Ideas for Music Section (5 Viewers)

[jameson_uk]

I dont believe that if I enter the music section and start playing music it should not start a playlist. I've not asked it to make a playlist so there shouldn't be one. Therefore enter/play should maintain the same function ie play.

Just a quick point here but if playing multiple tracks then you have to have a playlist. This may not be visible to you but it is needed to keep track of what will play next etc

 

[Gup]

Hi,

Love it that music gets reworked!

I think most of the problems lies in the lack of documentation MP has. (basic stuff is documented but fine tuning isn't). I should know as trying to code something for MP is more a trial and error work then actually coding (nothing is documented about MP-API's like GUI controls-properties methods etc), and as we all know if we have to find out by trial and error, 99% of users will loose interest.

As i understand the sort and display is linked.

This is actually a bad idea.

Sorting should nothing have to do with the actually displayed data.

example

i have an artist with x albums

i would like a sort of :

artist-year-album-tracknr-trackname

but NOT also as the display

display should be:

tracknr--trackname-album

I don't know if this is due to the limitations of the GUIListControl.

 

[wonkyd]

I dont believe that if I enter the music section and start playing music it should not start a playlist. I've not asked it to make a playlist so there shouldn't be one. Therefore enter/play should maintain the same function ie play.

Just a quick point here but if playing multiple tracks then you have to have a playlist. This may not be visible to you but it is needed to keep track of what will play next etc

Obviously from a technical point of view there is a playlist but to the user this shouldn't be visible

 

[jameson_uk]

I think most of the problems lies in the lack of documentation MP has. (basic stuff is documented but fine tuning isn't). I should know as trying to code something for MP is more a trial and error work then actually coding (nothing is documented about MP-API's like GUI controls-properties methods etc), and as we all know if we have to find out by trial and error, 99% of users will loose interest.

A new wiki is about to be released any day which should help us massively improvement documentation. What you are talking about though is development stuff which I guess most users are not (and need not be) interested in.
[ot]
Not sure if you have seen this but there is a good source of info available here which implements a large chunk of development code
[/ot]

i would like a sort of :

artist-year-album-tracknr-trackname

but NOT also as the display

display should be:

tracknr--trackname-album

I don't know if this is due to the limitations of the GUIListControl.

First off sorting and display are not directly dependant. The code chooses the order to add items to the list based on the chosen sort method. The displays labels happen to be added at this point but it could be changed.

Your sort however does not really make sense unless you only have a big single list of tracks (which is not a good idea for usability). Using the database views you might have
artist
album
tracks

and you want to sort each level differently. eg. your artist level sort will happen when you are choosing artists but once you have chosen and artist and drilled down to album this would be sorted by year but you no longer need to sort by artist as you have selected one. Again drilling down to the next level you have already selected an album so you no longer need to sort by artist, album or year as they are already chosen. Now when you get down to tracks you want to sort by track number.

If you set the sort method at the bottom level of this view to tracks and then you can adjust the mask used for this sort in the music config from

[%track%. ][%artist% - ][%title%]

to

[%track%. ][%title%] - [%album%]

your labels for all view levels set to tracks will be as above

 

[Dadeo]

True, but when you do that you alter the display of #selecteditem so if you use [%track%. ][%title%] - [%album%] as in your example, you will never actually see the artist name on the Tracks view.

 

[Gup]

First off sorting and display are not directly dependant. The code chooses the order to add items to the list based on the chosen sort method. The displays labels happen to be added at this point but it could be changed.

Your sort however does not really make sense unless you only have a big single list of tracks (which is not a good idea for usability). Using the database views you might have
artist
album
tracks

and you want to sort each level differently. eg. your artist level sort will happen when you are choosing artists but once you have chosen and artist and drilled down to album this would be sorted by year but you no longer need to sort by artist as you have selected one. Again drilling down to the next level you have already selected an album so you no longer need to sort by artist, album or year as they are already chosen. Now when you get down to tracks you want to sort by track number.

If you set the sort method at the bottom level of this view to tracks and then you can adjust the mask used for this sort in the music config from

[%track%. ][%artist% - ][%title%]

to

[%track%. ][%title%] - [%album%]

your labels for all view levels set to tracks will be as above

Well, you already make a decision for me on how i have to do the drilldown.
My point is that i want to set the visible stuff myself :

Like the sort you have now but additional the stuff you want to display.

in the example i give it happens that sorting result in that all tracknrs are listed in sequence.

so u get

01 Title album1
01 Title album2
01 Title album3
02 Title album1
02 Title album2
02 Title album3


which i don't want.

the drilldown i use : artist-->track (no substep to album/year etc)

basicly you get an additional field in MP-config (linked):

Sort :
[%artist%][%year%][%album%][%track%][%title%]
Display :
[%track%. ][%title% - ][%album%]

I think that if you would use a nested sort, you could even skip the entire drilldown stuff.

 

[jameson_uk]

Well, you already make a decision for me on how i have to do the drilldown.
My point is that i want to set the visible stuff myself :

You have sort modes (the ones you set in view definition) and in the sort tab in MP you can set what is displayed.

So what you really want is a different sort mode. A few pages back I did look at this but it would be a large amount of work to implement sorting on more than one field so I said I would not look to implement this (yet)

Out of interest, is there any reason you want a whole list of tracks under artist? Also how many tracks do you have in your collection?

 

[Gup]

Well, you already make a decision for me on how i have to do the drilldown.
My point is that i want to set the visible stuff myself :

You have sort modes (the ones you set in view definition) and in the sort tab in MP you can set what is displayed.

So what you really want is a different sort mode. A few pages back I did look at this but it would be a large amount of work to implement sorting on more than one field so I said I would not look to implement this (yet)

Out of interest, is there any reason you want a whole list of tracks under artist? Also how many tracks do you have in your collection?

Sure, reason is that i don't want to click a 1000 times. If i do it the mp way. i have to step back (out of the album) every time to get to another track on a different album.
I got alot of tracks.................. (artists with 5+ albums + 12 tracks avarage per album orso).

I realize that it would mean alot of code change on the view stuff, but the way i propose you wouldn't need to change the view/sort thats now implemented.

 

[jameson_uk]

I realize that it would mean alot of code change on the view stuff, but the way i propose you wouldn't need to change the view/sort thats now implemented.

Not sure what you mean; there is no way to sort by more then one field now.

 

[Gup]

I realize that it would mean alot of code change on the view stuff, but the way i propose you wouldn't need to change the view/sort thats now implemented.

Not sure what you mean; there is no way to sort by more then one field now.

Yup, thats what i mean.
You can only sort on 1 field.
The way i propose implements an "extra sort" option, without changing the existing code (so no massive code change needed).