[Goodies-dev] Audio thumbnailer

[Erlend Davidson]

On 28 Jul 2008, at 17:58, Jannis Pohlmann wrote:

> Am Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:45:52 +0200
> schrieb "Dirk Vanden Boer" <dirk.vdb at gmail.com>:
>
>> 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?
>>
>>> Attached is another idea... the oscilloscope waveform of the audio
>>> track. This would clearly indicate that this is a sound file, and
>>> not a collection of music files.   It's difficult though!
>>
>> I thiunk the problem of this approach will be performance and the  
>> fact
>> that it doesn't give a visual relation to the specific audio file.
>> Users won't recognize an audio file by looking at the waveform, so
>> showing any random waveform would give the same result. The id3  
>> images
>> usually give some clue what the audio file will contain.
>
> That's true. Waveforms are useless here.
Sorry, I wasn't meaning we should use the waveform instead of the  
album cover... I mean use the waveform as the audio icon, and have  
the album cover in the corner.