Browsing a long list is painful without proper scrollbars or being able to jump to an initial letter

[owldown]

Currently the Browse view has several ways for a user to filter - by favorites, by provider, by type of album (single, EP, etc), - and lots of different ways to sort the list, typical of most music software.

However, for any list with any length, actual Browsing - flipping through the list without knowing what one is looking for - is much more difficult in MA than in any other music playing software I've used. Because the list is loaded gradually (lazy loaded?), the user cannot grab a scroll bar and quickly move through the list.

In Apple Music/iTunes, I have 3140 artists, and I can scroll from top to the bottom of the list of artists in about 8 seconds.

In PlexAmp, I can scroll through the list about as fast as iTunes - thousands of items in a handful of seconds.

In Music Assistant, with the same library, I can flip the scroll wheel as fast as I want, and after 20 seconds, I'm only as far down as the artists that begin with the letter C. This is orders of magnitude slower.

In both iTunes and PlexAmp, I can grab the scrollbar and zip down to the bottom of the list. In MA, doing so only jumps to the latest item that has been lazy loaded, with not even an indication of any sort whether that's 20% through the entire list, half way, or what.

Some software overcomes this by using an alphabetic proxy for the scrollbar: choosing "M" scrolls the list instantly to the items that start with "M". This makes it simple to zip around the list and actually browse.

An example from PlexAmp:

An example from Lyrion Music Player

An example from CodePen

I would love to use MusicAssistant more, as the automation and routing and compatibility with different players is ambitious and quickly improving. However, when I want to listen to ... something... and I'm not sure but want to Browse, Music Assistant is currently the least good of all of the choices I have installed already.

This discussion: https://github.com/orgs/music-assistant/discussions/701 from 2022 is similar, but it has been marked as IMPLEMENTED, but the only features discussed in the thread are about filtering and searching, not improvements to the speed of browsing, or any affordances to make it nicer.

Search isn't browsing, a Favorites lists isn't browsing, and because MA has an entire view dedicated to Browsing, it should be better at browsing.

[OzGav]

We don’t need emotive language and this is a duplicate https://github.com/orgs/music-assistant/discussions/2554