mimetypes: audio files
One thing that is very nice with the new naming scheme for mimetype icons is that now much more file formats are covered. For example, kde used to have just one icon for all the audio format. Now we have 25! :)
This doesn’t mean we are going to have 25 different icons for audio files, but I thought it was a good idea to group file formats and to do an icon for each group. In the I found 5 categories:
lossy compression: mp3, ogg, acc …
lossless compression: flac, monkey …
uncompressed (PCM): wave, aiff …
midi
speech
Lossy compression
Lossy compressed formats like mp3, ogg vorbis are by far the most popular in an average user desktop. For that reason the icon is the simplest one in the audio set. So, the big musical note, and it’s green color set the basic metaphor for audio in Oxygen.Lossless compression
Lossless compression codecs like FLAC, allows the exact original data to be reconstructed from the compressed data. That means there is no loss of information from the audio stream. As a consequence, file size are usually bigger than lossy compressed audio files. In the icon for this category I wanted to emphasize the bigger size aspect by using a double note to represent the audio data.
I know it’s subtle.Uncompressed - PCM
Uncompressed audio files are really large in size. Because of their relatively “pureness” and high quality, these formats are mostly used when manipulating high fidelity sound, such in case of professional studio mixing and recording. That’s why the icon present the typical “wave” representing the audio data. I hope users playing with audio files will appreciate the fact they can easily recognize their rough audio data from their compressed versions.
MIDI
MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is an industry-standard electronic communications protocol that enables electronic musical instruments, computers and other equipment to communicate, control and synchronize with each other in real time (source: wikipedia).
Since the most common midi interface is the keyboard, hence the icon show a keyboard on it ;). To pass even more the connection to music, instead of just showing one single note, here there is a full pentagram with a couple of notes on it. This should help getting the idea.
Speech
Speech codecs, as the word suggest, are audio formats used for voice compression. These kind of codecs are used for teleconferences and VoIP. For this reason, this icon do not have any note in it. The headset instead is a perfect metaphor for teleconference and VoIP.
As usual, change may occur from here to the final release.
In itself your work looks good. The PCM one has a foreground/background problem, though. My problem with your sample is , that wouldn’t come to the idea to distinct the audio type by the icon. And then I’m not amused that I can’t distinct e.g ogg and mp3 by the icon, because both is lossy. For cases we have a multitude of formats (graphics, audio, video, source code,..) I think it’s better to include sort of a label in the icon.
I really like these. Good work :-)
Might be worth to note that .wav files are not always and every time uncompressed PCM data; they can easily carry compressed data like AC3 or DTS, or even MP3s in some evil ways.
It is, after all, mostly a container format.
David,
I really dislike lossy, lossless and uncompressed being different, it’s confusing… you should use the same icon or make them more different, like different notes AND color.
But thanks for so good icons!
Hey David,
I will offer a comment to the contrary of what Gustavo said. I do really appreciate being able to distinguish lossy from lossless. I try to encode most everything into lossless whenever I can, and this will make recognizing which files need to be recoded from CD, for instance.
It does seem very thought out, but there is one additional category I’d suggest. That is for .mod files and similar music (.it, .s3m, .xm, .mod, etc…) which are similar to midi files in that they contain the arrangements within the file, but at the same time, they also contain their own sample definitions… so it’s like a midi file with all the samples required to reconstruct the music contained within the file. (Would be similar to garage-band files I guess) It was a very popular type of format for many years, and still has a cult following in certain circles of the net. Some combination of your midi and raw icons would probably best represent it…
Cheers
I really like the fact that the icons for the different categories of audio files are different, in contrast to Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri. The subtle different between the lossy and lossless files is ingenious. The PCM-type file looks great… and I don’t think that normal people would be confused by the difference between lossy and lossless, anyway. :S
I think it’s a good idea that you can recognize if the file is a raw file, mp3 or midi - I think the difference makes sense here.
A bit offtopic , but icon-related:
Do you plan to change the small black arrows for forward/backward.. actions which seem to be the (temporary?) default in Konqueror at the moment? I don’t think they’re well suited, since they’re too small and not recognizable. And since there’s also a downward little black triangle next to it which indicates that there’s a menu popup if you click for longer, it also looks confusing.
