Screen shot of an album listing.
take note: the side-bar will follow you scrolling!
Bits of screens showing the different slide down options on the top of the screen.
There are four ``drop-downs'' along the top of the window, currently they are labelled ``Category'', ``Random'', ``Search'' and ``Edit''. You can click on any one of them and an area should slide down to reveal actions you can take. I spent a lot of time getting that sliding motion so enjoy the geek-factor to its fullest.
This allows you to quickly pick a category (or ``genre'') to view with the purpose of listening to it. You'll see later how to stream them or put them into the playlist. Once you've created custom categories, you'll see them listed in the bottom surrounded by quotes.
This allows you to ``Add'' to the playlist or ``Make a new list'' where you specify a number of tracks to pick randomly from a category or custom category. First, you'd specify if you'd like to ``Add'' to the current list, meaning whatever is currently in the playlist stays there, and the tracks will be added to it. Otherwise you can wipe out whatever is in there and create a new list of the random selections. The category selection here is the same as under the category section.
This enables full text searching on Artist name, Album name, or Song title. Just pick what you'd like to search on, then type what you're searching for in the text box, and submit it. It uses a full pattern matching system so the less you type the more you'll get back. And typing nothing at all returns everything which currently is the only way to view everything in your collection. This search is not case sensitive so ``bach'' will match ``Johann Bach''. ``Ann'' will match ``Johann Bach'' as well as ``Anne Murray''.
This is to edit your custom categories. Just choose a custom category (If you haven't created any, nothing will be in the drop down). This will show all of the albums in custom list and allow you to remove the unwanted albums. Take note, you can't play anything from this screen, just edit.
Also at the top is a list of what's currently playing, the Artist and the Song title, and the Album it's from. It will try to deduce if the player is stopped, paused or playing and the current position in the track.
The Side bar, contains the really good stuff. At all times the controls for the player on the server will be there (even if you aren't allowed to control it).
The first thing is the current volume in a percent range from 0 to 100. The picture below it will display it rounded to the nearest multiple of 10. You can click anywhere on that image to set the volume. The smaller end of the slope represents quieter and the bigger end represents louder. So by clicking on the very right, you'll set the volume around 100%, clicking on the very left, you'll set the volume down around 0%.
The next box is the player controls, these should be pretty self-explanatory and I won't talk much about them. But I couldn't find a way to poll xmms for the current random setting or repeat setting. So you'll have to guess.
The text links below the controls are the actions you can take. On the bottom of every page will be the ``Current Playlist'' option, which will show you the contents of the current playlist. You should always have this option even if you're already on the current playlist. Also, if you're coming from a host not allowed to control the player or to stream, this will be the only option. The other actions may or may not show up depending on what kind of page your viewing. A common action is ``Invert Selection'', which will take any checkboxes you have selected and invert them to not selected and vice versa for boxes not selected. The others should be self explanatory, such as ``Stream Selections'' will stream the selected tracks. etc etc.
There isn't too much to explain here. This is where you'll see the tracks in the current playlist, or the results of a search, or the results of selecting a category, or editting a custom category. But there are a few things I'd like to point out, In the ``Current Playlist'' you can click on a track to start playing that immediately. In other types of listings you can click on the album title to popup a box showing the tracks on the album.
NOTE: In some versions you'll see pencil by the album name, that is currently an unimplemented edit feature to edit the labels on the album and tracks.