Thanks in advance if you fix this bug, it's really annoying. I use the "Show current playing track" keyboard shortcut a lot, and I bet I'm not the only one

I really like the idea, but I have a couple of problems.
1) When I look at my whole library, with the large number of artists in it, only the 0123's and the A's pictures appear, I can't find any other ones. I know you can't display all my artists, but is there a way to randomly choose the artists displayed and then keep randomly displaying that?
2) All the pictures start out as blank when I look at my library, until i drag one of them.
3) When I look at a playlist, all my artists show up with the silhouette of a guy with a guitar. Only the pictures mentioned in my first problem (the 0123's and the A's) will show up with a picture...

i have the same problem as viperguy...

Is there any chance we can have the option to initially view by Album artist, then when you double click on the album artist it displays a bunch of photos for that artist. This will accomplish 2 things for me at least and im sure many other people.

1) I have a number of albums with various artists on them, i dont know quite a number of those artists nor what they look like, i do however know what the album cover looks like.
2) Having a lot of media means that the artist and/or album i am looking for can be quite time consuming to locate, my suggestion above will cut down on the number of images shown initially making albums easier to locate. Once located, i then have the option to extrapolate further from the images of the artist(s) that would have just loaded up.

Thats my only concern, its an excellent idea and one that i can only see gaining in popularity and downloads ! keep it coming.

Many regards

Russ

Nice idea, doesn't work for me yet:
On my machines (linux and windows) it manages to display about 3/4 of the pane's worth of covers. Whenever I click anywhere to drag an icon, it pulls one from somewhere on the bottom of the pile - ie not one I can see before clicking. I can't drag the ones I can see unless they're in the 1/4 of the window which is empty. I can drop them there, rotate them, scale them... but as soon as I left-click anywhere else, they disappear again.
Sometimes I get one image on top which is a few times larger than the display window, which has to be shifted to one side for a while and then scaled when I get to the edge.

I have about 1200 album covers.
HTH.

Good idea but I had to uninstall it because it was terrible slow with huge (22 Gb) library.

Thanks for a great add-on.

A small point - the files stored in the artist-art directory have no suffix - it would be easier to see what they are at OS level (and neater) if they kept their proper (jpg?) ending.

Also, I store my music files uin ana artist\album\track format, as do a lot of peopel.

e.g. \My Music\Fred Smith\Greatest Hits\ 01 Song Name.abc

Covers go in teh album directories and I store my artist images in the artist directories as gif files. ("Folder,gif" is picked up by Wndows XP as a folder image, which is handy at an OS level).

I would love a preference option to allow the files you find to be put into that structure, too.

Thanks again.

will this be available for 1.1 beta 1 ? or should i roll back to 1.0 to use this?

Why this won't work on my computer, the picture just don't show, even for a well known artist and their profile is available on Last.fm

Same problem as 4timonly. I am using 1.0.

Only the generic shadow shows.

Nvm, I just needed to restart it.

great thing :-) please update

yes, please update I am very much looking forward to trying this out!

Sorry to ask this but i'm newbee on songbird and i would like to known how to install this extension on my 1.1.2 version.

Thx a lot