Music, anyone?

I know the HTPC focus for most people is is on tv and movies. I myself am very much into music. It would be interesting to hear if there are any more music lovers out there.

As I am putting my entire music collection on a server, there are a few improvements I would like to see in My Music.

Media Portal, as well as most jukebox software I have tried, is very good at managing songs, but not so developed when it comes to playlists. When you start to get thousands of tracks in your collection, this gets important. Browsing maybe five hundred artists is not very effective.

Windows Media Player is a good tool to manage the music collection and to create playlists. The problem is that playlists created in WMP uses relative paths, and MP needs absolute paths to find the songs. This looks to be an easy fix. Maybe MP could even read the WMP database.

As playlists become central, there should be a playlist button in My Music, which takes you to the playlist directory, instead of having to find "My Playlists" somewhere in the music collection. Here you can have a structure of directories, for instance one for genre playlists, one for mood playlists and one for artist playlists.

Anoter powerful feature would be an incremental search function. You use the number buttons on your remote very much like the buttons on your cellphone (press 5 two times for "k"). As an example, if you type "ab" you get "ABBA", "Baby love" and "Abrakadabra". If you then press "r" you would only have "Abrakadabra" left and you can press "add to playlist".

The last thing I'm asking for is something I would like to call "Top shelf". If you click the Top shelf button in My Music you see a collection of twelve playlists, which are the four most recently played, the four most recently created and the four that are the most played during the last four months.

I'm looking forward to read your feedback on this.

[SpaceProtector]

I totally agree with you. I use Media Portal mostly to listen to music. But there are plenty of improvements which could turn media Portal into a powerful music player. Additionally to your requestst I'm thinking about

- a screen to generate playlists from within media portal
ideally using a database approach to filter according to genre, mood, playcounter, rating, etc

- and usign this feature a more advanced selection tool based on filters. For example show only mp3s where GENRE=ROCK AND RATING >3 and then allow to browse in that list.

Inspired by terratecs CAR4000 and MusicLibrary.

[trojkolka]

Yeah i also totally think this would be a amazing Pro cause i got like >150 albums and it's not practical to add every single album, artist or genre to the playlist by hand. I would like to see a better musicmanagement tool in MP like the one Winamp got, the media library. I think that's a very good way to organize and manage music and playlists.

Also beside the points Nisse Q and SpaceProtecter have i would like to see a Lyric get, show and organize function in MP and maybe karaoke files (.kas). I requested that a couple of times over the forum and i like to take this oppurtunity to request this feature again cause it would make my Music experience even better. Just imagine this request like the program of Evillyrics but than in MP

[Funky]

I also totally agree with you.

My feature idea, once playing a song I would like a special key to switch to a list with all songs by the same artists, same genre, same album etc...
and back again.

Check out Beoplayer by Bang & Olufsen, free MP3 player.

A question, if you have a lot of MP3's do you have performance problems switching to Album view?

[trojkolka]

No album view including coverart works pretty good it shocks sometime when i scroll to fast downwards/upwards but i have no complaints about that

[FlipGer]

Hi,

yeah, the music plugin could be better. The problem is, that most devs are currently working on My TV / My Radio and general code polishing. There is no developer only for My Music. Perhaps there is someone out there, who is willing to take care of My Music? Anyone?

Flip.

[SpaceProtector]

Does anybody know how the music information is stored in Media Portal? Is there access to all informations of the ID3 tags? If not then it might be a major work to implement all our suggestions otherwise it could be easier.

[Mr.Mitchell]

Th info is stored in the Music databae. You can view the info in database with the SQL viewer that is in the docs folder. The most important information is in the database I think. I think that Artist, Title, Album, Genre and length are at least in the dataabse. Probably more.

[LastMar]

One thing that would definitely improve the music side of things, would be to have the track info searching improved.... As it is now, it only searches for songs by their album. It would be better to search by band and title, or to have a choice... If nothing is found, you should be able to manually enter search info.

[frodo]

ok i added:
- support for relative paths in playlists
- a my playlists button which takes you to your playlist folder

frodo