Ideas for Music Section (1 Viewer)

[jameson_uk]

I'm not sure if this is already possible but can you have a button to add a song to a playlist/queue? So if a song is playing rather than having to go menu/add to playlist you can say press blue and it will add the song to the current playlist.

This is something I would like to do... currently trying to figure out the best way to to do this

 

[emphatic]

* Support for portable devices (after a one time setup, instant recognition with local/device stored playlist support)

I don't plan on looking at this. The whole portable device thing is far too messy.

* Global search box with input for keyboard and SMS-style (for your remote control)

But as previously, how do you expect this to work? why is existing global search plugin not enough?

Sorry for lifting all of the ideas that was in store for MusicEvolution. I must admit that I was on the fence about these features myself, but I don't think leaving out ideas just because I'm biased againt them is very nice.

* Additional playlist paths can be set up in MP configuration

This is something we can probably look at

Thanks, my idea.

* Careful RegEx parser for "automatic" finding of artist/album-data from files with lack of proper ID3 tagging
* User interaction for unmatched/conflicting files directly in GUI like MP TV-Series
* Commit downloaded data to ID3-tag (available as "Hidden feature" in the GUI?)

As above, I agree 100% with hwahrmann and don't intend to do anthing about tagging inside of MP. This goes for importing media too

This RegEx parser idea, is meant to use as an alternative to tagged files. This data would be written into the database and then pulled up in MePo instead of the (missing) ID3 data. So no ID3 changes would take place. The "Commit downloaded data to ID3-tag" was an additional feature that the small MusicEvolution team discussed to be available as a backend feature first and foremost. Or a a feature that could be added to MPTagThat (import data from music database).

* Support for online data grabbing with script support like Moving Pictures for localization

Not sure what this data grabbing is for? If for tags then as above, if for artist info/album info then MP already grabs this info

To get album reviews for example in the user's native language.

* "Hidden" advanced GUI options - show file path | mark database entries as incorrect/re-scan

Not sure what this actualy means or what use it is

This was an idea that if you'd get a "bad scan" i.e. wrong results from an online source where the song names would not match your local files, you could get the file path visible in the GUI as well as "ear mark" them as having a bad tag. This would then be carried to the backend, so that you could filter out all the correctly tagged ones when you want to fix your ID3 tags.

* Multiple layouts to choose from in GUI

you can already choose from several different layouts in GUI

Yes, but you have to setup "views" in Configuration, something that most novice users of MediaPortal seems to find hard to grasp. Having "view settings" inside the GUI (in Settings/Music) would be a nice feature. Like "Group artists by letter" on/off etc.

* Ability to give the plugin a custom name to show up in Home/Plugins list

As a default plugin not something I will consider

This isn't very important, I agree.

* In-Plugin Artwork browser - A browser to watch the scraper results for artwork, and also browse, select, delete existing artwork

Something that I will probably look at but this might end up being a new plugin

Thanks!

But more important is the possibility to import scrapers, so that should some data source "dry up", the scraper can be kept up to date more easily than hardcoded stuff. I have been looking at discogs.com and they have API for data collection: API Documentation

Using the Discogs API, display of "online" data rather than ID3 data can optionally be chosen instead of ID3 tagged data for display in the music section. For example, if you notice that one of your albums are not properly tagged, you can switch to data from Discogs by a menu selection and if you see that the data matches correctly, you can save the data into the database for this item.

again I am not planning to move away from ID3 tags. Possibly something for MP2 but for MP1 I think we will have to assume stuff is tagged correctly

All of my stuff is tagged correctly, but there are additional stuff that would be nice to get, like "Label", producer credits etc. Perhaps even let skinners use record label logos? Also, if you look at more obscure artists @ the discogs site, you'll notice that most have artist photos etc, something that's often missing when using Last.fm etc.

Thanks for considering these ideas.
Emph

 

[jameson_uk]

Thanks for considering these ideas.

No problems

What I want to do is improve what we have rather than radically change or improve things.

I think importing based on anything other than ID3 tag is possible but I think I may consider doing something on this but as a separate plugin.

 

[emphatic]

I think importing based on anything other than ID3 tag is possible but I think I may consider doing something on this but as a separate plugin.

Well, cul8er has his XFactor Music Info plugin (only distributed along with his skins) that displays some of the Last.fm/Audioscrobbler data in the GUI without having to press the "Show album/artist info" in the context menu. Like short reviews of albums etc. My main point is, it would be very nice for us users to choose the site from where this info is collected. Or just be able to import/choose scraper scripts in Configuration. Perhaps approaching him about expanding his plugin as a team effort?

The good thing about using scraped song titles etc, it that as everything comes from the same site, there's (hopefully) a standard to everything. If you're displyaing ID3 tag data, unless you've ALWAYS used the same software for all of your tagging, the displayed data might be different. Some "Track name" fields might contain track number as well etc. If you buy mp3's online, different stores have different standards etc. I'm sure you get what I'm trying to say.


Emph

 

[jameson_uk]

Well, cul8er has his XFactor Music Info plugin (only distributed along with his skins) that displays some of the Last.fm/Audioscrobbler data in the GUI without having to press the "Show album/artist info" in the context menu. Like short reviews of albums etc. My main point is, it would be very nice for us users to choose the site from where this info is collected. Or just be able to import/choose scraper scripts in Configuration. Perhaps approaching him about expanding his plugin as a team effort?

