Idea Collection thread (2 Viewers)

[emphatic]

There is an option in Preferences -> Tags -> Lyrics/Covers, which, when checked, uses an existing folder.jpg instead of searching the web.
Would this satisfy your needs?

Thanks, that will do nicely. I just don't see the point in hiding it/having it off by default?

Emph

 

[RaceNJason]

Did searches for these 3 ideas and found one that matched (item #1) but it was from a couple years back...sort of surprised it hasn't been done by this time since I'm absolutely sure other users would find it useful so I'm going to put it down again.

1) Improve right click menu for tray icon. Simply link the play, pause, previous and next toolbar functionality into the right click menu. This way for users who minimize to the tray because they are working on their computer but playing music in the background it allows them to have basic functionality without the need to restore MP every time they need to use those commands. This feature alone has made me want to use Media Player over MP, but MP can upscale music from 2 channels to my 5.1 surround sound system whereas Media Player cannot - so I'm stuck using either MP with reduced functionality but great sound or Media Player that has poor sound play but with great minimized functionality. From a programmer’s point of view, this shouldn't be a difficult feature to add since the toolbar functionality already exists, so it's just a matter of making the menu commands and linking them to already existing functions. I would do it myself...but I'm a C++ programmer using VS2003.NET (MP is C# code and apparently needs VS2005+ to work on and build). Hopefully this feature will eventually make it into a release build...it's really needed.

2) Remember (or allow for an option to remember) the last size and position of the main interface. I don't like running MP at full screen because I'm generally using it to play music in the background minimized to the tray. But when I first start it up the initial size is smaller then I would like because it squishes the preview pictures (if it didn't, I would probably be fine with the default size). So this means I have to increase the width by a lot and maybe a tiny bit on the height. If MP could simply remember what the last position and size of the main UI was...it would save users the time of having to resize it every time they restart it.

3) This one probably won't be done because it is more complex...but since I'm making this post I might as well put it in. Anyway, after setting up MP and choosing a particular database I realized I would've preferred an alternative database then the one I chose (due to the fact that the alternative database I could've directly accessed via other programs rather then always having to use the configuration UI). I could of course completely remove the program and reinstall it with different settings, but after painstakingly cataloging nearly 500 movies there is no way I want to redo that. So a conversion tool along with a little more control over location and such would definitely be a plus in this area. I did find tools online to do the conversion if I really wanted to (at a moderate cost), I couldn't find anyway to point MP to the converted database afterwards. I've been using MP for a couple months now and am pretty familiar with it...so I don't think I'm missing a feature here that would do what I want, but if I am...please someone point me in the right direction.

Jason

 

[hwahrmann]

Jason,

thi is the thread for the MP Tag Editor. Your enhancement ideas are meant for MediaPortal itself.
should be posted elsewhere.

thanks,

Helmut

 

[RaceNJason]

Helmut,

Hmmm...not overly clear that is the case. I see 'General Forums' with a thread in it that says 'Idea Collection Thread' (via the main page for General Forums) and the contents of the post doesn't say anything about MP Tag Editor. Instead it simply says:

"Now that the toool is used by quite a few people, i'd ask you to post ideas for future enhacements to this thread"

I had no idea what tool it was even referring to. And of course after you point it out I can easily see at the top of this page (that I'm typing this reply on) that it belongs to the MPTagThat subcategory (something I hadn't noticed before). I basically didn't want to start a new thread when one potentially already exists (since someone always seems to chastise you for doing that) and a brief overview of the main category and thread definitely didn't help me since I apparently got it wrong (and it's still not clear exactly what category/subcategory/thread I should be posting this to after taking a second look around along with a few searches...seems somewhat disorganized to me).

Anyway, thanks for letting me know...I'll just drop it and forget about trying to tell any of the developers these ideas because it seem too much of a pain just to find a thread this should belong to along with no direct methods to do this either (and based on finding that one post from about 3 years ago that is nearly identical to the first idea I posted which still hasn't been done tells me that none of my ideas will very likely be acted upon anyway...at least via this forum that is). In every one of my (Neural Science's) commercial products I have a menu link in the help section that says "Make a Suggestion..." which provides a direct means for users to easily send in ideas (that along with another menu link that says "Report a Bug..."). It's simple, clean and very easy to use. In return it gets way more users involved in sending ideas (or bugs) in since it takes very little effort on their part to do so. No forums to weed through, no websites to visit and search through, no time wasted on the users behalf.

