HI James,
Q1: Albumart is only shown in Max whenever you start to play a certain song. The way I often recognize albums is by means of their album art. Say I'd have a folder with all Artist X albums, I choose to play one of those by looking at their AlbumArt and title. Would it be possible to show Album art when clicking an Album, instead of having to click a song in an album and start playing it?
Currently the Bryston MAX will display the album art of the currently playing song in the lower left corner and also contains the Current By Album view which will display each album (with cover art) in your current playlist. The next major revision of the Max will include the ability to view your entire music library by cover art. We hope to have this ready by the end of the year.
Q2: when refreshing the browser the Max interface gets a full reload, which is rather clumsy if you are browsing your HDD, and are somewhere deep in the nested folders of styles and artists. You have to go down the folder-structure again completely after the refresh (which is needed after loading new music in the HDD). A refresh, and stay in the current folder would be so much nicer.
The next major revision of the Bryston MAX will fix this issue and file/folder navigation should much more responsive. We have already incorporated this technique into the final release of Mini 2. This version of the Mini 2 will be available in our next release later this month.
Q3:
a- loading Home on the BDP1 gives Radio1 both in the left and right pane. In the right pane there's an option to delete. I haven't tried this yet, because I am not sure what happens, does it delete it from the player, or from the playlist? This will remove the file that contains a list of the songs. In the case of Radio1, the file will simply to downloaded again at the next restart.
b- When I click on Radio1 in the left pane, all stations are added to a playlist. This is very inconsistent to the other operations needed to select a track and add it to the playlist. I find myself adding all stations all the time and having a fuzz about deleting them. Would it be possible to select stations the same way as the hdd-tracks? Browsing these stations is very confusing, cause if I click Radio1 on the let again to see what I had been doing, I add them again to the playlist.....seems awkward .
The idea of playlists is to allow the user to add multiple songs quickly to the "current" playlist. You can create your own playlists by simply adding some of your favourite songs to the "current" playlist. Then use the "save playlist" feature, once the playlist is saved you can reload those songs into the "current" playlist without going through your drives looking for them.
It might be most consistent if Radio1 is not shown in the Right Pane at all (because of the confusing necessary user interaction), but only under playlist after having selected a station to play?
Implementing the Internet Streaming as a playlist was the quickest way of implementing the feature to obtain feedback from our customer regarding the quality of the audio. We wanted to get this feedback before investing in the time it will take to create a proper interface for making use of Internet Radio. Currently we are just waiting to hear back regarding API keys before implementing anything further.
