My Music - need your thoughts on how to improve and enhance (2 Viewers)

[SteveV]

I've been doing some work on the My Music portion of MP and would like to get user's thoughts on which aspects of My Music they would like to see changed / improved / fixed.

I'm currently working on the following:

Find Coverart
ID3 Tag Reader/Writer
Improved playlist support


Year-end at work has been VERY hectic so I haven't had as much time to work on MP as I would have liked. I should have some time over the holiday break and thought this a good time to start gathering ideas. The initial changes will be focused on improving performance and usability versus adding features.

So post your ideas, comments and suggestions

[EDIT]
Here's a running list, in no particular order, of the suggestions made thus far. I'll continue update the list as people post more ideas:

List edited 1/16/2005

• 
  1.) Shuffle / Un-Shuffle toggle button on main music page
  
  2.) [DONE] FullScreen music view that shows: "Now playing" track title and track cover art, "Up Next" track title
  
  2b.) [DONE] Add Now Playing view
  
  3.) Dragable song trackbar (progressbar) and track elapsed time "0:53 — 3:07" on fullscreen music view (and track thumbnail view??)
  
  4.) "Now Playing" screen saver
  
  5.) Track title popup on track change (a la MTV)
  
  6.) Improved visualization support
  
  7.) Fullscreen Viz support with Track title popup on track change
  
  8.) Extended ID3 tag info collection and database field population
  
  9.) Smart Playlist (selects track based on past listening habits, BPMs, Artists??)
  
  10.) Random picture slide show option
  
  11.) Sound EQ
  
  12.) [DONE] Ability to "Play this share" "Play this album", "Play this artist"
  
  13.) Improve My Music and playlist load speed
  
  14.) Enhanced party mode track selection
  
  15.) Accurate track-to-track normalization offset without altering the original replay gain data
  
  16.) Scroll playlist tracklist to sync currently playing track. Highlight currently playing track with a color other that the standard "button focus" color (functionality already exists)
  
  17.) Localization (language support) for "Music Views"
  
  18.) [DONE] Ability to move up, move down, and delete tracks within the current playlist
  
  19.) Option to set track thumbnail track display properties to include/exclude Artist and Album text
  
  20.) Repeat (loop) playlist toggle button
  
  21.) Kernel Streaming or Asio
  
  22.) Sound card select (route audio output to this card...)
  
  23.) toby451's Screen layout suggestion
  
  24.) Dynamic "Smart Lists" that use multi-criterion search strings...[genre="christmas" NOT ("beach boys" OR "jackson 5")], [Artist="radiohead" AND rating="4" AND Live="false"], [LastListenedToMonths>"2" AND SmartListName="Steve's Favorites"]
  
  25.) Save-able / selectable "Smart Lists" (display in genre list??)
  
  26.) If shuffle is enabled, option to reshuffle on "add to playlist". Currently, when an album is added to the playlist the album tracks are shuffled but are all grouped at the end of the playlist.
  
  27.) [DONE] Add to playlist options: "Play Next", "Clear and Add to Playlist", "Add to Playlist (adds to end)
  
  28.) Ignore "The" prefix when performing search.
  
  29.) Option to not scroll text in playback thumbnail if text fits within text bounds
  
  30.) "Never Shuffle this album" option
  
  31.) Ability to cancel when scanning media (currently ignores cancel button click)
  
  32.) Improve mp responsivness when performing time consuming tasks such as loading large playlists, scanning, etc
  
  32b.) Display MP wait cursor when MP is busy IE: opening or scanning share, loading large playlist, etc
  
  33.) Optional automatic periodic rescan of music shares using very low priority thread (Rescan my music shares every n days)
  
  34.) Ability to edit tag info
  
  35.) [DONE] Ability to update coverart for entire share / ability to update coverart for albums with missing cover art
  
  36.) [DONE] Find coverart displays thumbnail of current coverart image along with thumbnails of found images and artist and album name.
  
  37.) Show artist bio, show album info (already exists)
  
  38.) Ability to persist "playing now" playlist and playlist position to allow resuming from last played track on mp restart
  
  
  ADDED 1/16/2006
  
  
  39.) Ability to limit Party mode to particular share, genre, artist, or smartlist
  
  40.) Option to check for compilation albums during folder scan/database update
  
  41.) Create new random playlist when current playlist has finished (base new playlist on genre of last playlist??)
  
  42.) [DONE] Options for enable/disable visualizaton/cover flipping on music overlay
  
  43.) Option for track to track cross-fading
  
  44.) Improve pq for fullscreen visualisations
  
  45.) Expanded music overlay; Now Playing/Playing Next
  
  46.) WMP playlist read support
  
  47.) [DONE] Ability or edit active MP playlist; item up, down, delete
  
  48.) Add Alphabetical Grouping view
  
  49.) [DONE] BUG: When My Music is first loaded MP initially displays incorrect view state (View: List) on view button when music views are edited and set to anything other than List view.
  
