This a major new release, introducing a redesigned UI which should be more intuitive to use while also being much easier to introduce new features to. (such as playlists) A lot of work has gone into this release, although there will most likely need to be some followup releases to smooth over rough edges and/or fix bugs as they appear. Feedback is welcome to help identify bugs or any further improvements. Overall though, this is going to be the last major change/overall made to the UI. That is, the UI shipped in this release will be the definitive UI layout for Recordbox for the foreseeable future, barring some tweaks if necessary.
The UI Redesign
All views such as the library, search dialog, lyrics, and play queue have been consolidated into a single, revamped sidebar in place of the old library. Switching between them is done with a new navigation panel beside the sidebar. This provides a more streamlined interface and improves the adaptability of the UI to various screen sizes while making the play queue and search features more prominent and giving the lyrics view much more space then the old UI.
In addition to this, the main view―which was previously the album view that showed the currently selected album in the library―has been replaced with a new player view, replacing the old player controls panel at the bottom of the window entirely. This new player view shows a much more prominent cover image and more clearly displays the information for the currently playing track. It also features a basic music visualizer overlaid on the cover image, which can be optionally disabled.
To make space for this new player view, the album view has been moved into the sidebar panel, opening whenever an album is selected in the library or an album or track is opened in the search view or play queue. Because of the additional vertical space granted by the new location, the album view has also been redesigned to be less vertically cramped and able to show longer album titles. A notable caveat to this is that it has required disabling multi-selection in the album list as it does not work in it's current form with the new navigation. Future work would be required to add a dedicated mode for multi-selection for this to return, however the benefits of the new layout far outweighed the loss of this functionality.
Play Queue Improvements
The play queue has been updated to make use of the additional space granted by its new location by moving the undo/redo controls and playback information to the header bar rather than a bottom bar. Drag-and-drop has also been enhanced by using drag-handles to clearly indicate which rows can be dragged and better drop target indicators to better show where things will be dropped.
Three-tier library navigation
The library has also been updated to allow three-tier navigation, which can be enabled with the "Group Albums" option in the album list's options menu. This will group albums by genre if in the artist view and by artist in the genre view. Or in other words, if on the genres view, the left list will show genres and the right list will show artists. Each artist in the right list can then be expanded to show the containing albums. This should make it easier to navigate larger music collections.
Other Changes
- Image loading is now handled by glycin instead of GdkPixbuf. If installing from source/not from the flatpak, this means that
glycin-loaderswill need to be installed. - Image loading in all lists has been improved to load images on-demand once they become visible for the first time, rather than incrementally loading every image in the background.
- Navigating lists in the library can now be done with a single click in all layouts.
- The internals of the play queue have been refactored. Most likely a lateral move in terms of performance, but should greatly improve the readability and maintainability of the code.
- Updated to the Gnome 48 runtime/Libadwaita 0.7, switched some custom layout-switching code over to the new
AdwMultiLayoutView - Toggling play/pause with space is now possible.
- A new button was added to the album view to open the current album's folder with the file manager
- Window recoloring/background gradient is now enabled by default.
Bugfixes
- The changes to the library lists should improve navigation with touch screens and fixes a few bugs related to selecting items.
- Enabling/Disabling ReplayGain no longer requires changing to a new song to take effect.