Ideas for Music Section (1 Viewer)

[jameson_uk]

One of the most important things for me is better support for non square album art / covers.
Steve Jobs probably tells us that cover art is square or else it is no cover art - but well I hate apple...

Cover art for me is how it represented on the CD and nowadays a lot of CDs do come in a sort of "paperback" case where the cover art is rectangular.
I do use high quality cover art (albumartexchange) and do scan CD covers myself as well.

This is really a skinning issue. The music section allows for non-square artwork it is largely a question of how it is displayed.

The only slight overlap is that the same skin file is needed for both albums and artist thumbs.

 

[Mike Lowrey]

Well i have no real idea what would make a music plug in really good.

But some things i really miss in each media center is an integration of audiobooks and also the integration of podcasts would be a great extension of a music plugin.

 

[jameson_uk]

But some things i really miss in each media center is an integration of audiobooks and also the integration of podcasts would be a great extension of a music plugin.

Sounds like a new plugin. I am not sure how well the existing music code would handle this

 

[jameson_uk]

More ideas please
In current SVN we now have

• disc# available in views
• ability to skip single levels in views (eg, if your view is Artist | Album | disc# | track but there is only one disc# it will bypass this section is defined that way in config)
• ability to change the order of views

I also have a patch being looked at to allow you to love/ban tracks on last.fm from now-playing screen.
I am also knocking up a patch to expose the artist / album info details as properties so they can be used by the skin

There was quite a lot of posts in the various threads about creating a new music plugin so please post your ideas and we may be able to implement some of them...

 

[tourettes]

One of the most important things for me is better support for non square album art / covers.
Steve Jobs probably tells us that cover art is square or else it is no cover art - but well I hate apple..

Actually Steve would say that "What is a coverart, I see only dollars in the music view"

 

[mpsam]

If this were to be completed it would take care of podcasts and audio books. mp-mycollection - Project Hosting on Google Code

 

[GoldenEye]

What I miss most since the old meedio times is the flexibility of its database views – specifically the flexibility of the filters. This flexibility helped solving issues with my collection containing a big variety of genres, jazz, electronic, classical music etc. With such a collection, you face the issue that the composer plays a central role in classical but a minor one in other music: In classical music, I usually decide first to listen to a piece of a specific composer rather than an artist which is the second criterion.

IMO, the issue could be quite easily (?) solved by offering an option to add a selection criterion on the top level of a view as follows:

• 
  Create a view called Classical. Add a the following filter to this top level:
  (genre = “Ballet” | genre = “Choral Music” | genre = “Chamber Music” | genre = “Piano” | genre = “Concerto” | genre = “Symphony”). --> This would ensure that only music with these criteria is shown when accessing the Classical view.

• Add a new "composer" filter (current MP function).

• Add a new "album" filter (current MP function).

In MP, I then could

• Choose the Classical view --> The list of composers of all my classical music appears.

• Choose a composer --> The albums of this composer appears.

Maybe you could take this into account when you improve the music part? Thx for your initiative!

G.

I would like too see all the properties exposed to the skin

The AlbumInfo class has

    private string m_strAlbum = "";
    private string m_strAsin = "";
    private string m_strArtist = "";
    private string m_strAlbumArtist = "";
    private string m_strGenre = "";
    private string m_strTones = "";
    private string m_strStyles = "";
    private string m_strReview = "";
    private string m_strImage = "";
    private string m_strTracks = "";
    private int m_iRating = 0;
    private int m_iYear = 0;

and ArtistInfo class has

    private string m_strArtist = "";
    private string m_strBorn = "";
    private string m_strYearsActive = "";
    private string m_strGenres = "";
    private string m_strTones = "";
    private string m_strStyles = "";
    private string m_strInstruments = "";
    private string m_strAMGBio = "";
    private string m_strImage = "";
    private string m_strAlbums = "";
    private string m_strCompilations = "";
    private string m_strSingles = "";
    private string m_strMisc = "";

Should be simple enough to expose these all to skin if they are in the database

What about the composer and conductor tags?

Thx, G.

 

[joostzilla]

Re: AW: Ideas for Music Section

argh .... i just reverted back to 1.1.1, because i had major performanceissues with 1.2 with big facades ...
will try later - but the scraper is only for the contextmenu, it doestn#t populate the db "globally", right?

edit: Hmmm, I might have a look at the code - porting some of dedas ideas should make it possible to add the pictures via thumbs - and exposing the properties also shouldn#t be too difficult - this would already give quite a good base for improvement.

The second area is "musichandling" - this is 2 things for me.
1.) search funktion - this exists via plugin (globalsearch), but the presentation is not so nice. I made search for myfilms and present the user a step between - search is done in all fields, and in step 1 result is presented like
artist - 10 matches
title - 24 matches,
etc. via GUIdialog. Second step is selecting what you search. This way you don#t get overwhelmed by 1000 results, that are bad to handle.
2.) contextsensitive search - this is something REALLY nice in musicscrobbler - it offers you similar stuff of your dB
it is easy to implement - by a contextmenu "search related", offering again results in e.g. genre, decade, etc.
This makes browsing your db much more convenient...

+1 for a better search function.
When i use itunes (and i'd rather not ) the first thing i do is use the searchfunction. Cause i hate scrolling for the artist/album or whatever. The search field should be available on every music screen (perhaps even on other sections too) and not hidden in a menu. Offcourse there would also be an advanced search button.

What also would be great is the publishing of the musicdatabase to the web for remote controlling purposes. (just like 'Signal' does for the iphone/pod). I know a lot of people would like to have ability to control their music collection without having the Tv on. This should not be to difficult. (i hope )

 

[jameson_uk]

What I miss most since the old meedio times is the flexibility of its database views – specifically the flexibility of the filters. This flexibility helped solving issues with my collection containing a big variety of genres, jazz, electronic, classical music etc. With such a collection, you face the issue that the composer plays a central role in classical but a minor one in other music: In classical music, I usually decide first to listen to a piece of a specific composer rather than an artist which is the second criterion.

I miss the music section of Meedio too They however did simplify things a little and did not have some of the functionality of MP. I think we can nearly do what you want already and perhaps with a little tweak we can come close.
(my initial thought is that you can already set a single restriction so you could have a view
Genre => restriction = "Classical"
Composer
Album
Tracks
and call this view Classical and then it works. Only issue is you want multiple values in restriction which is currently not catered for... I will look at this

What about the composer and conductor tags?

Did not see they were missed, will add them in too

 

[jameson_uk]

Re: AW: Ideas for Music Section

+1 for a better search function.
When i use itunes (and i'd rather not ) the first thing i do is use the searchfunction. Cause i hate scrolling for the artist/album or whatever. The search field should be available on every music screen (perhaps even on other sections too) and not hidden in a menu. Offcourse there would also be an advanced search button.

Not sure the current code really allows for this as the code to get tracks out the database is already quite messy and complicated. Can you give me an example of how you think this would work? (one issue for me here is actually inputting data, I guess a lot of people don't use a keyboard and the virtual keyboard is not great for lots of typing)

What also would be great is the publishing of the musicdatabase to the web for remote controlling purposes. (just like 'Signal' does for the iphone/pod). I know a lot of people would like to have ability to control their music collection without having the Tv on. This should not be to difficult. (i hope )

That is possibly something for another plugin but I don't think it would be massively difficult