Grid View JohnM
Displays albums grouped by artist
Grid View is similar to the Album View extension, but grouped by Artist. I plan on improving it in the future to include being able to sort by at least Album and Genre. I got my idea from some of the nice suggestions on getsatisfaction
Version 0.5.1:
Added media view icon from stevel
Version 0.5:
-Updates when album artwork changes
-Updates when songs are added/modified/removed
-Collapsible playlist
To some extent, same as topdownjimmy:
'When I click the "Play" button on the piles, it doesn't play the artist I'm clicking on.'
HOWEVER:
This is only after the INITIAL installing and rebooting. After rebooting a second time, works just fine. Awesome!!
This works exactly how these grid things SHOULD be working.
JohnM, I am so excited that some of the ideas have turned into an actual media view. As topdownjimmy also said, it is surprising how well it performs for an image-intensive view. Once each pile has loaded, I can scroll through my whole library without it needing to refresh album covers like iTunes does. I think it would be perfect if you could expand a pile to view the individual albums like you said in the GS topic. Would it be possible to have the other piles move and make space for one to expand into? Or perhaps they could expand into a layer above the others and look sort of like the stacks feature in OSX, like this: http://images.apple.com/macosx/features/images/desktop_gallery04_20071016.jpg
As for little suggestions, it would be nice if you could start typing the artist's name and it would go to that pile, like how normal filters in Songbird navigate to a name as you type it. Also, even when the album art pane is selected, using the arrow keys only moves the selection around in the playlist pane. It would be easier to navigate the artists with the keyboard if you could use the arrow keys to move between them, hit enter to expand the stacks, and then hit enter on an album to play it. Maybe hitting tab could switch to the playlist pane if you wanted to select a specific song.
Still, this is the already my favorite media view for Songbird. Thank you for developing it.
Thanks a lot for all your comments, they're pretty helpful.
tdmurphy: I want to be able to expand them, but I'm going to hold off on that until the rest of the extension is a little more solid.
Awesome! I can't wait til it does the spreading-out like in the GS thread!
Also, in the shorter-term, it would look nicer if the play buttons appeared on mouseover and on the currently selected stack, instead of being there for all of them all the time.
One other small thing... if you select an artist, then move to a different media view, this selection remains, i.e. only that artist is displayed. This is a problem when switching to views without media panes (if it were possible to always have filter panes, I would, but such is the state of songbird at the moment) because it means it's then impossible to see anything else without switching media views again. This may be the intended behaviour, but I think a better compromise would be to simply drop the selection when the media view is changed, or if possible, only when it's changed to a non-filterable view (such as Album List or list view)
Woooh! I am stunned by the performance! Thanks a lot, John! :-)
This looks really promising, I like how it shows both a playlist and the albums. Could use a catchier name, but that's just my opinion. Album Stack, or something along those lines, because Grid View doesn't really tell me what it does, just what it is. If that makes sense.
You may want to test it in a bunch of feathers. I'm trying it in Aero Bird Pro pre-release and it has some odd background effects. I'm not sure if that's the add-on, or the feather.
I don't see many bugs with it, just unimplemented possibilities. I agree that there should be left/right keyboard control to select albums (I'm on a laptop, so my mouse isn't my best friend). The expandability would be great, but I understand it'll be implemented later (I'm hoping for the messy spread out look, and not the neat side-by-side look).
Maybe stick an alphabet up top so you can quickly find artists instead of scrolling. (Sort of like Divided Tag Cloud.)
And lastly, is there a way to implement an option menu that would let a user set grid, image, and overflow size? I know my dad would like this view, but because his eyes aren't the best, I think he'd prefer a 3x3 of large albums on the screen. And maybe a horizontal scroll. I'd love if mine were a 5x2 with a horizontal scroll. That way I could still have mash tape up and use the maximum amount of screen real estate.
it works excellent!
GrahamS: your 2 issues are fixed for the next version
atreiu: Thank you
NK4551: I'm horrible with names. When I first created it I named it ArtistView, but I figured I should rename it because I wanted to eventually branch it out beyond artists. Album Stack is nice, but I'm not really positive the Album view which I eventually plan to include will have stacks. As for the features... that's probably a good idea, I'll also try and make it more friendly for feather makers when I get everything more hammered out. As far as the unimplemented possibilities, I consider some of those bugs. I also like that alphabet idea, I have a similar idea like that myself now. Options are always nice, but I'll hopefully add them later. Thanks for mentioning the idea though, it helps.
Looks good. I'll try to have a play with it soon.
Name idea: Stax
Hi
Please make it compatible with 1.2.0 :)
Thanks
Looks great, the performance is good too.
Too bad that it can only sort/stack by "Artist" at the moment, "Album Artist" makes more sense to me. I have a ton of DJ mixes, where each track has a different artist but the album artists is the same for all.
