Add an "All Artists" and "All Albums" item to the artists and albums pane

[Geoffrey Anderson]

The interface seems pretty complete, but a common paradigm most users see today is their whole music library (song-wise) available upon opening the application. Other programs like itunes and rhythmbox achieve this by having an "All Artists" and "All albums" item under the artists and album panes, respectively.

Maybe as you're pulling all the information from the ampache server, for each album by an artist, add an additional one at the top that says "All Albums" that will hold a reference to every song by that specific artist.

Likewise, before pulling all the artists, add an "All Artists" item that contains every sub-album by an artist.

See the attached screenshot for a better explanation!

[Dave Eddy (daveeddydotcom)]

I am definitely a big fan of these ideas, however I have thought about how to implement them, and all of them would require massive queries to the Ampache API, which would cause massive loading time for Viridian. (Assuming the user hasn't been able to cache any of the album/song info yet)

Right now, every artist has an implicit "All Albums" section, that will pull every song from every album by the artist, but if i test this on an artists that has ~6 or more albums, you can watch the songs slowly load in. Loading every album by every artist, or every song by every album would take a crazy amount of time (however it would be non blocking so it wouldn't be terrible). The only way this would happen efficiently is if the user had pre-cached their entire library, which can take up to 10 to 20 minutes depending on the size of the library and the connection speed to it.

I just don't know if this would be the best feature, because of the time it would take to pull all of the information.

[Dave Eddy (daveeddydotcom)]

All artists will pull all albums now and it should be reliable... if you pull the newest commit make sure to go to File -> Clear Local Cache to see this in action..