Ideas for Music Section (4 Viewers)

[emphatic]

I just spent the morning trying to "fill in the blanks" in my Artist list by adding missing thumbs myself directly to the Thumbs\Music\Artists folder. I only added the "artistnameL.jpg" type, as I figured that MediaPortal would created missing thumbs using these, but no thumbs show up for these artists. I've tried running the music reorganizer, but no thumbs show up for these artists. And the names of the artists are based on the thumbs that were already present. I later tried renaming the thumbs and removing the L at the end, and now they are all showing but a few. This is another issue, I have an artist with a "/" in the name, how should the thumb be named to be picked up by MediaPortal?

Emph

 

[jameson_uk]

I just spent the morning trying to "fill in the blanks" in my Artist list by adding missing thumbs myself directly to the Thumbs\Music\Artists folder. I only added the "artistnameL.jpg" type, as I figured that MediaPortal would created missing thumbs using these, but no thumbs show up for these artists. I've tried running the music reorganizer, but no thumbs show up for these artists. And the names of the artists are based on the thumbs that were already present. I later tried renaming the thumbs and removing the L at the end, and now they are all showing but a few.

Off the top of my head MP looks for thumbs without the L first. If it does not find one it gives up. If it does find a thumb it then looks to see if there is a large one

This is another issue, I have an artist with a "/" in the name, how should the thumb be named to be picked up by MediaPortal?

Any dubious characters get replaced with underscore to AC/DC becomes AC_DC

 

[mbuzina]

Re: AW: Re: AW: Re: AW: Ideas for Music Section

that's a good idea - currently I use separate share for nonalbumstuff and exclude this from indexing/DB to avoid having too many "albums" with just one song in it - so your approach would allow reading all tracks into DB and use viewsetting to achieve that - plus searching still would find those singletracks - great!
Re artwork - I think you're right - too many possibilities also from where in what view the artwork may come - plus different qualities - but the approach to distinct it via the sharesource gives a nive improvement e.g. to have one with "properly tagged" stuff and one share with "nonordered stuff" ;-)

Why not tag your singles as album = "Singles"? Use AlbumArtist = Artist and then you have one singles album per artist.

 

[Guzzi]

AW: Re: AW: Re: AW: Re: AW: Ideas for Music Section

Why not tag your singles as album = "Singles"? Use AlbumArtist = Artist and then you have one singles album per artist.

... first you loose the "true name" of a single album - second the former question was dealing about missing artwork - so if you have stuff you just wnat to throw in and find in e.g. a search, but keep it away from your properly tagged musiccollection, the approacjh of differntiating this via the share sounds good to me ...

 

[kiwijunglist]

Re: Add whole list to playlist

** THIS POST WAS ACTUALLY MOVED FROM ANOTHER THREAD SO KINDA DOESNT REALLY MAKE MUCH SENSE ANYMORE ***

enter will play all tracks but it doesn't actually create a playlist.

eg. press enter to start playing a track, mp will play all tracks from the album

However if I

1. Select another track from different album (press y) and then jump to current playlist the playlist does not show the original album i pressed enter on

2. Jump to playlist the playlist will not display what is currently playing

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I think mediaportal my music configuration should have a tab for play button behaviour, example below

Please choose default behaviour for 'play' button, if you select more than one option then a context menu will appear giving you choices;

[ ] Create new playlist .. Creates new playlist with selected item and starts playing
[ ] Queue in playlist .. Adds item to end of current playlist
[ ] Queue as next .. Adds selected item in next position in current playlist
[ ] Add to Quick playlist ........... Mediaportal should have a default playlist called "quick playlist". This will add currently selected item to the quick playlist
[ ] Add to Custom playlist ......... (Dialog box comes up with all playlists in the playlist directory and you can choose a playlist to add to)

**********************

'p' / play button behaviour should be handled as above configuration option

So basically if I want to play everything from an artist I just click the 'p' / play button on the artist
If I want to play one of his albums i press 'enter'/'ok' on the artist then I will see all his albums, and I can press 'p' / play on the album name
If I want to play just one of his tracks I press enter on artist, enter on album and then press either 'p' or 'enter' on the track

To have a context menu come up everytime I press 'ok' / enter on anything would be very bad.

A context menu should appear when i press 'ok' / 'enter' on a single track, ie a terminal item where you can not browse any further sublevels. This context menu would have the following items and is not customisable. We should keep this option as some people don't know that they can use the 'p' key. This would enable such a user to still "play all". Alternatively a little hint box could come up saying press 'p' / 'play' button on any artists / albums / tracks for additional play options. Or you could get both at the same time.

This would be context menu that appears when pressing enter / ok on an item with no sublevels for browsing;

[ ] Play track ... this would play track without creating a new playlist (the current mp enter key behaviour)
[ ] Queue track to end of current playlist
[ ] Queue all to end of current playlist
[ ] Add all to new playlist ... This would create a new playlist with all items and start playing at the currently highlighted item

 

[jameson_uk]

Re: Add whole list to playlist

enter will play all tracks but it doesn't actually create a playlist.

It does... it just creates a different one to the one you can see in the playlist screen. I am going to clear this up so that when you go to the playlist screen it will always show what is queued up to play.

I think mediaportal my music configuration should have a tab for play button behaviour

The more I think about it, the less I think we should change the behaviour of the play button. I think the confusion is really that enter/ok does a different thing and changing how play works would make it inconsistent across other areas of MP

So basically if I want to play everything from an artist I just click the 'p' / play button on the artist
If I want to play one of his albums i press 'enter'/'ok' on the artist then I will see all his albums, and I can press 'p' / play on the album name

This is as it is now and I 99% certain I will not touch this

If I want to play just one of his tracks I press enter on artist, enter on album and then press either 'p' or 'enter' on the track

This is where the confusion creeps in... I have always found two things confusing with enter/ok, one is that in a list of tracks it will queue up all the tracks and start playing the one you selected but there is no screen showing what is actually queued up to play. The other issue for me is that it takes a couple of clicks to add items to a playlist

To have a context menu come up everytime I press 'ok' / enter on anything would be very bad

This will never happen as yes it would be irritating as hell

A context menu should appear when i press 'ok' / 'enter' on a single track, ie a terminal item where you can not browse any further sublevels. This context menu would have the following items and is not customisable. We should keep this option as some people don't know that they can use the 'p' key. This would enable such a user to still "play all". Alternatively a little hint box could come up saying press 'p' / 'play' button on any artists / albums / tracks for additional play options. Or you could get both at the same time.

This would be context menu that appears when pressing enter / ok on an item with no sublevels for browsing;

[ ] Play track ... this would play track without creating a new playlist (the current mp enter key behaviour)
[ ] Queue track to end of current playlist
[ ] Queue all to end of current playlist
[ ] Add all to new playlist ... This would create a new playlist with all items and start playing at the currently highlighted item

But this is popping up a context menu each time your press enter/ok I think context menus should remain as standard using f9/(i) to bring it up not enter

See post I am about to write for my idea...

 

[kiwijunglist]

Re: Add whole list to playlist

enter will play all tracks but it doesn't actually create a playlist.

It does... it just creates a different one to the one you can see in the playlist screen. I am going to clear this up so that when you go to the playlist screen it will always show what is queued up to play.

if it does create a playlist then yes i agree this should be fixed instead of having an invisible playlist that you can never see.

I think mediaportal my music configuration should have a tab for play button behaviour

Please choose default behaviour for 'play' button, if you select more than one option then a context menu will appear giving you choices;

[X] Create new playlist .. Creates new playlist with selected item and starts playing
[ ] Queue in playlist .. Adds item to end of current playlist
[ ] Queue as next .. Adds selected item in next position in current playlist
[ ] Add to Quick playlist .. Mediaportal should have a default playlist called "quick playlist". This will add currently selected item to the quick playlist
[ ] Add to saved playlist .. Dialog box comes up with all playlists in the playlist directory and you can choose a playlist to add to

The more I think about it, the less I think we should change the behaviour of the play button. I think the confusion is really that enter/ok does a different thing and changing how play works would make it inconsistent across other areas of MP

I disagree because with my example above the default setup behaviour for the play button in the play tab would be unchanged compared to how it is currently (ie it creates a new playlist with the currently highlighted item). This would just allow the user to customise it and make it BETTER suited for him, and actually more useful. eg. popup menu with option of new playlist or append to playlist.

I don't think you can compare the music section to videos/live tv as it's completely different. To require everything to be exactly the same in music section would make the music section really poor. It already differs a lot in it's presentation. The way the user interacts and queues up music is generally very different to videos. In fact I would guess that 99.99% of the time users do not use video playlists, with the exception being music videos.

A context menu should appear when i press 'ok' / 'enter' on a single track, ie a terminal item where you can not browse any further sublevels. This context menu would have the following items and is not customisable.

[ ] Play track ... this would play track without creating a new playlist (the current mp enter key behaviour)
[ ] Queue track to end of current playlist
[ ] Queue all to end of current playlist

But this is popping up a context menu each time your press enter/ok I think context menus should remain as standard using f9/(i) to bring it up not enter

See post I am about to write for my idea...

My main issue is with having additional options for the 'p' button behaviour to append to playlists making it a lot more useful. Currently the ok button is faulty when you click on a terminal option because it creates an invisible playlist, so it needs to be changed.

just read the last few pages of this thread. What is the problem with the current audioscrobber scraper for getting last.fm artist/album artist images. Ideally this scraper should be moved so that it resides inside the my music configuration section.

 

[lukaslayne]

One of the biggest problems I can see is there is no SHUFFLE function for ALL music. I have thousands of albums on my PC I don't really want to add individual songs to a playlist as that will take up a lifetime..
Would it be possibe to build a database of the music folder with the option of randomising the contents then be able to load that database while retaining all of the album art and info.

 

[jameson_uk]

One of the biggest problems I can see is there is no SHUFFLE function for ALL music. I have thousands of albums on my PC I don't really want to add individual songs to a playlist as that will take up a lifetime..
Would it be possibe to build a database of the music folder with the option of randomising the contents then be able to load that database while retaining all of the album art and info.

All info should be stored in the database to get the most out of the music section. If you have thousands of albums MP will not cope that well with loading them all into a playlist and then shuffling (it will do it; just a little slowly)

Have you looked at MEDIAPORTAL - One Button Music ?

 

[kiwijunglist]

u beat me to it, "one button music" is where it is at for what you desire.