This addon looks very promising. I'm curious about seeing the development of this extension! Great!
I like the potential of this addon, good idea and nice of you john to make the magic.
It would be nice if we could use a bigger tag like Mood or GENRE.
By now, i have a lot of different artist and it's very complicated to navigate trough them all, this add-on is the semi-solution for me...
For the genre pile, I suggest use the (*)Photo add-on component that fetches the artist image, it would be nice to have a artist pile too...
maybe i'll add some mockups.
Found a little UI Bug: The little play-button-image 
doesn't show up 
, if you don't have the "Album View"-Addon installed. DOM-Inspector tells me, that you use the image right out of that albumview: src="chrome://albumview/skin/playing.png".
ha, nice one. Thanks atreiu
@JohnM: Hey man this add-on is huge, and to show the play button only when hovered is great! :) Thanks! :P
It's a great add-on, and impressively fast!
One thing, it doesn't seem to refresh automatically when typing a research (it even prevents to do a researche sometimes). Still, impressive for a 0.2 release!
I'm on Mac OS 10.5.7 with 1.2b1 :-)
This is just awesome! BUT, I don't like those black borders when selected album pile. Tried to find it in xul and css files but there wasn't no border 2px black or anything like it. So JohnM, where I can remove those ugly borders? Other than that, this is my personal favourite for now.
Rolle: I'm still playing with the UI design. The borders aren't currently in the CSS because they need to be drawn with the html canvas element. I'll try link em up with css sometime so you/skins can hide/change them. I might just not include them at all.
JohnM: OK, great! I'm looking forward to test new version.
i have an idea. instead of a stack like it currently is how about an artist image generated from last.fm or have a directory of images (that we save ourselves) kind of like itunes .plist files for genre images. i wouldn't mind doing some manual work to get this, if it's possible i think artist images would be really awesome :)
dtay: once I get the current view to work better and add some more features to it I plan on extending it to work with different sorts, like genre. Showing pictures of the artists is one possibility for later on down the road.
Rolle: I wasn't fully thinking earlier. Although you can't change the color or width of the border right now, which I do hope to add in, you can hide it completely if you want to remove the "artist[selected] .borderCanvas" selector from the view.css file.
JohnM: Thank you! I just put artist[selected] .borderCanvas { display:none !important; } and it works :) I have one more suggestion: filter pane would be nice (like in MediaFlow, possibility to show or hide filterpane just below media view). Thanks again.
Manusnake might have already said this same thing, not sure: it seems like the search textbox doesn't work in this view. When I enter something into it, it doesn't filter what's visible in the view. And if there was already something in it, changing it doesn't change what's visible in the view.
Otherwise I'm really psyched about this view and looking forward to its development!
-myk
I'm about to work on getting search to work. I left it out in the beginning so I could focus on the more important aspects. Thanks.
I found something strange when one stack of albums is done playing. Say it stopped at song #20, and I start playing another stack. The new pile starts playing at song #21, instead of starting at the top. Not a big issue, but still strange :-).
I'm still hoping for proper Album Artist support...
8000+ downloads in a month... dammmmmmmmn.
Odd suggestion/annoyance: Could you get icons for your two awesome media views!? The gray puzzle pieces make me sad...
boosh: I'm not an artist. Do you have some good looking icons for me?
*points at atreiu*
It works fine but a little slow.
it would be possible to improve the speed?
In the first 1 minute, I can see that the first 3 or 4 letters!
apparently i was bored...
maybe add a little atreiu gloss to it :-P
Seb: Are you referring to just the latest version being slow or were the previous versions just as slow to you? How big is your library?
Boosh: Thanks! I like them.
@JohnM : 30.000 songs and the last version...
Seb: If you can try the previous version I would be interested to see if you find that slow too. Once Songbird adopts the same underlying codebase as Firefox 3.5 I think I'll be able to make it faster. I think the main slowness is a combination of sorting the list when the view is opened and just the huge number of songs you have. Hopefully the addition of the alphabet isn't whats slowing this down, but its possible. I only have around 4000 so its hard to test.
This is just pretty darn good. Alphabet is priceless!
Grid is Amazing, but I noticed that when there are no albums in all songs of a specific artist in your library, the artist is not shown on Gird.
Do you have any plans to change that?
Oh and thanx JohnM your making an awesome job :)
Thanks deOmega.
lady_teacher, I didn't think about that, thanks. I'll try and add that in and just give it the default album image for now. Maybe sometime it will show a picture of the artist... but not anytime real soon.
There is a serious glitch with this plugin. It's hard to notice unless you have only one album in your library, so I suspect it's nt been reported yet.
