[Goodies-dev] Audio thumbnailer

Erlend Davidson E.R.M.Davidson at sms.ed.ac.uk
Tue Jul 29 11:11:54 CEST 2008


On 28 Jul 2008, at 17:45, Dirk Vanden Boer wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 12:43 PM, Erlend Davidson
> <E.R.M.Davidson at sms.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Dirk Vanden Boer wrote:
>>>
>>> which let's you choose between different presets. The cdcase will be
>>> one of them. I already tried overlaying a music note, but the result
>>> wasn't really satisfactory, maybe I made the note too small but I
>>> didn't immediately recognize the files as audio files.
>>>
>>> Other ideas are always welcome.
>>>
>>
>> There should probably be the option to use an icon from the user's  
>> theme -
>> as that will probably be the most recognisable thing around (they -
>> presumably - chose it, after all).
>
> Do you know of a way to get the current icon theme withouth dragging
> in any gui toolkit dependencies?

Hmm, it would probably be safest in this case to allow the file- 
manager (or Thunar-thumbnailers) which already has the icon-theme  
libraries nearby to do it.

Also I think to make the musical note work you'll have to make the  
note larger than the cover art (so the note is the primary part, and  
the album cover like a category). In that sense the album art is not  
readable - but that's okay, the research into the effects of  
thumbnails on users showed that even small unreadable icons helped  
users as long as they used the files fairly often.

So I would recommend two options:
--album: the album icon you've already shown us,
--audio-file: take the Tango icon theme's music note and shrink it  
slightly, then put the cover art in the background top-left corner  
(for example).  Check the license though - Tango is Creative Commons  
Attribution-Share Alike.



More information about the Goodies-dev mailing list