Imho the icon should be green (or blue), be huge and look like an arrow, not like a triangle (or circle).
I very much like the different icons, and think they show the different formats in a subtle but effective way. It does seem slightly inconsistent to me that uncompressed music uses the single note of lossy compression rather than the double note of lossless compression.
What does the difference between lossy, lossless, and uncompressed mean to most users that wouldn’t be immediately apparent by the file type?
Sorry for the huge font :) don’t what I did wrong this time.
I like the icons. I certainly DO want to see the distinction between lossy and lossless and other audio types. If I’m loading up my mp3 player (a usb disc type affair) I’d like to be able to spot the difference between lossy, lossless and midi for example. Its not like an inexperienced user is going to have any problem telling that a given file is an audio one and for people who need to know the difference its convenient to be able to see it up front.
I kinda see the point about the one note vs two thing for uncompressed files, but I imagine once they scale to smaller sizes it would be come to busy.
Great work :)
I like the icons for the most part. I would like to see the MIDI icon with the keys on bottom and notes on top. Seems like that may be a more natural layout, but I’m not sure.
Hi,
Really the icons are excellent!!!!
I have a suggestion: will it be possible to include the extension of the file as an emblem
Thx for the great job
Nice Icons — what would be really cool be some sort of visual preview for the actual file to be incorperated into the Icon. My suggestions would be either looking at the moodbar in Amarok or the circular patterns in freewheeling (freewheeling.sourceforge.net). The moodbar in particular can give you a lot of information about a file if you know how to read it. and helps differentiate files.
This feature would be very useful to me and I might even be tempted to help code it if I could find somebody to show me where to look.
Phantastic! I would not change anything…
Hi, nice work. I like the look of the icons and the idea of being able to distinguish compressed from uncompressed audio. Just a single remark to do, the keyboard in the MIDI icon has an incorrect grouping of black keys. The right way is alternating groups of 2 and 3 black keys. The following ascii drawing shows it (format with a monospaced font):
Very nice. May be one thing: One note symbolizes lossy and two lossless quality. If this is right, I don’t understand why uncompressed has only one note. Should also be two then?
There’s a problem with the keyboard: the black keys are in the 2-3-2-3-2-… pattern. 4 is not an option here :)
I have to say I don’t really like the speech icon. What do you think about picturing lips instead of a headset? Also the MIDI icon somehow doesn’t look consistent with the others. I really like the first two icons though.
Really good looking! I like the idea of being able to differentiate the nature of the file from the icon. Maybe an average user won’t see a difference, but once aware of how it works, it really helps. The trick will be to make users aware of the difference…
I agree with Theo Spears : uncompressed music should use double note for consistency
Concerning compressed files, maybe reversing the arcs around the note towards the note would show more explicitly that it is compressed
It seems a bit illogical to me that file with looseless compression have two notes because they are bigger while uncompressed files have only one note. The metaphore would be more coherent if uncompressed files had two or three notes. Furthermore, for the user, uncompressed and looselessly compressed file are equivalent, and might be happy with the same icon.
Hi David,
great work! I like those Icons very much.
Only a small addition. I really would love to see which format the file iss, without looking at the filename.
Why not show just a small font in one of the corners, maybe top-left.
I really love the work you did!
Go on and make KDE what it should be… SEXY SEXY SEXY!!!
Nice Icons. But I wonder if you really need to separate uncompressed and losslessly compressed. I suggest you use the icon you proposed for uncompressed for both of them.
I really, REALLY like them!! They are so cute! The only doubt I have is that I don’t know if I prefer the extension name on every file type or not…
Ottimo lavoro David! :)
Nice icons! I like them:-)
Some notes though:
* I second Louis in that keys on the bottom seem more natural.
* Using different icons for those categories makes sense, but like sombuddy, I would appreciate some kind of text to differentiate at least OGG and MP3
* While I like the idea of waves for WAV, the blue color doesn’t fit. The black background is too heavy in my eyes.
Thanx for the nice work!!!
MIDI:
We also noted that the keyboard should stay on bottom … will change soon.
