A new Plugin for the Music-Part! Is it possible? (3 Viewers)

[ntinnton]

Proper tagging is the solution to a lot of our problems. And guides are always helpful. I never managed to have music backdrops but probably I'm doing something wrong for example. Also something about creating and using custom playlists

The only wish i would have for the music part would be nice (automated) backdrops of the artist playing.

I wish I could change album and artist info's (translate them for example) and store them at the music db

 

[emphatic]

Yes, iTunes tags are read and understood by MediaPortal.

Fact is: To have a good Music experience within MP, you need perfectly tagged files.

As I've explained numerous times, I know this.

Several ppl have explained that already in this thread.

Do you even see how arrogant you come off with these comments? If you care to read my posts in full AND understanding them, I would be very happy.

if you don't want to take the effort and tag your music collection, then you will always have this bad experience.

I don't have the time, as I rather spend it helping out in the skin forum. If I as well as lots of other people spent all this time on the music tags, then yes, there would be no need of a new music plugin for MediaPortal.

As i said before, there are a lot of tools on the market that'll help you. I'm not asking you to use my own MPTagThat, there are ,i'm sure, better ones on the market.

I don't doubt that your tool is very competent, but you should
a) create a wizard for beginners or
b) have someone that understands the software to write a "quick start" guide that you attach to your app

Ok, it was taking me 1/2 year to get all of them tagged, while developing features for MPTagThat, which i found missing while tagging.
But now i can scratch my Music DB and do a Scan and all of my files are perfectly detected and useable inside the various DB Views.

Of course everything works for you in MediaPortal, you've already explained that several times, even after I told you I KNOW already. In fact, this i a very typical behavior for developers/programmers, the inability to see that not all users think the way they do.

I will look at the other apps mentioned in this thread, especially TagRunner sounds interesting. I'm sure that MPTagThat has that or a similar functionality, but I've failed to find it.


Emph

 

[hwahrmann]

I'm not arrogant, i'm simpl.y tired of explaining it over and over again.

It's simply: You don't have time to tag your files.
i will no longer spend time to read this thread.

 

[PussyWagon]

I must agree with Emph in some of his points in this thread, I also experience some problems in music views and think its quite hard to manage it to work as I want.
But I also see your points with correctly ID3 tags as this is the way Music files is handled today, everywhere.

But also, we are living on 2009 now. Things should be EASY, AUTOMATED, QUICK and GOOD LOOKING!
This force developers to make their software/plugins very advanced but in the end. More Userfriendly!
This also leads us to have the possibillity with tagging from filename/foldername in an automated way (ofcourse things could be wrong, it always can. The filename may be wrong and then you get wrong tags, but ID3 tags could also be wrong from beginning.). This way it supports more way to retreive information about the file, not only ID3 tags.

What if:
hwahrmann could integrate MPTagThat as a plugin in MP (because its a good piece of software) that had a little more easier view and configuration part? And with a good overview of your music db collection and the possibillity to ALSO use "create tags based on file title/folders name"?
Maybe have some talk with fforde (developer of MovingPictures) and make it a bit like the Moving Pictures plugin (as many already know and can handle). (No harm about your software, but its really advanced and so many options). But this could be as a advanced view or similar.
Make it retreive thumbs on artists, covers and saving it in Application Data/Team Mediaportal/Thumbs/Music/ "Covers/Fanart" and this would be a good start for an easier/better looking music experience in MP.

Just an idea.

 

[emphatic]

And with a good overview of your music db collection and the possibillity to ALSO use "create tags based on file title/folders name"?

I agree with everything you've said here, except that the above should be "create tags based on retrieved and approved data". Also, perhaps some other developer than fforde could create the music plugin, as he's already has a full plate with Moving Pictures. MP TV-Series was the base that he used for Moving Pictures, and as the structure of music/series are quite similar (artist/series, season/album, episode/track) it shouldn't be that hard to rework into what we want. Also, mediainfo could be used for displaying mp3, flac or ape logos as well.

Emph

 

[PussyWagon]

I agree with everything you've said here, except that the above should be "create tags based on retrieved and approved data".

Doooh!

Also, perhaps some other developer than fforde could create the music plugin, as he's already has a full plate with Moving Pictures. MP TV-Series was the base that he used for Moving Pictures

Yes, what I ment was to make the developer of (this possible future music plugin ) have feedbacks from fforde as he probably have good opinions/ideas and a good structure of how to build it.

and as the structure of music/series are quite similar (artist/series, season/album, episode/track) it shouldn't be that hard to rework into what we want. Also, mediainfo could be used for displaying mp3, flac or ape logos as well.

Agree!

Also I hope in future (probably MP2) that search function will be improved so there is no need for extra plugin as Global Music Search. This really should be integrated in MP as standard!

About the music views in MP, and to search with GMS and only having listviews as mentioned before I only have one thing to say about this. NO NO NO!!
As I said before, its now 2009! Things should be GOOD LOOKING, EASY AND FUN to deal with... not only textformat bla bla bla. I got bored before I even has played the song.

Yes ofcourse, you cannot have thumbs/covers for everything like genres for example. But what if there was a nicer way to navigate through all music files. Like having different viewing options on the left (always visible) like "genre" / "artist" / "album". Instead of pressing menu, switch views, select prefered view and the back... And if you regret and want another view, theres a lot of presses again! (but this maybe is a skinning developers work, maybe this option to have visible buttons already exists, I dont know.)
Then it shows covers of all music in order of choosed view. Then you may have the full alphabet to be shown in top, and you can press the letters in orders of what you are searching for, displaying the search tag in REAL TIME. For example you press: "I" and "R" it will show everything with "IR" like "Iron Maiden".
When using remote, ofcourse you have the "SMS Style" option when searching. ( I know there is some options about the sms style input, but I dont know how and if this is working with music search though?)

