[ian]

One of the many annoyances of many of the jukebox (harddrive) mp3 players out on the market is their user interface. Usually it is far from ideal for my purposes. The purpose of this thread is to try to identify what would make the perfect user interface for you. With the exposure of these forums, manufacturers are listening!

When selecting between 20+ gigs of content, this is an important thing to me. I don't want to go through 10+ button presses to find and choose the proper content. My big problem is the complexity of most menu systems. I would like the majority of the player's functionality hidden. My dream would be:
A simple menu button to load up a list of albums, sorted by artist. So my player UI would now look like:
Bruce Springsteen
-Born in the USA
-Born to Run
-Greetins from Asbury Park
Led Zeppelin
-Houses of the Holy
-How The West Was Won
etc
Simply use a scroll wheel, jog dial, or even just up and down buttons to choose an album, hit an 'enter' button, and thats it.
The idea is that this is the way I use my player 99% of the time - just selecting music. Once it's setup, I have no desire to have to wade through menus of options I have already set up....things like EQ, display, etc.
For more complex menu functions like playlists, equalizer, configuration, etc I'd like a more advanced menu to be trigged by holding down the menu button.

What are your thoughts?
Do you like having all of these options at your fingertips?
Do you like a more graphical UI?
Is a very simple design (like I describe above) the way to go?
What about letting the user choose their UI? Or even design their own?

 

[blessingx]

Sounds an awful lot like the iPod GUI.

 

[williamgoody]

I don't think so, you can't get a listing like that with the Ipod. Probably closer to a NJB3 or a Zen.

 

[blessingx]

You're right Williamgoody, I read the order wrong. My bad.

Speaking of though, if we're talking about several gigs, how is this menu suggestion better than the more simple iPod-like...

Artist->Album->Song
or Album->Song
or Song?

With a iPod scroll-wheel or a Zen-like scroller device running through one submenu (in worst case senerio) instead of a list which could be several times longer (at least twice as long if one album per artist [best case] if title is on different line than artist) seems like the quicker/visually simpler route.

 

[MaxHeifetz]

I just would want a Windows Explorer file type of lookup. You know, KISS.

 

[ian]

Yes, it might be a long list, but I'd like the chance to peruse th albums I have available on the player without having to go through menus. With a decent scroll wheel, jog dial, or pressure sensitive button the scrolling could be made very quick. I guess I'm saying I prefer one list instead of two (artist, then album).

 

[williamgoody]

ian, the only MP3 player jukebox Iknow of that gives you that type of interface and listic as you desribe it would be this one:

http://www.hotmp3gear.com/neojukebox.htm

 

[e-r0ck]

i have my Archos set up that way. it just uses file structure as the file transfer program is simply Windows Explorer. so i have mine organized:

Genre -> Artist - > Album -> (CD # if applies)

of course you can structure it however you want. it uses up and down buttons though, but holding them scrolls faster.

 

[GSTom1]

Ian, you have just described the GUI of the Creative Nomad Zen and other Creative Nomad MP3 players.

You scoll through a list of artists.

Once you select an artist, a list of their albums appear in alphabetical order. (You also have the option to change it to list all their songs instead).

Scroll until you see the album you want to play.

Hit the scroll wheel and select play now (or simply just hit the play button).

Voila, that's it. The album will begin to play.

If you have the unit set to normal play, then the album starts at track one and works its way through the entire album in order. If you have it set to shuffle, then it will randomly play any song off the album, one at a time until it is finished.

You can also simply add other albums/songs to the playlist while the current album/song is playing.

 

[Dweebgal]

i can do pretty much that with my ipod too