[Uatschitchun]

For a better music experience, besides custom tags, it would be nice to have the possibility to get to items more straight and direct.
It would be nice to jump directly to the album or artist of currently playing song, to look at the album or other albums from this artist. Maybe even genre or custom tags could be included

Agreed. Bi-driectional navigation e.g. having selected a song link to the album (maybe even albums if you have compilations too and mbids to identify the recording), or artist(s) etc. or from album to artist etc.

Yes, some kind of 'jump to' or 'show artist, album, etc'. Right now, there's no connection between the actual playing song/playlist and the media collection/database

When playing a real CD or Vinyl, I'm not only viewing the front cover, but am able to turn the cover to see the track list.

Do you mean having more than one image per album? Or having a songs list in a panel when an album is selected on album node?

No, not more images, but a more stringent playlist integration. I don't get, why it is important to have visualization options in music OSD, but not an easy way (button)to show the playlist!? Kodis focus is on optic and playfulness but usability is behind that. A bunch of easy ways to show images, visualization and lyrics, but no way of fast switching between audio playing and the media.
I have configured a button on the remote to show the current playing playlist, but it's always a matter of where I am if it gets displayed.
In shorter words, yes, a simple and fast way to switch between media, playlist and music fullscreen/osd. I even can't find a way to disable the timeout of album cover showing with song info in fullscreen. Only way is when playback controls are displayed.

Picking up the museum idea, I would surely like to look left and right of the current item found. Maybe head for something I know and get inspired from there...

Up to now I haven't found a quick and intuitive way to get to 'relations' of what I'm currently playing. Examples are:
* show releases of same genre and year
* show albums of same artist
etc

I get the idea, but how would we define "related" items? Surely we need to let the user choose the criteria? But interesting.

A start would be to have media, playlist and current song/album connected in a navigational sense. Being able to fast switch between current and playlist would be a start.
A second step could be a fast way to switch between media and current song. When listening to music, I don't need the main menu. I only need my music collection, my playlist and the fullscreen info with cover.
From playlist one may have a jump to option, which switches to the related album. One step up then would be corresponding artist showing all albums.
Music isn't database friendly. It's nice to have the possibility, but the natural way is best reflected when using filemode, not database. Or, one would be able to design the database view like filemode :-)
It's nice for movies, but I guess no one has a movie collection as huge as an audio collection. Even if one does, 200 movies are 200 movies, whereas 200 CDs are appr 2000 tracks!

Sorting music in "hardware", I never would expect Jazz in the same space as Metal. Genres are nice, but the discussions on genres is well known (could be just 5-10 or 500-1000). So custom tags come in handy here, having some main genres within custom tags like 'Rock' (which sums up Hardrock, Postrock, Metal, Punk for me), Jazz (New Jazz, Experimental, Swing, etc)...

I do think users need to get control of genre, certainly in what they tag. Scraping online genres for artists and albums can resuklt in a mess too - do any of us agree on genre? I want to get Kodi to propagate song genre into artist genre, and allow the user to refuse the scraped values that come with other nice things like biogs. I also wonder about having a genre / sub genre relationship, sort out the Hardrock, Postrock, Soft-rock etc.

What I am saying is that we tackle the genre mess independantly of having a hash-tag or custom tag facility.

I guess the main cause of confusion, feature requests and wishes for music in kodi is the misconception of 'what works for one kind of media, works for all kind of media'. Some similar discussion is about unscrapeable movies not being added by filename...
The golden way to listen to music (and I'm talking about larger collections here) is to have a stringent way of organizing the music in hardware (filemode). Therefore a consistent naming scheme and a hierarchical ordering is necessary. To get that, one needs proper tagging for the mass renaming. Once that is done, one adds music to kodi and all work of hierarchical ordering and naming is lost, as the database neglects all this and throws it over board...
Some kind of mixed mode comes to mind. For smaller collections, a pure database mode could be sufficient. For larger collections, a pure filemode is far too less.
A possible way to go would be to add the folder structure/hierarchy into database. I know it's possible with smart playlists, but that's too static!
When we have folder structure in db and being able to navigate along that structure even in database mode...!? Yes!

I have a folder called unsorted, where I put new music for to get to know the music prior to adding it into media structure, as I like knowing what I've got prior to just having :-)
How would I be able to just focus on this music with database mode? No way!
Only way would be to loose maybe genre and tag my unsorted/unlistend music with genre 'unlistend' or, use filemode loosing advantages of database...

My main problem with music in Kodi (and with all tag based players like Ipod fi) is that there's no way of 'own ordering' my music. Databases are a nice to have, like catalogs in museums are, but the art displayed in a museum isn't unordered.

It is the database that makes ordering possible, although Kodi only offering a limited variety at the moment (and has some odd bugs). But what do you mean by "own ordering"?

Explained above, I guess :-)

Widgets are nice, too. But even there I haven't found a way to 'jump' to a random album displayed in a random albums widget, but only am able to play that album. If I like to draw a path from there, I start listening to a random album, I have to be able to get to wherever I'm inspired from by that album in a quick and intuitive manner. It even takes "millions" of buttons to get to the current playlist...

In a museum I'm able to start and go on from there. Head left for photography or right for paintings. Head for the upper floor to see more experimental or contemporary art or downstairs to see Mona Lisa :-)

Agreed. From any item, any where (nodes, widgets etc.) you want to be able to play, but also go to related items and chose that relationship e.g. other items by artist, other songs on that album etc., other items that genre, other items that year, other items that genre and year, other items with same hash-tag or combination of tags.

Keep the ideas comming.

Yes, nice sum up, Thx :-)

My suggestions would be:
* reflect folder structure within database (gives, what nodes or SPL do, but dynamically
* a consistent and not destructive 'current' playlist (only cleared by user's request)
* an intuitive way to switch between media, playlist and fullscreen
* add a way to directly switch between fullscreen (current playing song) or some song from playlist to the corresponding album
* the hierarchical structure, we now have in database, makes it possible to just get "upstairs" from song, to albums, to artists and what is coming above that
* cause of having the database in handy, a switch to similar genre, year, composer, etc would be quite easy

So far from my side, thx for reading :-)
R