Then when choosing album it will shows files in ListView style with artist fanart/albumart and so on. Perhaps it also shows "Similar" artists/albums on the right to make you discover new music/artists.

This way, as earlier mentioned listview is the easiest overview and way to search musicfiles. It still would be very easy to navigate through files but in a MUCH MORE SATISFIED way with nice graphics!

Take a look at this video on youtube for some ideas and references: YouTube - Wannahaves: Sooloos Music System

 

[tourettes]

I see two different issues discussed.

1) People are too lazy to provide correct metadata (use correctly tagged music files). This wont change, as the best way to handle the metadata is to use the technology (ID3 tags) that is designed for the task. There is no point in reinventingthe wheel, no need to create hugely complex codebase to guess what people have used to name their music files (it is much easirt with the movies as you can have only movie name that you need to guess). Also if you have music files named in some sensible way (just as one example "track # - Artist name - Album name - Song title" ) you can handle the tagging automatically with the tagging tools designed for the work. Also as there is always a error possibility with the file names (those are named by people after all) the task cannot be completely automatized.

2) Browsing music library is not intuitive enough for some people. This could be changed with external music plugin or having a different approach for the music plugin in MPII.

For point #1 there is no need to discuss. It wont change, you just have to accept the fact that lazy people don't get all for free. For #2 please start submitting some design ideas how MPII could be doing it better (or some other 3rd party plugin for MP1).

 

[Helios61]

For #2 please start submitting some design ideas how MPII could be doing it better (or some other 3rd party plugin for MP1).

Most of my files are lossless images of classical music, so first i am missing one view in database views: All files in alphbetical order. Example:

Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan (1977) - Beethoven - Symphonien 5 & 7
Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan (1982) - Vivaldi - Die vier Jahreszeiten
Berliner Philharmoniker, Sir Simon Rattle (2002) - Mahler - Symphony No.5
Berliner Philharmoniker, Sir Simon Rattle (2005) - Dvořák - Tone Poems
Berliner Philharmoniker, Sir Simon Rattle (2007) - Bruckner - Symphony No.4
Boston Symphony Orchestra (2004) - Tschaikowsky - Pathétique Symphonie
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Charles Munch (1958) - Schubert - Symphony in C Major · Symphony in B Minor 'Unfinished'
Cecilia Bartoli (2003) - The Salieri Album
Cecilia Bartoli (2007) - Maria
Cecilia Bartoli (2009) - Sacrificium
Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1985) - Mendelssohn - A Midsummer Night's Dream · Schubert - Rosamunde
Christian Thielemann · Orchester der Wiener Staatsoper (2004) - Wagner - Tristan und Isolde
Daniel Barenboim (1984) - Beethoven Sonaten
Daniel Hope (2008) - Vivaldi
Daniel Hope · Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Thomas Hengelbrock (2007) - Mendelssohn
Elīna Garanča (2007) - Aria Cantilena
Elīna Garanča (2009) - Bel Canto
Emerson String Quartet (2003) - Bach - The Art of Fuge
....

Best regards

Helios

 

[emphatic]

I see two different issues discussed.

1) People are too lazy to provide correct metadata (use correctly tagged music files). This wont change, as the best way to handle the metadata is to use the technology (ID3 tags) that is designed for the task. There is no point in reinventingthe wheel, no need to create hugely complex codebase to guess what people have used to name their music files (it is much easirt with the movies as you can have only movie name that you need to guess). Also if you have music files named in some sensible way (just as one example "track # - Artist name - Album name - Song title" ) you can handle the tagging automatically with the tagging tools designed for the work. Also as there is always a error possibility with the file names (those are named by people after all) the task cannot be completely automatized.

This is actually just different opinions, if you prefer the "ancient art of tagging" than that's okay, perhaps the plugin can be set to different search parameters:

1. Search ID3-tags primarily, add all non-tagged items + tagged yet not matched items to online database to section 2-list
2. Section 2 searches folder names and give the user a heads up if something looks weird (this can be handled the same way Moving Pictures searches and "green lights" items.

See, it's possible to really narrow down the work, and with automation bring it to a minimum.

For point #1 there is no need to discuss. It wont change, you just have to accept the fact that lazy people don't get all for free. For #2 please start submitting some design ideas how MPII could be doing it better (or some other 3rd party plugin for MP1).

Yes, there's really no need to discuss point 1 anymore, at least not until development starts. Believe me, the nagging will never end, and I'm not talking about myself.

For how Genres should be shown within MediaPortal, I'd leave that up to the skinners to decide on a skin-to-skin basis. It doesn't have to be overly pretty, just intuitive and easy.

Emph

 

[DieBagger]

the "ancient art of tagging"

I completely disagree, tagging (meta-information in general) is definitely the way to go... With movie files being 10Gigs+, who cares if an mp3 file is 3 or 5 MB large? Why maintain a perferct order structur/naming scheme instead of using a widely accepted industry standard? I'm sure moving-pictures and mp-tvseries would work ALOT better if instead of file-parsing at least an id of the movie/episode would be stored within the file.

Same thing for images: the new picasa has an amazing face recognition but instead of storing the information in the files (xmp for example) it creates ".ini" files -> no chance to use the pictures with another program or even with picasa on another pc!