We have already implemented something to expose all the artist and album info that has already scraped to skins so it is possible to for the data to be exposed where and when wanted. What I would like to do is add a new tab in the music config application to make scraping artist and album info easier (and possibly artist thumbs). It might be an idea to look at last.fm instead of / as well as allmusic.com as this does allow other languages

The good thing about using scraped song titles etc, it that as everything comes from the same site, there's (hopefully) a standard to everything. If you're displyaing ID3 tag data, unless you've ALWAYS used the same software for all of your tagging, the displayed data might be different. Some "Track name" fields might contain track number as well etc. If you buy mp3's online, different stores have different standards etc. I'm sure you get what I'm trying to say.

Use some software which allows you to fix tags... I am sure some software allows you to ensure that everything is standardised (ie. remove track number and artist names from track titles, files names etc)
Problem with this scraping is the amount of configuration needed and manual intervention really does not lend itself to a 10' UI

 

[nfox]

What I want to do is improve what we have rather than radically change or improve things.

Shame.

I'd really like to see the whole Music plugin reworked from the ground up rather than adding more bells and whistles to a very clunky interface.

As an example of what I think the music plugin should be like I give you MeediOS • View topic - [Official Thread] JukeBox Module

 

[joostzilla]

What I want to do is improve what we have rather than radically change or improve things.

Shame.

I'd really like to see the whole Music plugin reworked from the ground up rather than adding more bells and whistles to a very clunky interface.

As an example of what I think the music plugin should be like I give you MeediOS • View topic - [Official Thread] JukeBox Module

What i like very much about this example is the displaying of Artist, album and tracks at once. In MP this will take 3 different screens. So getting lost in your collection is very likely.
It would be great if this was possible in MP.

 

[jameson_uk]

I'd really like to see the whole Music plugin reworked from the ground up rather than adding more bells and whistles to a very clunky interface.

What is clunky though? this is what I am after in this thread and was lacking in the other music plugin threads. I am looking for details of I don't understand what happens when I click..., I want to go straight to.... Also ideas of what you would do to improve that.

I simply do not have the time to create a music plugin from scratch as this is a much much bigger job than you might think. Take TV series, this has an import which scans a share based on name and then matches this to a single source then there are only a few actual pieces of data stored (series name, series, episode plus a couple of bits of data. Thumbs and details are loaded from this one single source. TV Series does what it does really well and has had a massive amount of work spent on it (and I love it ) and this is not saying that TV Series was easy but rather that this was hard and music is even more work


Now take music, you need a much bigger import with many many more attributes (some of which you need to code for having multiple values; eg. artist, genre etc) you then have to cope with different types of tags (and some variances in tags from different players like ratings from WMP, iTunes etc) not to mention that you have to read many many different types of files to get the data (rather than just parsing a file name). On top of that you have ID3 v1 and v2 tags and different versions within these let alone CUE sheets and things like that...


Now even when you have the import side sorted you then have so many more issues in music than you do elsewhere. You have playlists, scrobbling, getting dynamic info from last.fm, scraping artist / album info, vizualisations to think about.

The the main thing you have is user interaction, you have all this info and you need to have a customizable way of accessing the data (customizable views). And you are limited a little by the MP skin engine.

A large chunk of this works very well in the current plugin but all the code is so linked in that it would be difficult to take bits out and re-use them.

Also a little side issue is that plugins like MusicTrivia and GlobalSearch would not work with a changed setup.

There are probably lots and lots of other things I have not put down here but this should give the idea of the size of the task at hand. Then you need to add all these things like portable devices, auto-playlists, importers that are not based on tags, scraping tags from the internet and then writing them to files

As an example of what I think the music plugin should be like I give you MeediOS • View topic - [Official Thread] JukeBox Module

In terms of what though? looks are skin issue but having three different sets of data on screen is not possible with the current plugin and everything is so linked together this would require the full rewrite... (Also whilst I loved the flexibility and ease of use of Meedio, I don't actually like the look of this screen and I am not how well it would cope with massive collections (or multi-disc albums)

 

[jameson_uk]

Thinking of Meedio, is anyone interested in a jukebox view?

In my simple thinking this would be a set of albums down the right and a list of tracks on the right which would change depending on which album was selected (albums would be presented in random order)

Clicking on tracks would add them to a playlist.

Anyone interested in that?

 

[emphatic]

I would like to have views that are a pretty much "translation" of TV-Series:

Series -> Artist
Season -> Album
Episode -> Track
Genre -> Genre
Available mediainfo -> Codec, Record Label, Bitrate, Cue-sheet/tracks

When you have an artist selected, you see a short artist bio, when you browse an artist/groups albums you see a short review of them, and instead of a show plot for each episode, each track will show the lyric to the selected track. I don't know if all of the above is already possible with very clever skinning?

In the backend (MePo Configuration) I'd like to have the same option as in Video Database, so you can manually change artist photo(s), album cover art etc.

I'd like to see (rather than a pure Jukebox mode) some sort of "Party mode" where it's IMPOSSIBLE to skip the play queue, i.e. "Play Now" is canceled out momentarily unless you enter a pin code or something. Play, pause, stop etc will still work. Perhaps in the Configuration you can enable/disable certain player commands for this particular mode?

Emph