Re: [Pykaraoke-discuss] DJ Player

[Jay R. A. <jr...@ba...>]

----- "John Schneiderman" <Jo...@me...> wrote:
> 	Actually that is certainly I would be interested in. I'm actually
> looking at designing it so that it's a single unified interface. It's quite
> cumbersome to have to switch between multiple windows when running shows. The
> players will be separate, but the search stuff will be integrated into it's
> own areain the player. 
> 
> 	What are you ideas for singer and rotation management? I have added a
> basic prompt for adding the singer. 

At last!

A coder, who wants to hear my design ideas!

(Those are hard to come by... :-)

I don't have a mockup on anything but paper, but I'll try to describe what I 
had in mind, and maybe I can find a UI mockup builder somewhere.


Sit down, get caffeine, and don't think I'm placing an order, here.  :-)

(and, on re-reading this, yes, I do actually eventually answer your question about
rotation management, at least in part...)

===

Divide your screen into 3 vertical stripes.

Karaoke goes on the left, music in the middle, 'sound buttons' on the right 
(look at Rivendell's Sound Panel for an idea of what I mean).

Each panel has a "player window" at the bottom; sort of a stripped down
XMMS window.  Each player shows the track name, total time, time remaining,
and a play/pause icon -- or the background color changes from pastel green
to pastel red, or something to show what's running.

Each player has a Play button, a Pause button, a Cue button (rewind to start) and
an Eject button.  Each button is separate so you don't have to worry about debouncing
a touchscreen (though I personally would probably go buy one of these:

http://www.piengineering.com/xkeys/xkstick.php

and put real labels in the keys; I like hard buttons.

For each player, you have the playlist (upcoming stuff) and some spill (ejected stuff, 
which you might need to "uneject" -- uneject can be a softkey; preferably a popup menu
that says "add as next", "add at end".

For the music player, that's pretty much it, except that you need a way to add things to 
the play list; just a popup search window with (preferably incremental) search -- and my 
favorite approach is "sort all the things that *start* with the string first, then all the
other things which *contain* it, like my BlackBerry does with its phonebook.

On the karaoke side, though, you need a bit more control.

I'm a "strict rotation" guy: the order you first sing in is the order you sing in all night;
new singers go at the end.  Some people modify it slightly for new singers; a common one is 
"after the first rotation, alternate old and new singers 1:1, 2:1 or 3:1".

But you need "new singer", and you need "add song for this singer"... and I'd really like 
to have it keep track of each singer's requested songs, and provide an easy popup way to let the 
KJ handle "Oh, could I sing that second song first?" requests, as well as snapshot add-ons.
(I come from a service employee background, and have little tolerance for uncooperative KJs. :-)

Generally, though, the Karaoke play list should look like

Drew - Put Your Head on my... (SC8463)
JR - Somewhere in the Night     (KH27)
Billy - We Just Disagree      (AH2008)

And provide a soft key to pop up the singer-list management stuff if necessary.

(I'm a ringer; I really care what label the track came off of, so I preserve that
all the way through the system.)

(I'm also looking at smart song-request terminals, probably using Fujitsu Point
1600 touchscreen pads and wifi, so external access to the singer management stuff
is important to me -- using a DBMS for that instead of flat files is a plus).

===

Still breathing?  :-)

As you may imagine, I'm seriously considering trying to take it out on the road and
make some money with it, so stability and ease of use in that environment is important 
to me as well.

Things like "use windows, not dialog boxes, for management functions, so you don't lock
up the realtime interface *ever*", and that sort of stuff...

Cheers,
-- jra

Cheers,
- jra

-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jr...@ba...
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com                     '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://photo.imageinc.us             +1 727 647 1274

             Those who cast the vote decide nothing.
             Those who count the vote decide everything.
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