I have 1 album in my library. When I install this, I cannot resize my Songbird window (Vista 64-bit). It is set to fit the height of 1 album, and it will not allow me to resize it vertically. I can resize horizontally, however. I uninstalled Songbird using Revo Uninstaller and then cleared out any remaining registration entries or files related to Songbird manually, and reinstalled Songbird 4 times trying to figure out how this problem happened--and your addon is the lucky winner. Uninstalling the Addon does not fix the locked vertical position. I'm going to have to reinstall Songbird again, but at least I won't make this mistake again. I like the addon and I see that it has potential, but if any one else installs this and doesn't know how to manually uninstall all components of Songbird (since the uninstaller doesn't take care of this), then they will be stuck with a non-working copy of Songbird. You need to get this fixed!
Thanks,
AMDphreak
P.S. by resize, I mean using the corners or edges of the window form of Songbird. The "maximize" button and minimize button still work properly.
AMDphreak, I don't have that problem and honestly, it doesn't seem to make much sense that this extension would do that.
Any news on the next release?
Awesome add-on. Fastest way to browse my music. It would be very useful if you include "Album Artist" sorting in the next release. Perhaps an option you can turn on as this would not be ideal for everyone.
I was looking forward to using this, but the album art is very, very pixelated (as in a squeeze-too-many-pixels-into-a-small-space way) and I simply can't use it. It's a shame, too.
Nice add on but a major problem for me is that it does not pick up album art using all the Songbird album art fetchers and settings and only looks for art in the album tracks meta data.
I'd be grateful, if you could consider using the art fetchers to get album art from files (where I store all mine!).
It would nice to see some artist art, too.
I love the alphabet with highlight!
Yo, really like this extension. It strikes a balance between good looks and usability, so kudoz. I have two ideas.
1-Currently I am using this extension set to display Album Artist instead of Track Artist. I am getting incorrectly sorted duplicates in the list at the moment. Example:
I have the soundtrack for Terminator: Salvation. Every track is tagged with the album artist Danny Elfman. However, one of the tracks is by Alice In Chains, so the Track Artist is "Alice In Chains". This results in two "Danny Elfman" items in my grid, one sorted into the A's where "Alice In Chains" would go (but its still labeled Danny Elfman), and one in the correct position. I haven't had a look at your code yet but I figure this is just a matter of looking for and combining duplicates when the "Album Artist" mode is turned on. Just a heads up.
2-You should make the grid/album art display size user-configurable. Like others have said, I feel like the default is a bit on the small side.
Hi John, I would want to translate this module to the Russian language. Please tell me your email, simply reply to fatcoow@gmail.com">my mail. Thanks, Marcis Gasuns.
Getting error when switch to grid view. Sometimes it does work well
Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [sbIMediaListView.clone]" nsresult: "0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://gridview/content/gridview.js :: MF_initiateElement :: line 31" data: no]Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [sbIMediaListView.clone]" nsresult: "0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://gridview/content/gridview.js :: MF_initiateElement :: line 31" data: no]
jigarshah, does this happen on any specific media list? Does it happen on the library? or when you view other playlists?
How can I set this extension to use album artist instead of artist or is this not possible?
ihavnoclue, open the main preferences window and look for the grid view tab.
A really nice add-on. Almost everything I need (want)... Almost, so here are two ideas (since I am only a user, I would not manage to develop it by myself).
1. A full screen version of GridView, or at least the possibility to hide the "list view" would be nice (one thing I like in WMP 11, i.e. if I open my library I only see stacks by artist (apart from the toolbar)).
2. "Add a new layer": It would be very nice if one could click the stack in GridView, but instead of playing the first track an album view would show up (also as a grid). That is, if one clicks one can see all albums from that artist as a "new" grid (like in Album List by moshy without the titles).
If this is possible, I definitely would set up a pure audio-pc using only a touchscreen to navigate in Songbird.
Anyway a great tool by now...
Pils, you can now hide the list view if you drag it down. I'll look more into a full screen option.
I also plan on working on that new layer idea soon.
Is there a way to show all of the album covers instead of having them stacked.
Also, I thought if I click on the stack I would see all of the albums under that artist but that didnt work either.
rhaur, you can't show them like that yet, but that will be coming.
Also, the second comment is also coming. When you click on them now they show in the list view below.
I have a silly question. How do you get the new media view icon for GridView to show up? I uninstalled and re-installed GridView, and I don't see the new icon.
TIA,
Frank
oh I should have been more clear, that only shows with recent nightly builds of songbird. It should then show next to the icons for list and filter view above the media view
Bice add-on... but:
I have a large music collection and it would be awesome to navugate first trough genres (maybe showing artist piles: last.fm API) and the see the cover pile.
Another ideas is to have some kind of tags on he top instead of letters, this way we could filter the view.
Keep the good work.
based on 24 ratings
topdownjimmy
This is very nice, thanks. A few thoughts at first glance: