Feedback on 1.2 music changes (3 Viewers)

[JimmyBoy]

Hi,

Im a bit late jumping into this, and must confess that I havent read all the pages (getting late, work in the morning), but from the first few pages I DID read, I was agreeing in that I find the current system a little flawed.

I, Like others state, like to listen to some tracks, and then if I like them, I add them to my current playlist etc... (pretty much what has already been stated)

The way I see it is like this : The "Current Playlist" should never be altered. I will of (over time), added tracks to this playlist, and by playing a new track (to hear what it is), I dont want my previous playlist cleared.

I almost see the need for two playlists ;

1) "Current Playlist" (as we already have)
2) "Audtion Playlist"

The audition playlist would need a new screen, which would be pretty much identical to the "Current Playlist" we currently have.

When browsing my music :

If I press play on an album track, the whole album gets added to the "Audtion Playlist" and plays from the currently selected track (ie if I pressed play on track 7, whole album is added, and starts playing from track 7)

If I press play on a track, the "Audition Playlist" is cleared and it gets added to the "Audition Playlist", and plays

Would be nice if the "Audition Playlist" screen had a checkbox type control next to each song, and also one at the top which would select all the songs in the current audition playlist. Then we wouldneed a button or context menu option to "Add selected tracks to current playlist" option.

This way my "Current Playlist" remains static and unchanged by whatever I do, and the "Audition Playlist" is the dynamic one.

So the overall workflow would be as follows

Browse Music > Audition Track/Album > Dont like track / album > Continue Auditioning other tracks

Browse Music > Audition Track/Album > Like Track / album > Add selected tracks / current track to current playlist

You could say that the "Current Playlist" is essentially working as I am describing the "Audition Playlist", but to my mind, there needs to be a playlist for "I just wanna see what this track / album sounds like" scenario, and an additional playlist for "this is a playlist im working on at the moment, that only MYSELF (not the system) can modify" scenario (I wont of saved it as a playlist yet, because it is a work in progress playlist).


I have a feeling that I may of made this sound WAAAAY more complicated than it actually is, it's really quite simple. Also, you may of come up with a better working solution already,. but I just wanted to add my thoughts.

Please dont bash me for my late night thoughts!! hehe

All the best.

 

[jameson_uk]

I almost see the need for two playlists ;

1) "Current Playlist" (as we already have)
2) "Audtion Playlist"

Yep indeed but I would (and have) spun this the other way. Any other player has a list of what is queued up to play (often called current playlist). So you should always have a current playlist that is actually what is playing now. Then you should be able to add tracks to a different playlist (most players do this by right clicking, selecting an add to playlist menu then choosing an existing playlist; or force you to create a playlist; this however is very hard to build in a way that is nice to use on a 10' UI and is much better suited to a mouse)

What is in current code (and therefore will be in 1.2 RC) is an option which chooses what playlist you see on the playlist screen. This will either be the "current playlist" (ie. what is queued up and playing now) or the "other" playlist which is what a user is building up.

I have a feeling that I may of made this sound WAAAAY more complicated than it actually is, it's really quite simple. Also, you may of come up with a better working solution already,. but I just wanted to add my thoughts.

It is certainly not simple. As above this is actually quite difficult to achieve in most players and then they rely on context menus, sub menus and most importantly mice. Take these out the equation and it makes an already difficult problem very complicated.

Hopefully based on the feedback here the solution is going to be ok for everyone (I want to improve playlist handling in 1.3 anwyay)

 

[rlevis]

Since installing 1.20b I hadn't tried creating playlists, but my wife tried to yesterday and she was having all sorts of problems. I confirmed today that it's not possible to create a playlist unless you write the song names down on paper while playing them, and then add them later to the playlist without playing any songs.

Playing a track in a folder adds the entire folder to the playlist, which is not much use when we have 1000 songs in one folder. Are we missing something?

 

[hwahrmann]

The "Y" key, or to whatever remote control button it has been mapped, is your friend.
Just press it on any track, while browsing, and it will get added to the end of the current playlist.

 

[rlevis]

We press Info on our remote which adds the current selected track to the playlist. That is still working. The problem is that we, and I would have thought most people, want to play a track to ensure it is suitable before adding it to the playlist. Currently when you start a track playing, it adds the entire folder of tracks to the playlist.

As I mentioned, currently we need to write down the track name on paper and browse through the tracks later to add them to the playlist. Surely there is a better way. We didn't have this problem with MP 1.1 or 1.0.

 

[jameson_uk]

Some changes have been made for playlists for 1.2 RC
0003627: Rework Music Playlists - MediaPortal Bugtracker

 

[rlevis]

Look forward to the RC. Any idea how far away it is?

 

[jameson_uk]

Look forward to the RC. Any idea how far away it is?

Roadmap - MediaPortal Bugtracker

There are a couple of tricky issues left but we are getting quite close. Obviously once we have solutions they need to be tested etc. so not sure when it will appear but hopefully if we can resolve one last nasty it should be soon

 

[Mr. V]

Love what you have done with the new music tags. Really great.

I am having a few issues with the music browsing skin properties and all music scraping. Also some thoughts on new features.

1. Cant expose artist name on an album level
(see post - https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...ag-expose-artist-album-view-98572/#post767266)

2. Downloading media info;
- allmusic has an album review, in some cases it is blank. My guess is it depends what entry you pick, i seem to get more luck if i pick the second correct match
- the artist and album may not be fround in some cases . if my tag isnt perfectly named it wont find any matches.
- if by mistake i pick the wrong album or artist the only way to change this is to edit the db3 file.
- to fix these issues i think it would be good if the refresh button give you the option to change the match and there was an option to edit the search terms.
- all these new music tags are great, but it is a slow process to download artist and album info 1 by 1. some sort of batch processing would be great.

3. Additional Tags;
-Ability to scrape genre info from all music
#GenreInfo.Description
#GenreInfo.TopArtist
#GenreInfo.TopAlbums
#GenreInfo.TopSongs

4. Something i cant figure out
-If i had png's for years where do they go?

5. Hyperlinks
-I can hyperlink directly to years or genres. If i had a button that was 2011, I would like to be able to link to 2011 under years.

 

[jameson_uk]

https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/improvement-suggestions-46/missing-tag-expose-artist-album-view-98572/#post767266[/url])

Answered in that thread

2. Downloading media info;
- allmusic has an album review, in some cases it is blank. My guess is it depends what entry you pick, i seem to get more luck if i pick the second correct match
- the artist and album may not be fround in some cases . if my tag isnt perfectly named it wont find any matches.
- if by mistake i pick the wrong album or artist the only way to change this is to edit the db3 file.
- to fix these issues i think it would be good if the refresh button give you the option to change the match and there was an option to edit the search terms.
- all these new music tags are great, but it is a slow process to download artist and album info 1 by 1. some sort of batch processing would be great.

Scraping is something I wanted to improve for 1.2 but ran out of time. There are lots of flaws with it but these are things that will be addressed now in 1.3. What I hope to do in the meantime is provide some sort of plugin to automate scraping.

3. Additional Tags;
-Ability to scrape genre info from all music
#GenreInfo.Description
#GenreInfo.TopArtist
#GenreInfo.TopAlbums
#GenreInfo.TopSongs

Not sure I think these are worth it but might have a look. These values could easily be added by a third party plugin if necessary.

4. Something i cant figure out
-If i had png's for years where do they go?

Not sure what you mean?

5. Hyperlinks
-I can hyperlink directly to years or genres. If i had a button that was 2011, I would like to be able to link to 2011 under years.

Too many unknowns to do this easily. Getting a list of views is simple (there is a list). getting a list of say years would involve querying everything in the database to find out what values exist. One way to achieve this would be to create a 2011 view with a restriction of = 2011. You could then jump direct to this view but you would need one view per year which is far from ideal. There is also only a single hyperlink parameter, I guess we could add in some form of syntax here (say view#value) or something and then parse this but that is fairly messy and not sure there is a need for it?

Either way these are things for 1.3 rather than 1.2