Jason

 

[sweetdude]

Would it be possible to include an option to modify the search paramaters used to grab the album cover art?

I have my double CD's tagged in the album tag with (1 of 2) and (2 of 2) on the end of the album name, to make sure both "discs" appear separately in the music view. This usually throws the album cover art grabber, and I get no results, until I re-tag the album without the suffix. An option to modify the search parameters, both when album art is returned, and when no album art is returned (more important) would be good.

This issue also exists in the lyrics search. If a title or artist name has strange signs like üö / ' in the name the lyrics won't be found for that song or even artist. For example tag a Mötley Crüe album from the internet and the artist name will be set to "Mötley Crüe" do a lyrics search and nothing is found. change the artist name to "Motley Crue" and lyrics will be found. Songs with a " ' " (apostrophe) in the name also gives back a N/A in the lyrics search.

Here are a few wishes, prompted by a recent experience. I just ripped an opera from 3 CDs with 73 tracks and tried to find Cover Art for it using MPTagThat.
I only needed to download one picture (the album cover), but since I had the whole directory selected, MPTagThat insisted on scanning each track for a picture. It would be nice to have:
1. some way to tell MPTagThat to just find a folder thumb for the directory instead of tagging each file
2. a dialog button to "Cancel All", instead of having to individually cancel each of the 73 individual searches
3. keyboard shortcuts for all dialog buttons (e.g. "C" or "Alt-C" for "Cancel")
4. consistent default selection of one of the buttons (e.g. "Cancel") in each dialog
5. consistent sequential selection nof dialog buttons using the "TAB" key
for MPTagThat and all of your great contributions to MediaPortal

The cancel all button would still be very usefull. I usually search via MP tag that for album art but if the program gives me a small album cover back (less then 500 x 500) i want to manually update it.
So, i click cancel to abandon the album at finder but it goes to the next track with the same result i don't want till it reaches the end of the selected tracks.

 

[rsbrux]

For the Conversion facility, I would like to have either:

1. Separate settings for the destination path, based on output type. If I am creating MP3s, I generally like them to be filed by Album Artist and by Album, but if I am creating WAVs, I am more likely to want them all in the same directory.
2. Maybe even better (and almost certainly easier) would be to provide a way to override the settings somewhere on the Conversion page. That way I could set up the directory hierarchy I usually like for MP3s in the settings, and just override it on the occasions when I ma doing some other kind of conversion.

P.S. For the Burner function, it would also be nice to have some way to at least see, or better still, influence which directory is used as temporary file storage.

 

[bugmenot]

I would like to see a portable version of MPTagThat. I like to have portable applications on my USB drive and it'd be great if the settings could be portable with it.

 

[hwahrmann]

I would like to see a portable version of MPTagThat. I like to have portable applications on my USB drive and it'd be great if the settings could be portable with it.

You can copy the MPTagThat folder from the Program Files folder to the stiick.
Start MPTagthat with the "/portable" switch. Then it'll use the config from the local folder like a portable app.
Of course the target machine needs to have .Net 4.0 installed.

 

[ElDog]

It would be nice to have a tool which allows to convert all tags of the selected files to unicode. I have a lot of music with cyrillic tags, on windows pc they are all shown correctly because the default codepage is set to cyrillic. But when transferred to mediaplayers they become unreadable. Currently to change tags to unicode I have to change them manually, save and then change back. Or to use another utility, mp3tag, it allows to select a bunch of files and save their tags even if not changed. But mptagthat is much more convenient otherwise.

 

[hwahrmann]

It would be nice to have a tool which allows to convert all tags of the selected files to unicode. I have a lot of music with cyrillic tags, on windows pc they are all shown correctly because the default codepage is set to cyrillic. But when transferred to mediaplayers they become unreadable. Currently to change tags to unicode I have to change them manually, save and then change back. Or to use another utility, mp3tag, it allows to select a bunch of files and save their tags even if not changed. But mptagthat is much more convenient otherwise.

I'll see if i can do that via a Script.