A new Plugin for the Music-Part! Is it possible? (2 Viewers)

[hjalleballe]

Bump.
Any news on this subject?

 

[druid9]

A couple of things off the top of my head that I would like to see.

1) Ability to show a Review of the Artist. I used to use an MP3 player that did this (can't remember the name at this time) and I enjoyed reading information about the artist while listening to the album.

2) An easy way to download and view lyrics. Also be able to automatically get the lyrics to the next song when it plays without having to re-navigate to a View Lyrics link.

I am pretty sure you can do this in MP now, press info on an album. Need to be in database not shares view.

 

[Helios61]

Foobar 0.9.6.x

Maybe it is possible, to get "foobar 0.9.6.x" running with MP, but i don't know how! I think, Foobar has a lot of visualizations, a nice Librarry, ASIO and WASAPI Support and Foobar has Cuesheet-Support! an it looks nice, take a look to this Thread!

I hope, some of you can help to get foobar running under MP as an external Player!

Best regards

Helios

 

[divinius]

wow that looks awesome, above all if the library search functionality that foobar uses (with Facets for example) that would be a huge improvement!

 

[lloydsmart]

This seems like a really great idea. I love MP, and think it's one of the best open-source projects I've ever seen! (Come to think of it, it's one of the best pieces of entertainment software I've seen, full stop!) But the one thing that lets it down is the music section.

I was thinking about all the suggestions I've read on here about plugins and coverart support, etc. and the difficulties involved in getting it all working properly. It occurred to me that most people who have music on their computers will already have some program to organize it installed and working. I, for one, use iTunes, and have all my music organized into folders by artist and album, and all sorted out in the iTunes database, which also keeps the ID3 tags up to date. Some people use foobar, some WMP, winamp, etc. There're a whole variety of programs out there and most use their own database format and organization method. What it seems we need here for MP is a plugin which knows how to read the databases for the most popular of the various programs out there (maybe limit to iTunes and WMP for the betas, for example), then presents it in a MP 10-ft friendly interface. It would know how to import all your playlists and smart playlists if you have them, and let you choose them with your remote, or whatever you use to control MP. e.g. In my case, it would read my iTunes database, and would therefore automatically know the paths to all the MP3/AAC/whatever files, along with artist, album info etc. It would have some way to show the album artwork from the database or the ID3 tag, or the folder.jpg.

This just seems like it would be much easier than developing a new way of doing things. Mimic the behaviour of whatever music program is currently installed on the user's system. I'm presuming that support would gradually build up for new music software as the plugin is developed, and people request compatibility for their particular program or filing system. I suppose the easiest way to do this would be to implement support for a kind of "script" to grab the details from whatever program is in use, so new scripts could be written for new programs as and when they're needed.

Am I making any sense here? lol

 

[tourettes]

Am I making any sense here? lol

All people should just use ID3 etc. tags in their files and it won't matter what program they are using to handle / manage their music collection.

Using some other application's music database / library won't bring any benefit over that.

 

[lloydsmart]

^ Yeah, I see what you're saying about ID3 tags, but if we could find a way to comprehensively read the database from another program like iTunes, and present the user with all the information they would normally see when using their favorite program, including playlists, album art, lyrics, ratings etc. then we'd quickly have a solution that "just works", is updated every time iTunes or [insert favorite music program here] is, and doesn't require mediaportal to actually store any information about the music collection itself.

Basically just some sort of parser is needed, I guess, to get all the information from whatever program and then it needs to be presented nicely. No storage required.

If we just used the ID3 tags, we would get the information like artist, album, composer, year, etc. and possibly some album art if it's inserted correctly into the file, but we'd be required to either:

a) Have mediaportal create and maintain its own database according to what it finds in the ID3 tags, or
b) Read the tags each and every time the music section is launched, and sort all the information each time.

Both of those options have problems because a) would ultimately mean that the mediaportal database wouldn't always match up with the external database as changes are made, etc. and b) would be very slow and resource-intensive to do, particularly if you've got tens or hundreds of thousands of songs in your library, occupying several hundreds of gigabytes of storage. The loading time would be incredibly long, and the interface unbearably slow.

If we just read the iTunes/whatever database each time, it would be much quicker than parsing all the ID3 tags each time and sorting them into their own database, and it would be much more efficient and accurate (not to mention user-friendly) than maintaining a separate database just for MP.

 

[hwahrmann]

i don't see any difference in reading information from e.g. the iTunes database and / or storing the information in our own database.
At the end of the day, we need to present the data to the user. it shouldn't matterwhere the data comes from.

And if you have your files tagged correctly, which you have, otherwise iTunes wouldnt have them in it's DB, then we can read everything.

A lot of nice ideas in this thread and you're more to welcome to add more.
We've just a few problems:

- Lack of Time
- Lack of Resources

And the biggest issue is, we would need to rewrite a lot of code to make that happen within MP Core.
So currently, this is something, which is definitekly impossible for MP1, but it should be and will be evaluated for MP2.

 

[orencha]

Basically I pretty much like the current implementation of the built-in "My Music", and use it most of the time.

I would, however, enjoy the ability to setup a second instance of the plugin.

I have lots of Multi-channel Music files in .DTS and .AC3 formats (I mean REAL 5.1 channels re-masters, not "upmixes") and would like to have a separate setup for them (IE: use Directshow / SPDIF pass-through rather than BASS engine, use separate database, etc.)

 

[Helios61]

Hi orencha!

Basically I pretty much like the current implementation of the built-in "My Music", and use it most of the time.

I would, however, enjoy the ability to setup a second instance of the plugin.

I have lots of Multi-channel Music files in .DTS and .AC3 formats (I mean REAL 5.1 channels re-masters, not "upmixes") and would like to have a separate setup for them (IE: use Directshow / SPDIF pass-through rather than BASS engine, use separate database, etc.)

For this Intention maybe you can use the PureAudio Plugin! For me it works great!

Best regards

Helios