I recently transferred my entire phone music library to my new e/OS Teracube 2e. There are around four thousand tracks. This makes scrolling manually through the library a bit… cumbersome. It would be made infinitely easier by the addition of a big, obvious grab-and-drag button on the scroll bar — especially if letters are used as headers for navigation. (I have attached a screenshot of a similar feature in Spotify, or there’s another similar feature in Google Docs. Ideally, the ability to jump between headers like in Google Docs would be the most useful.)
Also, I suspect I should separate this out into its own topic, but a big clickable “Play” button at the top of the playlist/album windows would make things much more intuitive. “Shuffle” button optional but very welcome.
Thanks, but I’m not looking for an alternative; I want to try and help improve the default options.
That said, though — VLC is FOSS, right? Maybe the folks on the tech side could use it as a basis for implementing this feature? (Just an idea, I don’t know anything about programming)
Yes, but you probably don’t have 4000 files in a single directory. Typically you have a well ordered tree of directories, at last two levels deep (interpret and album). And also the library shown in a player is not linear (all files in a single list) but organized in a tree, mostly based on meta data.
So, in the most cases “scrolling” is not the problem because scrolling is done based on a small subset of your files.
It gets a problem if you don’t have any order in your files and meta data, so your player doesn’t know how to make proper subsets. Players based strictly on meta data (which are just crap in many cases) or playlists are mostly not very helpful.
I use simple Foldplay on a more than 44GB library, still growing.
Another one for handling big libraries is foobar2000.
I’m afraid I actually have no idea what you’re talking about, but I also don’t think it matters. My point is that, based on the way I use the default music app, I would appreciate a more efficient way to scroll through long lists of songs, artists, and albums. That’s all. I’m glad you don’t encounter this issue, but I do, so I suggested a solution that would suit my needs.
Yes, I did understand that. And that’s your right.
But the structure of your files and folders on disk plays a role here to avoid long lists. That’s in your own responsibility. And the quality of the meta data in your files is also important to guarantee order in lists, the stock player is based on them. When you don’t understand what this means than this is a significant part of your problem.
I’m sorry, I feel like we’re talking across each other here, because I have no idea where you’ve gotten the idea that my metadata is the problem. The metadata in my music library is impeccable. That doesn’t make it any easier to scroll all the way to the bottom of a list hundreds of items long every time I want to listen to an album that starts with the letter Y. There needs to be a quicker and easier way to scroll the lists, regardless of whether someone is using the metadata efficiently or not, because you can’t micromanage your way out of needing an effective scroll bar.
Yes, this is the case in apps which are really not good. An app which has a button named “Albums” which shows me all 347 albums I have is just crap.
A tree is a well known principle to divide big amounts of data into manageable pieces. When you have a well designed tree structure and an app which is able to handle this tree you will never have to long lists because you see always only a subset. A so called folder based player allows you to order your files exactly by the criteria you need, so you can decide which order you will use and how many subfolders and files are there.
I saw the stock player is not good in that. That’s indeed the reason why I never used it for anything, this thing can’t handle my library in any aspect. Nevertheless it’s legitimate to demand improvements. But I’m rather doubtful if this will ever happen.
It sounds like we’ve come to an agreement, then, that your requirements and mine are vastly different. I’m glad for your sake that there are options available that suit your needs! As for me, I’m going to keep pushing for what I need
Sorry, but with your mentioned structure, Dolphin, or any other file manager on a PC become crap?? Well I use PAGE UP/DOWN, TOP/END on the keyboard then – keys missing on most mobile standard keyboards, so apps implementing the newer scroll side bars have filled a need, I can very much appreciate.
Files and file managers are something different, they must have a much more general approach, especially because of many different file types in a directory and different actions on them. That’s why file managers have colors and filters and search functions and group operations. And also scrollbars - I do not at all fight against scrollbars, I never said this. But it’s a difference if a scrollbar has 50 or 350 items especially when you have to scroll down there ten times a day.
Here we talk about some music files on a mobile phone where the space on the screen is always limited. The user must still be able to select some of them he wants to listen. This is indeed a rather simple thing. And it should also be simple to do that, also while walking on the street, also under bad light conditions and so on. A long list is the most simple tool for that - but also a primitive one. The effort to handle this list increases linear with the number of entries. This is exactly the reason why the very most recent file systems are hierarchical.
I understand you’re seeking a more capable scroll solution and better placement of UI elements you describe. Guess you need to go app shopping. Shuttle2 has scroll behaviour similar to Spotifys. But there’s no f-droid release yet.
