Ideas for Music Section (2 Viewers)

[emphatic]

I always use the "Album artist" tag for sorting my albums, as I have plenty of compilations. But if you have FLAC files, this tag is ignored, and "Artist" seems to be used instead. Is MediaPortal not 100% compatible with FLAC tags? It also seems that the "use embedded artwork" has it's limits, as while all of my files have artwork embedded, not all show up in MediaPortal, even after a fresh import.

I really hope that the manual database editor tab will happen, as getting all artist info/thumbs is impossible from whatever scraper MediaPortal is using.
Emph

 

[jameson_uk]

Jukebox mode and on-fly search like in moving pictures using remote. Last one is really needed!

Jukebox mode is something I am looking at as a separate plugin

Something probably like

but this will most likely be on hold until I get the other stuff working. (jukebox can wait 1.2 beta can not....)

 

[hwahrmann]

I always use the "Album artist" tag for sorting my albums, as I have plenty of compilations. But if you have FLAC files, this tag is ignored, and "Artist" seems to be used instead. Is MediaPortal not 100% compatible with FLAC tags? It also seems that the "use embedded artwork" has it's limits, as while all of my files have artwork embedded, not all show up in MediaPortal, even after a fresh import.

I really hope that the manual database editor tab will happen, as getting all artist info/thumbs is impossible from whatever scraper MediaPortal is using.
Emph

we're 100% Compatible with FLAC tags, we've even made an exception.

There is no official "Album Artist" tag for Vorbis Comments, which are used in Flac files. see here

It always depends on what your preferred Tag Editor writes.
taglib-sharp, which is used by MediaPortal's TagReader and also with my MPTagThat looks for "AlbumArtist" (MPTagThat writes this) and "Band" (TAG &Rename and others use this).
So you need to tag accordingly.

There are no limits in "use embedded artwork".
If the embedded art work can be converted to an image. we will save it to a jpg.
If there are any errors, you should see them in the log.
The fact that it isn't shown in MP, doesn't necessarily mean, that it hasn't been saved.
You should check your Thumbs Albums folder. Maybe it's just a naming issue.

What should the Manual Database Editor do in terms of Cover Art?
We're not storing any Cover Art in the database.
So all this could do is using a scraper. Maybe we make it configurable, but this is a lot of work, which i'm not sure we can do in a short time frame.

 

[jameson_uk]

I always use the "Album artist" tag for sorting my albums, as I have plenty of compilations. But if you have FLAC files, this tag is ignored, and "Artist" seems to be used instead. Is MediaPortal not 100% compatible with FLAC tags?

All my collection is FLAC and I use Album Artist and all is good. What are you using to tag your files?

It also seems that the "use embedded artwork" has it's limits, as while all of my files have artwork embedded, not all show up in MediaPortal, even after a fresh import.

Again never had an issue with artwork not showing. Are these massive pictures? I have a feeling it may ignore images over a certain size but mine are generally 500x500 and working ok too.

I really hope that the manual database editor tab will happen, as getting all artist info/thumbs is impossible from whatever scraper MediaPortal is using.
Emph

I am hoping to get this done but it is quite a bit of work....

I did knock up a very simple artist thumb grabber (external to MP) as I found the audioscrobbler plugin was not always getting the right image (https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...review-has-darkgray-borders-79446/#post593915) this is pretty basic but I think it still works

 

[emphatic]

What should the Manual Database Editor do in terms of Cover Art?
We're not storing any Cover Art in the database.
So all this could do is using a scraper. Maybe we make it configurable, but this is a lot of work, which i'm not sure we can do in a short time frame.

Well, album art can be embedded, so that's not a problem, but the ability to add artist thumbs manually would be a huge advantage as they're not 100% available from the scraper that MediaPortal currently uses. And many of the available ones are low res only. Also, you can't pick and choose, and should you choose the wrong artist info, it's not possible AFAIK to remove the wrong info and replace it with the right one.

Downloading MPTagThat now, been using MP3Tag for my FLAC files before.
Emph

 

[Dadeo]

Great list jameson_uk -Thanks! WOW - nice progress - keep that list for our docs requirements

 

[jameson_uk]

Great list jameson_uk -Thanks! WOW - nice progress - keep that list for our docs requirements

I am getting there

 

[hwahrmann]

What should the Manual Database Editor do in terms of Cover Art?
We're not storing any Cover Art in the database.
So all this could do is using a scraper. Maybe we make it configurable, but this is a lot of work, which i'm not sure we can do in a short time frame.

Well, album art can be embedded, so that's not a problem, but the ability to add artist thumbs manually would be a huge advantage as they're not 100% available from the scraper that MediaPortal currently uses. And many of the available ones are low res only. Also, you can't pick and choose, and should you choose the wrong artist info, it's not possible AFAIK to remove the wrong info and replace it with the right one.

Downloading MPTagThat now, been using MP3Tag for my FLAC files before.
Emph

So the Database editor should show you the Artist / Albums found in the Music Database and present you with Covers we currently think are appropriate (Thumbs folder (Artist / Album), folder.jpg, embedded)?
And allow you then to somehow assign e.g. an artist image? By copying it then into the Artists thumbs folder or even store it as folder.jpg?

Understood it right?

 

[jameson_uk]

So the Database editor should show you the Artist / Albums found in the Music Database and present you with Covers we currently think are appropriate (Thumbs folder (Artist / Album), folder.jpg, embedded)?
And allow you then to somehow assign e.g. an artist image? By copying it then into the Artists thumbs folder or even store it as folder.jpg?

Understood it right?

Was thinking a little simpler than this and doing something like fanart handler. have a list of artists / album artists (I am not bothered about artist thumbs but I guess some people might be). Anyway I am not sure whether it would be possible to be artist info and thumb on the same page but I would have a list of artists (possibly with columns for bio etc) and a single thumb showing the thumb for highlighted artist from artist thumb folder.

The screen would have a button to grab artist images (single artist, all artists, only those without images) and also scrape artits info (same options).

What would be amazing would be to offer a choice of thumbs (possibly based on an option to pick best thumb automatically) and then let user choose. Any thumbs picked up here would then be saved to artist thumb folder


Then there would be a similar screen for albums although I am not sure whether to bother about thumbs here as you get into the mess of finding thumbs from different sources??

 

[emphatic]

Ideally, the "editor tab" would be similar to that in the Movies database, but I understand it will be too much work. But would it be possible to have a "reset" button for the Artist/Album info page in MediaPortal (when you browse artists then hit F9) along with the "update", as this seems to assume that the info retrieved is correct? Because for some reason, much of the info the scraper gets has very little data (sometimes only date of birth and how interesting is that exactly? ). And if you press "Update", the scraper doesn't do a completely new search, but instead just reloads the "chosen" data. Would it be possible to have the scraper put the matches containing most data at the top of the list?

Also, should there be an editor for the music database (integrated in the Music section or as a standalone app), the "reset", i.e. blank items could be filtered, so you can show only the empty entries and edit them manually. I have put too much time into tagging my music now, so I actually see red when items show up incorrectly sorted, or with blank info/thumbs. Maybe I should get help?

Emph