music album browser improvements

[phil]

Two improvements I'd love to see for the music album browser:

1) performance:
- optionally pre-load all/certain amount of album art
- increase the cache size or keep data entirely in memory

2) usability:
- the music browser should allow scrolling by line (and not only by page)

Please forgive me if these issues are already solved, at least I couldn't find a way to get around them

Phil

[stevenhanna6]

its already set to preload coverart...if you move to quickly through your collection then there is no chance to preload though.

2) usability:
- the music browser should allow scrolling by line (and not only by page)

you got me there...I dont know what you mean....there are several scroll options for a category if you edit it through the skin editor. Maybe describe the behaviour and I'll tell you if its done.

[phil]

its already set to preload coverart...if you move to quickly through your collection then there is no chance to preload though.

That's good, is there a way to adjust the preloading parameters (e.g. how many albums to preload)?

What about caching? IMHO the music browser could be much snappier and the easiest way to improve its performance by factors is caching all those covers. Even a cache of 1000 images would be no problem: at 30kb each it would require merely 30 MB.

2) usability:
- the music browser should allow scrolling by line (and not only by page)

you got me there...I dont know what you mean....there are several scroll options for a category if you edit it through the skin editor. Maybe describe the behaviour and I'll tell you if its done.

I would like to scroll one column at a time, e.g.with 3 cols and 2 rows it would be:

123
456

When the cursor is at position 3 or 6 and is moved right, the display should get:

237
568

(dont take the numbers as numbers in a sequence, I just wanted to illustrate where each table cell is expected to be after scrolling). The cursor should remain in the same cell, which is now number 8 (or 7 resp.)

The same with left, up and down.


PHIL

BTW: the documentation link on http://www.xlobby.com is broken, could someone point me to a mirror?

[jowaldo]

I'm trying to get a copy of that documentation so I can put it up on the xlobby site instead of where its linked to, cuz that site has been down for a while now.