  50.) [DONE] Play album, artist, or track when play button is clicked while on item selection (insert into playlist after current track??)
  
  
  ADDED 2/16/2006
  
  
  51.) Configuration.exe Music-->Music Views does not include a "ViewAs" option for an AlbumListView list type.
  
  
  ADDED 2/22/2006 and 2/23/2006
  
  
  52.) Better handling of artist tag when tag includes multiple artist in a delimited list.
  
  53.) On FreeDB cd lookup strore a copy to the music DB to avoid having to look up the CD again the next time it's played
  
  54.) CUE file support
  
  
  ADDED 3/3/2006
  
  
  55.) Show playlist name in "Now playing" view.
  
  56.) Use \thumbs\artist image when album cover art is not available
  
  57.) Show track name (instead of Track information not available) when playing CD in "Now playing" view
  
  58.) BUG: AlbumListView and normal ListView sometimes interchanged when re-entering a view
  
  59.) List item thumbnail image occasionally missing even though cover art image exists. Scrolling the list frequently "fixes" the problem
  
  
  ADDED 3/21/2006
  
  
  60.) Option to burn an audio-cd from playlist
  
  61.) Shuffle tracks when playing a top level database view item such as Artist, Genre, Top100, etc.

Steve

 

[Gordonx42]

I would suggest maybe a simple way to shuffle the music collection. I understand there is the party shuffle option, but that is a few menus deep. Or even better, perhaps a smart playlist option...such as play songs with highest rating, etc.

 

[ASiDiE]

Cool Steve... if your not doing one thing, your doing another. I talked about cover art. Instead of the WMP visuals I think it would be cool to have a large cover of the album displayed along with the song title. I really can't think of anything else right now...

 

[mzemina]

pieroxy made some statements regarding the browsing in my Music. Here is his posting. I tend to agree that the browsing ability could be enhanced a little more. He gave suggestions to allow more "depth" (additional catagory) when browsing.

Then there was toby451 - who came up with this suggestion here. He even showed what the skin should look like. It appears that toby451 and pieroxy may have close to the same desire.

What do you think?

It appeared as though ALOT of people liked the idea (maybe because they could see the suggestion) of toby451.

Mike

 

[Marcusb]

A feature that MCE has that I quite like is that when you are in a full screen visualisation the name of the song appears on the screen for a few seconds at the beginning and end of the song. Kind of like the title overlay that MTV put on film clips so you know what you are watching.

This is one of the only things that I really liked in MCE that MP didn't do.

 

[FlipGer]

Hi,

nice Steve!

- afaik ID3 tag import is currently only loaded into the songs table. I have also album info in my tags, so it would be nice, if MP could also fill the "album-info" table in the scanning process. This is only done when hitting F3 and making CDDB lookup.
- fix fullscreen viz OSD
- Do not know if this is possible. But it looks nice.

Flip

 

[Maschine]

Hi SteveV,

nice to hear! Ok, I'll add my ideas for this:

I think it would be really nice to have a "Now Playing" screen in MP. Meaning a fullscreen view that shows info about the currently playing song. Right now it's hard to read the sonf name in the lower left corner while playing if you are some meters away from the TV. Maybe this can be done like a "Screensaver". So you select your tracks or put together a playlist, then after one or two mins of inactivity MP starts the fullscreen view where song info is displayed. We could start with the basic info from the tags we have right now (song name, artist, cover art) but it would also be nice to extend the info with the data FlipGer mentioned above. Album background info you get by pressing F3 in music. If interest is there I could try to make a visual draft for this...

Second thing was mentioned similar above: Smart playlists. Bavarian started something like this for TV, a "personal EPG" and I already asked him to port this to my music for playlists. He said this could be done and he would start with this once the epg is working. So, SteveV, maybe you could talk to Bavarian about this so no double work needs to be done...

That's it for now. Thanks for reading ;-)

Maschine

 

[Rafe]

Only just bought the hardware so not actually played with MediaPortal yet - so apologies if this feature is already in there.

I'd like to play MP3s at random, with a slideshow of random photos on the screen. A optional "now playing" feature would be nice.

Thanks

Rafe

 

[Marcusb]

Only just bought the hardware so not actually played with MediaPortal yet - so apologies if this feature is already in there.

I'd like to play MP3s at random, with a slideshow of random photos on the screen. A optional "now playing" feature would be nice.

Thanks

Rafe

This is sort of implemented. If you place a playlist in the photos folder then it will play while you are showing a slide show of the photos. I think the playlist has to be called folder.m3u or something. I never use this function, but I'm sure someone else will come along and fill in the blanks.

 

[Ralph]

A kind of equalizer would be very nice.
To adjust bass, treble etc.

Just to enhance sound quality a bit.

Regards
Ralph