This is a brief proposal I'm whipping up for a UI for browsing a music library. It takes inspiration from the "paned browser" present in players like iTunes and Quod Libet among many others, as well as the Xbox 360's "blades" (which unlike Sony's XMB doesn't seem to have any patents on it).

Left and right would control the type of list currently being shown (for example, "Artist", "Album", etc), as well as a single "Settings" page. Up and down would scroll through the list (the seek buttons could behave like they did on the N1). Enter would make an item on a list 'selected' (non-exclusive, like a ctrl-click on PC). Holding enter for two seconds would start multi-select mode, allowing the user to scroll and highlight many targets, then press enter and select them all (like a shift-click).

The difference between this and a regular paned browser is that this system isn't hierarchical; you don't have to select artist, then album. If you choose "Band X" as the artist, for instance, sliding over to the Years category would only show years that contain "Band X"-tagged media, but you can just as easily choose "1997" first, then go to Artists to choose "Band X" from a much-reduced set. At any time, you can flip between metadata categories, which is particularly suited for the OSD's remote control interface.

The Settings page would allow you to select sorting criteria, among other things; up to three. You could say sort by "Artist", then "Album", or "Year", then "Track Name". Separately, there's an option called "Group Albums"; selecting this causes "Track Name" and "Track Title" to disappear from the sort categories, and forces all other metadata categories to sort based on the first track of the album (in track order) that implements a particular field (Year, Genre, etc).

That's all for now.