Amir,
I understand the visual appeal of album covers. If I were selling gear, I'd use an interface like that in a store. It's like decking out a model home in a new housing development. Great for the 20 minute tour. When I use an interface like that for real browsing, I get frustrated quickly. yesterday, I was using an iPod with a tough sensitive wheel to scroll through composer and artist lists. While the iPod was doing the sort of accelerated scrolling you described, it wasn't fast or precise. And going up and down menu trees to switch between Composer and Artist (first) searches gets old fast.
Bill
I use pretty much exactly the same setup - J River Media Center with a Dell Mini 10 (fanless, SSD) netbook as a full-interface remote, and for the same reasons. Classical music, in particular, stresses the simple user interface paradigms of most media players, in several ways - and I'd suggest that it's not only Classical music that suffers.
First off, Classical has many categories of relevant metadata. Composer, Work title, Sub Genre (Symphony, String Quartet, etc etc), Performer/Soloist(s), Instrument (Piano, Violin, etc), Ensemble, Conductor, recording or performance date, record label, Movement, Key (C Major, etc), and Era (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, etc) are just some of the categories by which you might want to search for and organize your music. Most media players start with the assumption that almost all music will fall into the Artist/Album/Song hierarchy, and grudgingly allow for Composer to fit in there somewhere too. And most do not allow you to define tags for all of those other categories of information at all, much less use them in searches.
Second, most media players assume logical unit of grouping is the Album. For much Pop music, that is true, but Classical violates that assumption far more often than not. The usual case is for one CD to hold performances of multiple works, often even by different composers and in different genres. Whether those multiple performances are even intended to constitute any kind of coherent program is very much in the ear of the beholder. In other cases, a work (Mahler or Bruckner symphonies, most operas, masses, choral works) will span multiple discs. In any case, these factors make navigation by Album art even less useful.
What drove me to J River is that it allows me to define all of those different categories of information (tags) and use them in my own user-defined search views. So if, for instance, I want to find all 11 performances of Beethoven's Symphony number 3 in my library, select the performance by Leonard Bernstein on Sony (rather than the later, less intense performance on DG), and play just that performance, I can do so in a few simple, logical clicks. To do the same thing on iTunes is remarkably difficult - in fact, I found that after an iTunes library got to several hundred discs or more, I would sometimes have to wrack my brain and try multiple text searches just to find back performances that I
knew were there. iTunes and its kin may be simple to use, but they are not
easy to use if you really want to get all of the rewards of a computer audio source (aka "music server".)
I would also say that it is not only Classical music which benefits from more advanced interfaces. If you're a Jazz aficionado, and you want to find all performances of Take the A Train from the Bop era, how do you do that? All of my recordings that have Scott Lafaro playing bass? How about all Punk/New Wave Albums that had contributing artists who also played on Elvis Costello's "My Aim is True"? Or just have the same general styles and moods of that album? These are exactly the sorts of questions computers are ideally designed to answer for us, and which, IMHO, provide the most compelling justification for choosing a computer over a disc player as your primary source.