Ideas for Music Section (3 Viewers)

[joostzilla]

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?

But why not add the artist and you have the meedio view. (although it should be presented in a better way )

I think that the current music section isnt really that bad but we have to distinguish two things. One being the features and two being the presentation of these features. The meedio approach isnt really about features but about how do we show things to make the user interface better.

 

[jameson_uk]

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?

This is the default artist view Most of the rest of the data you are talking about is now available (in latest code) and if skinners want to show this data they can (although the artist bio would need to scraped first; and I am going to look at improving this next)

Record Label is not in the database and I had a quick look and does not appear to be in the ID3 library we use (tablib sharp) so this won't be added. Codec again is not in taglib but IMHO I don't think many people want to see this; either way there is no way we can really add this

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.

This is something I will attempt to look at with the artist / album info scraping.

 

[jameson_uk]

But why not add the artist and you have the meedio view. (although it should be presented in a better way )

I suppose but this is a single view so queries can be hard coded and being random I only need to have say three albums on a screen at any time and I don't need to store masses amount of data about what has been selected where and maintain four different lists (A-Z, artist, album, tracks)

But even with this view, what would happen if you wanted to browse your collection by genre, date added or year?

Just looked again at the Meedios idea and I am not sure we could even implement this in the MP skin engine...

I will have a quick look at a jukebox plugin (separate to music plugin) and see how easy that is

I think that the current music section isnt really that bad but we have to distinguish two things. One being the features and two being the presentation of these features. The meedio approach isnt really about features but about how do we show things to make the user interface better.

Agreed but the two are quite deeply linked in our code and as above I don't have the time for a full rewrite.

 

[emphatic]

Thanks a lot! I understand that such details as Record Label often isn't included in ID3 tags, that's why I suggested the use of Discogs API in the first place. I don't want to push this getting included into the MePo Music plugin, but as there's an API available already, I just don't get why someone versed in the art of plugin coding won't see how great it would be as a companion plugin.

Another great addition would be the ability to use Record label as a filter, especially for Dance Music. This is because in this genre, labels are often closely tied to a special "sound". I think this is true for most non-mainstream type of music, like Punk Rock, Jazz etc.

Would it be possible to at least add some extra fields in the MediaPortal database? So if a plugin comes along, these values have a place to go? Like:

Producer
Remixer
Record Label
Release Date
Review

The idea here would be to not rush inclusion of new features, but rather open ports for them (by use of a later developed plugin) to be integrated smoothly.

Emph

 

[Helios61]

AW: Ideas for Music Section

And please do not forget the labels "Composer" (SONGWRITER in cuesheet) and conductor! IMO it is very important for operas and classical music!

 

[jimwin]

How about a few new features on Playlists: I'd like to be able to resume an audio playlist from the point I last got to, ie, at least the track if not the position in the track.

I'd also like support for audiobooks. The big thing to allow this would be the resume feature above, but I guess support for downloading appropriate cover art etc would be a bonus.

 

[emphatic]

Btw, podcast support would be awesome.

How? You have a tab in setup where you input RSS links to your Podcasts and then they would appear in MediaPortal so that you could a) download them manually or b) in setup you can choose to have them automatically downloaded.

But perhaps this is something that some other plugin could be used for
Emph

 

[mbuzina]

Just my 2ct (thanks for working on this)

* Jukebox / Party Mode would be great.
** Show a Now Playing Screen with nice Album / Fan / Viz Art und a single button "Request a Song" (or talk to the DJ ;-) )
** When requesting a song have a very simple user interface where you can look around for a song. Maybe use a directory like structure as
> Albums
>> Album A
>> Album B
>> ...
> Artists
>> Artist A
>> Artist B

(Maybe do smart indexing, if there are more than X entries, index by letter and lazy-load the list)
** Allow for seaching by SMS style text entry (I know is hard to incl. the global search plugin)
** Exiting the Party Mode only by entering a PIN
** Unable to skip songs, ffw, rev etc.
** Have scrobbling to make sure music never ends
** Optionally: Prefer starred or otherwise marked "party songs"

* Audiobooks support is a must for any audio player and why should it be hard? For every album just remember where you left of last time. Maybe add an alternative download source for covers, but that is something for later.
* podcasts is nice but for me not top of the list.

Otherwise: I like the music plugin as it is, but yes a more itunes like search and views incorporating different filter criteria in one would be nice, but lets keep something for MP2 ...

 

[emphatic]

Here's something I just thought about:

* Better multi-disc support - If you have an album that consists of multiple discs, MediaPortal will just add a 1 to the beginning of the CD1 track numbers, then a 2 to the CD2 track numbers etc. Can this be improved somehow? Like if you click on an album with "Enter"/"OK", you'd get a visual cue that this is a multi-disc album? I think that "101.Track title" looks too much like a "data list".

Disc 01
01.Track Title
02.Track Title

Disc 02
01. Track Title
Etc.

would perhaps look better?

It would look really cool if the two discs' contents where presented in two square fields side by side, and clicking right/left would take you directly from one disc to the next. The selected disc would be zoomed in so that you can view the track names better, perhaps some type of Film strip or Cover Flow animation? I can do a mockup picture later if this sounds interesting enough.

Emph

 

[Mike Lowrey]

That's a really good point... Multi Disc is nowhere presented in a nice way