Audioscrobbler (last.fm) support for MediaPortal! (5 Viewers)

[SteveV]

Just a thanks rtv for the now playing screen in the new music engine, its really excellent. You any idea how to make MP jump to Now Playing when I click on a track in a folder?

Pressing the play button on an item (rather than the enter button) allows you to jump to a variety of screens depending on how you have configured your "Play Now Behavior" settings.

See Configuration.exe-->Music-->Misc Settings-->Play Now Behavior-->Jump on Play Now.

Steve

 

[piranha]

Since we are retrieving album art already, would it be a problem to embed that album art within ID3 tag for those tracks that are missing the tag?
That would obviously need to be done via preference settings.

 

[rtv]

Sorry, I just know that there's muuuch dirty stuff going on with ID3 tag writing. I do not know the details of every format and I'll most likely _never_ write to music collections or add any code that does this. My Collection is just to valuable to risk it for a simple MP bug...

Right now MP only fetches these covers into the local "cache" \thumbs\music\...

Steve knows a lot more about tags - maybe he'll do it at some point but I guess he is busy fixing the remaining bugs with the pretty visualization window

 

[piranha]

...and I'll most likely _never_ write to music collections or add any code that does this. My Collection is just to valuable to risk it for a simple MP bug...

That's why I proposed configuration switch on/off

 

[tomtom21000]

In regards to "Now playing":

the "album top tracks" and other tracks tagged "xy":

Could there be a flag the skinner can use for a little graphic or a different text colour to distinct if the track is available in your music collection or not.

Because the buttons are clickable, but in many cases they won´t work, (at least when not playing ripped albums)

tomtom

 

[rtv]

look at your log and you'll find out why the DB filter didn't work.
I wouldn't display them if the musicdatabase wouldn't "think" they are there..

 

[tomtom21000]

O.K., here is part of the log.
If you need a full log, I´ll supply one. This one was very long, although I only went to my music, but it seems it logged every song in my charts folder.

To make more clear. I am talking mainly about the "top tracks of this album"

I played Anastasia: Sick and tired

It said twice Sick and tired and once "Get ready" a song which I don´t have. Clicking on the songs wasn´t successful either.

tomtom

 

[rtv]

To make more clear. I am talking mainly about the "top tracks of this album"

It said twice Sick and tired and once "Get ready" a song which I don´t have. Clicking on the songs wasn´t successful either.

tomtom

Okay - you name it : you do not have the song - MP cannot add it
The database "filtering" just happens for the "tag" suggestions.

The top album tracks' purpose is e.g. to show you the 3 top songs you might be interested in when listening to a song. Even if you might not have this songs currently and MP "silently fails" enqueuing the songs you still get the information..

If this is very disturbing and there are many more people only having single tracks instead of full albums in their collection I will think about a config option to explicitly enable filtering there (of course slowing things down a bit then).

 

[jawbroken]

I do not know the details of every format and I'll most likely _never_ write to music collections or add any code that does this. My Collection is just to valuable to risk it for a simple MP bug...

I agree, imagine how many angry people would storm the forums if a small bug wiped out their music collection...

 

[reagan+carter]

hi, and first of all thanks a million for your work. This plugin actually changed the face of MediaPortal!

In SVN, one can submit track info from Audio CDs and this is really smashing.
The system works great for an artist album, nevertheless there are lots of problems with compilation-like albums. Each and every compilation CD is discarded by audioscrobbler.

The main reason for this is because of the official freedb nomenclature guideline, quoting it "When submitting a sampler or compilation, you should include the track-artist in the track-name, using the syntax "artist / track-title" and set the CD-artist to "Various"". This is an inherent limitation in the cddb system.

In my opinion this issue may be addressed within the audioscrobbler plugin.
Some kind of: if artist-tag is "Various" then split the title-tag using the first "/" character encountered; the first part is now the artist-tag and the second one the title-tag.
Is it simple enough to be implemented as a quick workaround in the plugin?
Could the info, meant to be submitted to last.fm, be pre-processed (it's not mandatory to touch the original FreeDB tags)?

However a few people still don't follow these simple rules while first tagging a CD. The main variations that I've observed are:
- The artist could be "Various", "Various Artists" or "Various Artist"
-- it is not case-sensitive
--- some (stupid) users put a portion of the CD name or the name of the DJ who made the mixtape instead, there's nothing one can do about that (e.g. Artist="Defected" and Album="Most Rated Miami" where Defected is the name of a record label, not a real Artist). Frequently seen, no way to provide last.fm with correct data.
- The artist/title delimiter may be "/" as well as the 'conventional' "-"
-- they are usually not mixed within the same string: it is either one or the other
--- a noted exception to this rule (and things got worse) is when the compilation includes mash-up/versus/bastard pop/whatever the name (+/- the acapella of one over the instrumental of another or a bootleg from a few tracks, mixed altogether) i.e. "Dina Vass / The Love I Have For You (Full Intention Club Mix) - Supafly VS Fishbowl / Let's Get Down (Accapella)" (the proper tagging should be "Dina Vass Versus Supafly VS Fishbowl / The Love I Have For You (Full Intention Club Mix) Versus Let's Get Down (Accapella)". The two kinds of delimiting characters are used altogether and no real Artist and Title names could be extracted. Not frequently seen, the tags are effectively lost.

sorry for the essay, I just wanted to share some ideas in order to improve this great plugin.

EDIT:
The pseudo-code should be more like (in fact "Various" is not a good indicator of a compilation):

if track from a physical or mounted Audio CD then
begin

if track Artist tag = "Various" or "Various Artists" then
begin

if " / " found in track Title tag then
delimiter = " / "
else if " - " found in track Title tag then
delimiter = " - "

end
else if " / " found in track Title tag then
delimiter = " / "

if delimiter assigned then
begin

split track Title tag in two parts separated by first delimiter found
track Artist tag = first part of split string
track Title tag = last part of split string

end

end

Moving from FreeDB to MusicBrainz would be an alternate solution but the MusicBrainz database is almost empty and this would require too much work