Teaching:TUW - UE InfoVis WS 2005/06 - Gruppe 10 - Aufgabe 3 - Prototyp
Prototype
Downloadlink: ...todo...
Short Task Description
What we had to do in our project was to visualize data from MP3 music files. We use the so called ID3 Tags to get all the interesting attributes like: song title, album title, genre, year and so on. For getting all this information out of the songs, we decided to use iTunes, because this software saves all the songs on the computer in one file. It's a xml file that holds all the informations for each song.
There is also other data saved with each song, when you are using iTunes. Namely the date when the song was added to the library, the date when it was last played and a rating given by the user between 0 and 5 stars. As we are doing Information Visualization a main task was to give the tool an explorative touch, so that the user can find and explore his music using totally new ways which were not possible before.
Implementation Description
The prototyp that we did of course doesn't have all the functionality we described in our concept but we tried to make clear what we wanted to achieve. The program consists of a main Window and three other windows. In the main window there are two axis, one showing years and the other showing genres. The boxes on the crossings stand for the songs that were published in the given year and fall into the given genre.
The size of the Box accounts for the number of songs and the color (more or less saturated red) accounts for the rating. The better the rating, the higher the saturation. If you klick on such a box, more details of these songs are shown in the other windows. In the lower right window you can see more detailed how the songs are rated. In the lower right window the artist and albums are listed. But there are no pictures, like we used them in the concept screenshot, it's just a list. The upper right window is also just faked and without pictures and you also can't play the songs with the buttons.
Used Libraries
- mytunes
mytunes is a Java Package that makes it possible to get all the data from the iTunes Library xml file to the Java Sandbox. It makes the work with with the xml file a lot easier, for you don't have to bother with xml parsing.