MPoD – Your feedback is needed
Based on some of the comments I received on MPoD I’m looking at ways to improve the user interface. One thing I’ve been thinking about is to use gestures for some of the actions, e.g. swipe left => previous song, swipe right => next song, swipe up => increase volume, swipe down => decrease volume.
This could be combined with a 2nd now playing screen that shows the album cover art. Then this screen would not have buttons, instead the swipes would do the work.
Do you think this would be a useful addition? Or do you have a better idea? Then please post your comments and I’ll see what can be done.
@Mrik: thanks for the suggestions, I’ll take those into consideration. I thought the 2nd request wasn’t possible, but just found that the standard interface to MPD does support this so technically it can be done.
Hi, very cool app right here !! I really enjoy using it, but there are two functions you should put on it guys :
1) We should be able to drop songs from the main playlist
2) We should be able to choose the audio output. I mean many audio outputs can be set up using the file /etc/mpd.conf, the best thing would be to choose the one(s) we want using mpod, like with ario on Ubuntu (sorry for my bad english, I’m french ^^).
Anyway this app is a very good one !
Yet another function that just came across my mind: sleep timer. I often play some audio book / podcast before going to sleep. it would be cool that MPoD can Stop/Pause mpd after a preset period of time.
oh.. another thing is … it would be better if we can have the option to choose server profiles — like save multiple server ip/port/password with names. I currently use this both in office and at home and manually entering the ip again and again is a bit of a pain.
thanks
About the album art, it seems gmpc can get the album art? I’m not sure if that means MPoD can also do it? I mean, access the embedded album art like iTunes does. I wouldn’t suggest the amazon way. It’s troublesome and might not get the right CD cover. plus many album art on amazon are of crappy quality.
Hey, cool app! one of the few “useful” apps I got on iPhone. For me, it is the iTunes remote counterpart on linux. Thus I guess you might wanna refer to what the iTunes Remote app is doing.
The album art is most welcome. A coverflow (as suggested by some comments) might be too expensive.
Gesture based control will be cool! But most important is to make it bug-free. So far MPoD seems pretty robust for me.
One random suggestion is that you might use the album art as background for the song list and make the song list fade out if the screen is not touched.
Also, it would be very useful to allow “replace” and “add” to the now playing list at the same time. maybe one tap is add, press and hold is replace?
A last suggestion is to take care of unicode artists/albums. For now, my chinese albums are not sorted correctly and are distributed into A~Z, which makes it impossible to browse. Maybe you can do what apple does -> group all of them into # instead of A-Z.
Anyway… very cool app. keep it up!
Don’t be put down by the nuts that gave 1 * reviews. This app is far better than the almost 5-star tic-tac-toe game.
Cheers,
Pan
MPoD doesn’t have access to the song’s folder (that folder is on the server, MPoD only communicates using the mpd protocol). That leaves the amazon route, which is unfortunately more complicated then I would like it to be
. But I have some samples available so it is doable.
Cover flow will never be there, because that’s way to complicated for me to build. The tilting could be a possibility, or do it the ipod way, flipping over part of the now playing screen.
The album art issue can be tackled one of two ways. Grabbing the art off the net from say Amazon or looking for art in the song’s folder “usually folder.jpg”. Which implementation are you planning on? Having multiple now playing screens might be an over-complication. I think you should implement a cover flow option on the “Albums” screen for when your selecting music. On the “Now Playing screen it would be cool if the album art shows when you tilt the ipod on it’s side. Just some ideas…