Teaching:TUW - UE InfoVis WS 2005/06 - Gruppe 09 - Design: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 23:26, 22 November 2005

Topic

MP3 Archive Visualization

Description of the Application Area and given Dataset

Application Area Analysis

The application area is the creation of a MP3 archive visualisation and its ID3 tags. This should contain information like the name of the artist, the year it came out, name of the album etc.
ID3 tags store information within the MP3 files. Originally ID3 tags held just the basic text-only information about a music file. They had a standard size and standarized information.
The most important and also special thing about this Project ist to create a useful visualisation, which can store lots of information in one place, without having to abstain from a user friendly interface.

Dataset Analysis

In the following Table, you can find the attributes which should be contained in a MP3 file. These attributes are 1-dimensional.
A MP3 file contains only attributes with data.

Attribute	Data type	Description
Track	Discreet	Track Name
Artist	Discreet	Artist name
Album	Discreet	Album name
Genre	Nominal	Type or category of music
Track #	Ordinal	The track's position on a CD
Disc #	Ordinal	The CD's position in relationship to other CDs in a series, such as a boxed set
Track count	Ordinal	Total number of tracks on the disc
Disc count	Ordinal	Total number of discs
Composer	Discreet	Composer of the track
Performer	Discreet	Performer of the Track
Year	Ordinal	The year the track was recorded
Size	Ordinal	The file size
Total time	Ordinal	The total time of the song
Date added	Ordinal	Date when song was added to archive
Play count	Ordinal	Number of time the song was played
Play date	Ordinal	Date of last play
Bit rate	Ordinal	Bit rate of song
BPM	Ordinal	Beats per Minute
Sample rate	Ordinal	Sample rate of song
Location	Discreet	File location
Kind	Nominal	Kind of file
Rating	Ordinal	Personal rating
Comments	Ordinal	Any comments you care to make about the track
Mood	Ordinal	The mood of the track

Target Group Analysis

Who should use this visualation technique?

In the past years media is getting much smaller, much better in quality, and also provide more space for our data. If you convert conventional audio files from CDs to the MP3 Format, you can afford to have your whole music collection on one larger hard drive. The business within the musich industry is taking over the internet. You are either able to download song, or listen to them directly through streams. So your favorite song ist just a click away!
Because of the fact that this new art of saving your songs, albums and so on, does not contain the usually shipped cd covers which were a very good visualisation of the audio you are listening to, it has become very important to find a good solution for the visualisation of your music archive.
At this moment the target group are mostly the people who already use the MP3 format to store their audio data, but should expend soon to all the other music-lovers.

What are the characteristics of the target group?

Like we already mentined (2.1) the business with the music is spreading more and more towards the internet. So over the years there are going to be developed more and more solutions (e.g. for children, elders, amaurotics etc.) for the music market place. The target group is going to expand over the years.

Are there any known / often used Methods / Visualisation Techniques?

The most popular program for MP3 files is nowadays iTunes von Macintosh (Apple). This is mostly due to the big boom in the distribution of the iPod in the past few years. In order to manage the music archive, iTunes uses a XML (Extensible Markup Language). In this xml file, the metainformation is stored, independent from the proprietary audio format which e.g. use ID3 tags. The advantage is that the metainformation nevertheless can be edited, even if the audio files don't allow modificatoins to their tags. Besides iTunes contains a visualizer for different music genres and can encode (import) and decode (play-back) music in different audio formats, except for music samples which is bought in the protected AAC-format.

Purpose of the Visualisation

What should be achieved with the Visualisation?

Information should be displayed clearly and intuitinal. The user should have a clear view of the information, be able to orient him/herself, and always know that the information displayed is about a music sample.

Which tasks should be solved?

A solution should be found which can be suitable for young and old, but also for the power and "less"-listeners. The problem is that presentation mostly functions and in fact is very subjective. On the one side the user want't to have as much information as possible displayed, and on the other side one want't to see only the relevant data.
A good compromise should be found and developed.

Questions that can be solved using this Visualisation

Which title is being played back at this very moment?
Which interprets are avalible?
Which titles are avalible?
How many titles from a certain genre are avalible?
Has the design been propertly developed?
Is the View / Information shown user friendly and straightforward?

Designproposal

Which kinds of Visualisation should be used?

Search for genre and interpret
Filtered search output should be displayed in an information window
View (display) and selection possibility for the genres
View (display) of the current title and interpret
Scrolling list up & down
View (display) for the interprets
Colored distinction of the amount of titles through intervals

The detail pannel stays clear until an artist or title is selected and afterwards gets filled with all the information.

Visual Mapping

Dimension "MP3 Anzahl" --> visual attribute "colored square"

The amount of titles is characterised in terms of color, e.g. blue for 0-500 MP3 files

Dimension "Interpret" --> visual attribute "table"

Information should be displayed as a table

Dimension "Genre" --> visual attribute "table"