Ideas for Music Section (1 Viewer)

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jameson_uk

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  • January 27, 2005
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    I have been through the couple of threads about improving music section / creating a new music plugin but there is very little in there that is a firm idea of what could actually be changed / implemented.

    I see a couple of recurring themes
    (1) Playlists are bad
    (2) I want music section to be like TV series / Moving Pictures
    (3) Music is not intuitive

    but there is very little substance to this....

    I am looking for more details on what you want to see improved. eg. for playlists what actually is it that you don't like? Is it creating, manipulating, loading, lack of smart playists ??

    The TV series one confuses me too, is it the fact that TV series has eye-candy? TV series does what it does well but remember that it is dealing with a limited set of data and all the data is retrieved from a good source but dependant on you naming your files correctly. Music is far more complicated; many more ways to sort the data and many more more sources. Eg. I saw one good idea about having artist / album info on some screen (possibly whilst browsing the collection, possibly in now-playing) the problem with this is sourcing the data. TV series can easily pickup a synopsis of the series / season / episode but for music you have masses and masses of data

    Take Aerosmith for example, the two main sources of music info (allmusic.com and last.fm) have more than enough data to full several pages let alone fit into a small area on an existing screen and still be useful
    Aerosmith | AllMusic
    Aerosmith?s Biography ? Free listening, videos, concerts, stats, & pictures at Last.fm
    and this is just the bio so you will need to add albums, genres... to this.
    The data is available in MP just on a different screen.

    I am not going to discuss tagging as I think this is a given for all music programs and I can't see this changing for MP1. Basically if you want a good music experience then tag your music ;) (no different to TV series where you have to set your metadata first by naming the files correctly)

    I am also not really looking for feedback on how it looks. A lot of skins use the Fanart Handler plugin to create some great looking pages and MP still needs to cater for users with low spec machines so the core MP look is not going to change.

    I am not saying anything is going to change but if ideas come back which we are able to implement we will consider them. If not the ideas will be taken into account for MP2.
     

    jameson_uk

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    So as a starter I have a couple of things I am looking at already

    • Adding the ability to love / ban now-playing tracks on last.fm profile
    • Adding disc# to the list of available tags in views
    • Adding the ability to skip levels of views where only a single item exists


    One thing I would possibly like to see if a multi-purpose now-playing screen so you could switch between fanart, vizualisations, tag info, artist / album info

    I personally do not like the current setup where pressing ok on a track will play it and then queue up remaining tracks in the view you are looking at. I would like to be able to configure this to allow ok to add just the track you want to the playlist.
     

    pilehave

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    I would like too see all the properties exposed to the skin, with the info that is shown when you look up an album on [insert valid sources here]. This would make the Music section a lot more attractive. If it could scan the database from MediaPortal Configuration like Videos or Moving Pictures, this would be awesome.

    The least it should do is use the genres and year properties from the current source (is that Amazon?)
     

    Guzzi

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    AW: Ideas for Music Section

    Hi jameson_uk,
    "inspired" from the infos of your post, i checked the links and was very pleased by the infos provided by lastfm (never used the website, only the plugin ...)
    I think for music lovers, adding the available infos to the musicplugin makes it more attractive. I have seen, there is already a table "artistinfo" - so adding biographyinfos and pictures shouldn't be too difficult - mostly a scraper would be needed.
    Further i agree to pilehave, that available infos should be exposed to the skin - so skinner can make attractive GUIs.
    btw - when scraping is done anyway, reading and adding the links to the musicvideos also wouldn't be too bad...
     

    jameson_uk

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    Re: AW: Ideas for Music Section

    I have seen, there is already a table "artistinfo" - so adding biographyinfos and pictures shouldn't be too difficult - mostly a scraper would be needed.
    :confused: there already is a scraper that populates this table...

    bring up the context menu on an artist / album and there should be a show album / artist info option :D
     

    Guzzi

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    AW: Re: AW: Ideas for Music Section

    I have seen, there is already a table "artistinfo" - so adding biographyinfos and pictures shouldn't be too difficult - mostly a scraper would be needed.
    :confused: there already is a scraper that populates this table...

    bring up the context menu on an artist / album and there should be a show album / artist info option :D

    Yes, i have seen the context menu and hoped, it would work as you mentioned, but it doestn#t find any info and the mentioned table is completely empty in my DB ... is there any settings for the scraper or debud infos or is it hardcoded?
    Is there a way to populate the db with website infos - similar to reading the mp3 Tags into DB?
     

    jameson_uk

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

    Yes, i have seen the context menu and hoped, it would work as you mentioned, but it doestn#t find any info and the mentioned table is completely empty in my DB ... is there any settings for the scraper or debud infos or is it hardcoded?
    Is there a way to populate the db with website infos - similar to reading the mp3 Tags into DB?

    Doh that is me:oops:
    0003089: Retrieving Artist Info / Album Info is no longer working - MediaPortal Bugtracker
    allmusic.com (where data is scraped from) changed their layout. This is working again in MP 1.2
     

    Guzzi

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    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...
     

    jameson_uk

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    I would like too see all the properties exposed to the skin
    The AlbumInfo class has
    Code:
        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
    Code:
        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
     

    BugsBunny

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    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.
    See here also:
    https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...on-square-cd-covers-now-playing-screen-59177/
     
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