Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Sound and vision
These days I'm generating far more data on Flickr and on Last.fm than I am here. Does that say something about a change in balance between the visual, sound, and the written word, in my current interests?
Probably. I recently acquired a Squeezebox 3, and that's definitely had an impact on how much I'm listening to music, what I'm listening to.
I hope to blog something more extensive about it here shortly, but in summary, it changes everything, but the interface to large music collections really needs addressing.
If you have 1,000+ albums, numerous loose tracks, and so on, seeing a collection through 'browse album' (one at a time) is laborious to say the least. There's a loss of context going on. It's easy enough to flip through a bunch of physical objects - CDs, vinyl - with hyper-rapid recognition. Having to *read* text takes more time. And there's a loss of context: items that 'sit next to' one another, for example. Tagging with 'genre' and so on is all well and fine, but requires somewhat more application than messing around with a pile of physical objects. And genres are of course all or nothing, whereas physical objects can have transitions, gradients, gradual movements from one into another.
The Squeezebox search function is weird: it doesn't seem to work on 'initial letter'. So an artist search on 'K' will not throw up Kasabian or Kate Bush among the first items, but rather a load of items with 'k' in the artist tag text.
So the Squeezebox is a great leap forward but there's a long way to go.
Hope to come back to this.
1:41 PM|
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