About black keys … I must admit I’m not a musician ;) will remove the extra 4th key.
WAVE:
I agree that wave should have double note too … will change that too. And will try making the wave background softner.
really nice icons, they look cool … i also think your 5 categories are ok … really no need for a icon pro music file format.
But i would switch the icons of lossless and lossy. First of all,
since uncompressed got one note, lossless compression should get one note as well since they are both not lossy. Second, as you pointed out, since lossless compression files are usually bigger in size that fact should pointed out by an whole tone(note) that has, from a music kind of view, more length than two half notes … so to speak …
Hi davigno,
I found the several metaphors very well found (simple note, double note for uncompressed….). The note svg for me is perfectly done. And yes, it is maybe better than the speaker idea.
The several issues i still found on them was only for midi and PCM:
- seems a bit overloaded
- keyboard (i like the idea) should be on bottom (or left?)
- The PCM must have double note, and the black/blue wave is too hard. Why not just a big wave in the background (without background for the wave).
The note on lossless format is actually bigger than the notes in the lossless format. being more notes doesn’t directly correspond to bigger filesizes. to me more notes would feel like midi. the midi icon looks good, but I don’t know about small size versions of it. for the compressed voice I don’t quite see how the headset is a ‘perfect’ metaphor, it will definately be good enough, but I think that most people would associate lips/mouth with speech far more than the headset. the headset contain earphones and those take more focus than the microphone that looks like an accessory to the headset.
Hello!
I’m sorry, but I don’t like these icons. For me the style looks too childish (it’s too glossy, like balloons or bubbles). And I also doubt, that they’ll look OK when you scale them down. Look at this for example (http://icon-king.com/?p=34). The speaker on the second row is very clean and elegant.
As for your metaphors - as somebody, who records speech a lot and listens to the podcasts I strongly disagree that note should be used as a metaphor for audio files. What would be a metaphor for notation files then? Also the notes themselves doesn’t make sound.
Please, think about this for a while.
Thanks
Very nice work.
Here is a small suggestion:
The icons on lossy and lossless should be more different. Imagine this: If one has many lossy files in one directory and only a few lossless (with some non audio files in that dir as well) it becomes very hard to locate lossless just by icon. It should be more different. For example the note on lossless could be golden (or platinum) to represent its better quality, and it’s easier to locate it among other similar icons.
That’s the best idea I’ve seen in the context of the Oxygen idea. Really inonvative !!!! :-D
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I like the icons, in general, but It may be useful to at least differentiate Ogg file formats, because they are “really free” and because they may not work on portable players.
Also, WAV and IFF files may be compressed, even if that’s not very common. So that distinction may not be too relevant, unless the type system can identify the subtypes.
And yes, piano keyboards have the 2-3 key grouping.
Maybe you could put a G cleft on the score or something.
veramente bellissime! grande david!
When I saw the difference between lossy and lossless, I figured the latter had two notes because it has a higher fidelity.
I like differentiating the two. I would further suggest you could use color to separate types of compression; ogg is red, mp3 is green, etc. As not all portable players play all formats, this could become important.
Overall, I like the icons.
Awesome icons! I’ve also looked at the SVN, and in just the few days, it looks like many of the suggestions mentioned here have been incorporated (such as using double notes for raw formats, and the right number of black keys on the MIDI icon, lol!). I’d like to add that making notes different colors for lossy formats like ogg, wma, mp3, and aac would be nice.
(continuing the same thought) In the oxygen SVN, the icons for C files, C++ files, header files, and C# files are blue, green, magenta and brown. I just think it makes a lot of sense, and would be a subtle way to distinguish file types in addition to compression type. Green for MP3, purple for OGG, blue for WMV, etc - what colors are which file types wouldn’t really matter, because
A) It would be immediately obvious when there is a mixture of different file types in a folder.
B) If it mattered, people would eventually remember which colors are which file types.
It is just a nicety. The fact that the icon shows compression is a step up from the Crystal icons I’m using, which just uses a speaker for anything, regardless of file type.
Separate question:
Are you going to do the same thing for video? (E.g. raw video formats versus compressed formats?)