Music Improvements for 1.4 (2 Viewers)

RicoHTPC

MP Donator
  • Premium Supporter
  • February 4, 2011
    1,441
    172
    Cuxhaven
    Home Country
    Germany Germany
    That was only supposed to mean "and so on", so don't mind.
     

    emphatic

    Design Group
  • Team MediaPortal
  • August 25, 2006
    3,717
    1,178
    Alingsås
    Home Country
    Sweden Sweden
    Glad to see you back at this, jameson_uk! :)

    I had some ideas that I posted in the other thread but didn't get much feedback on, so I lost interest in coming up with more. I'll re-post them here:

    * How about using http://www.theaudiodb.com/ as info provider?
    Community driven API.

    * Add "Now Playing" option to F9 context menu.

    When music is playing, while browsing music (artists, albums, tracks or files) you hit F9 and you have Now Playing in the options shown instead of having to go to the hidden menu then keep on navigating to go to it. If you add Now Playing to the bottom of the F9 list, it's just F9 then UP to get to it.


    * I'd love to be able to load a playlist, click "Show current playlist" then have some filtering options in a context menu (F9, Info, Right-click):

    Sort playlist->

    Sort by Artist
    Sort by Genre
    Sort by year (Ascending)
    Sort by year (Descending)
    Sort by Duration (Ascending)
    Sort by Duration (Descending)
    Sort by Media format

    Jump to album (show album name of current playing track)
    Single track repeat

    * I would love to be able to have custom filtered categories that I can setup in the backend like Moving Pictures has.




    This way, I can create a playlist without having to go from one genre to another each time.

    Example: I would like to be able to create categories such as:

    Electronica | a collection of these genres: House, Techno, Trance, Electro, Rave, etc (new additions are automatically added to this category)
    Jazz | a collection of these genres: Acid Jazz, Jazz, Samba, Bossa Nova etc.

    Having filters that can either include or exclude genres or artists would be awesome and (I think) a very welcome addition for people with large collections.

    Emph
     

    kiwijunglist

    Super Moderator
  • Team MediaPortal
  • June 10, 2008
    6,746
    1,751
    New Zealand
    Home Country
    New Zealand New Zealand
    regardless of newness if it doesn't have a lot of artists / tracks it's not much use. Gracenote is really professional and has been around forever.
     

    jameson_uk

    Retired Team Member
  • Premium Supporter
  • January 27, 2005
    7,258
    2,528
    Birmingham
    Home Country
    United Kingdom United Kingdom
    -1 for theaudiodb.com , it's pretty crappy with anything that is not mainstream and super popular.

    What about
    1. www.discogs.com
    2. www.gracenote.com (aka thecddb)

    gracenote is probably the best source
    Just had a look at the audio db and there are only 2,000 artists. All I checked just had the text from Wikipedia as the artist info.

    The gracenote license is restrictive (and also as there is advertising on the MP website we would need a commercial license apparently)

    My experience of discogs is pretty poor too and the data quality seems a bit crap.

    All not ideal....

    Last.fm data actually seems pretty good, has an api and is (sometimes) there is different languages.

    Amg is good but getting data us a pain (no api) and breaks quite often.

    Not sure if the best plan here.

    One thing I will be investigating is musicbrainz. It has an api and usefully links to most sites of interest. ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/65f4f0c5-ef9e-490c-aee3-909e7ae6b2ab)
     

    kiwijunglist

    Super Moderator
  • Team MediaPortal
  • June 10, 2008
    6,746
    1,751
    New Zealand
    Home Country
    New Zealand New Zealand
    yeah i dont find last.fm to be that bad. Also I sometimes use amazon.com quite a bit for album info.

    Mediaportal is not for profit, so maybe they will consider it non commercial
     
    Last edited:

    Illuminator

    Portal Pro
    December 6, 2010
    125
    32
    Home Country
    Germany Germany
    Hi james_uk and all other,
    two ideas to make the playlist more handy.
    1. When queueing a song to the playlist, it should be marked (eg different colour). At the moment there is no feedback, that the song is queued. (or I haven't found it...)
    2. In my opinion it would be nice to see the current playlist all the time I'm browsing music. It could be a sort of a splitscreen; on the left side the playlist and on the right side the albums, titles, etc. I think in most cases there is enough room on the screen for this. At least when using list view there is room for the playlist.
    Thanks for reading
     

    wawa79

    Portal Pro
    December 9, 2008
    111
    28
    Niort
    Home Country
    France France
    +10000 for the custom filters.

    I use Mediamonkey custom views features and have to use 2 awfull workaround to get a bit of usability in MP:
    1) I use the 'Conductor' field to group my 9500 tracks in 3 major categories: Classical / Jazz / Pop-Rock-Folk-Electro. But some music can belong to several categories: this can be handled in Mediamonkey but not in MP!
    2) I create playlists from my Mediamonkey groups but then I loose the navigation by level (artist / album / disc and so on)

    First example. when I play the Jazz group, I want to get Adele in the selection, but when I play the Pop-Rock-Folk-Electro group, I also want Adele in the selection... With current Music view implementation, I cannot share a track over several genres.

    Second example. If I want to browse all live performances or all jazz vocal it is just not possible...

    Basically, this could be achieved by adding "CONTAINS / START WITH / DOES NOT CONTAIN" operators in filtering each view level and then tagging the genre with 'composite' genre such as 'Jazz/Live', 'Jazz/Vocal'.
     

    Users who are viewing this thread

    Top Bottom