I wanted to ask you guys how you are consuming your music at home in 2016. We live in a time when everything has moved away from recorded media into digital music libraries, but to be honest I still haven't quite found a nice way to interact with my music collection.
I'm mostly an album listener and I grew up collecting CDs, and I guess I still have that sentimentality that I at least like CDs as objects. Of course I have digitised everything into MP3 for portability and FLAC for quality, for as much as that is worth.
So I have a big folder full of folders of artists full of folders of albums, and some awkward folders of compilation albums that don't really know where to sit. Technology has moved on enough that I have basically everything on my phone for mobile listening with headphones, and a USB drive with plenty to listen to in the car, and that is all great. But browsing it all is a pain.
When I'm at home, sitting down to relax in the living room, making dinner in the kitchen, I want to throw some music on. I turn on my Kodi box in the living room and browse the list, scrolling a dozen albums per page, or in the kitchen I pull out my phone and hook up to the bluetooth speaker, and scroll through little menus to find something to listen to. And for all this choice and all this technology, I've not seen any interface that can come close to the speed and ease of use of standing in front of my bookcase and physically looking at my CD collection. Doing things on a screen feels so awkward.
So, what devices and what kind of interfaces are out there that I haven't seen or thought of? Or is it just me?
edit: The best thing I have seen that comes closest to the "shelf" experience is the old iPod "cover flow" with the fluid movement afforded by the scroll wheel - I loved my 3rd gen iPod Nano for that, but I've not seen anything that recreates it on Android.
I'm mostly an album listener and I grew up collecting CDs, and I guess I still have that sentimentality that I at least like CDs as objects. Of course I have digitised everything into MP3 for portability and FLAC for quality, for as much as that is worth.
So I have a big folder full of folders of artists full of folders of albums, and some awkward folders of compilation albums that don't really know where to sit. Technology has moved on enough that I have basically everything on my phone for mobile listening with headphones, and a USB drive with plenty to listen to in the car, and that is all great. But browsing it all is a pain.
When I'm at home, sitting down to relax in the living room, making dinner in the kitchen, I want to throw some music on. I turn on my Kodi box in the living room and browse the list, scrolling a dozen albums per page, or in the kitchen I pull out my phone and hook up to the bluetooth speaker, and scroll through little menus to find something to listen to. And for all this choice and all this technology, I've not seen any interface that can come close to the speed and ease of use of standing in front of my bookcase and physically looking at my CD collection. Doing things on a screen feels so awkward.
So, what devices and what kind of interfaces are out there that I haven't seen or thought of? Or is it just me?
edit: The best thing I have seen that comes closest to the "shelf" experience is the old iPod "cover flow" with the fluid movement afforded by the scroll wheel - I loved my 3rd gen iPod Nano for that, but I've not seen anything that recreates it on Android.
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