One major problem is having enough screen space to display the thumbnails. The left side of the screen is generally used by the tree, and other areas are typically used to display the "Now Playing" pane and the "Album Art" pane. The area that's left can be smaller than one would like.
If the Album Art pane is positioned under the tree, then the Now Playing pane can be easily switched off by clicking the "Playlist" button on the player. This quickly provides a large area to view the thumbnails, however, this doesn't work if the Album Art pane is positioned elsewhere.
A very common arrangement is to have the Album art pane in the lower-right corner, with the Now Playing pane either to the left or above it. In this case, it's difficult to turn off both panes.
I hope the developers will really give this some thought. If I could just click a single button to turn off both panes, it would be a huge improvement. Or maybe there is a spot on the divider in 4.0 that you can click to hide both panels?
Here are a few other items I wish could be implemented to improve the Album Art View feature:
- I would like to be able to sort without grouping. For example, if I choose to sort by Album or Artist, MediaMonkey groups albums under each letter from A to Z. I would like to see a button on the toolbar that would allow me to turn the grouping off or on.
- When I click on a different sort header, the view should start out in ascending order, not decending order like it does now.
- It would be great if the underlines on artist and album names could be done away with. I know that the names are underlined to indicate that they are links, but I hate the way it looks. As far as I'm concerned, these don't need to be links anyway. How many people even click on them, especially when it's not intuitive what the action will be if you do so?
- I really don't care for the mirror effect. At least you can turn it off, but I would much prefer to have a nice small shadow around each thumbnail.
- Instead of a list of tracks in the album tooltip, I would prefer to see the date, genre, total length, comment (if there is one), and last played date (based on the first track). I suspect this will be changing in 4.0 anyway to accommodate the new types.
