My Music - need your thoughts on how to improve and enhance (1 Viewer)

[LordMessi]

Steve your doing some amazing work! The new features feel so at home with MP, it would be hard to imagine it without them. The Music section is becoming very powerful indeed.

One area that could maybe benfit MP as a whole still is getting the thing setup & configured. I've just sat down with a non user trying to setup their box, and they just didn't get it! Having seen mine working, they had fell in love originally.

Yeah - some work is needed here. Making it more user friendly and power full.

 

[CHli]

Regarding "Views"; have you tried setting up how you want the various views configured from within MP's configuration.exe app? The settings you're looking for are under Music-->Music Views

Steve

Hi SteveV,

Thanks for pointing this out, but I still have a problem using this because there are 2 "list" views, this one :

[Small Cover] Text
[Small Cover] Text

and the other :

[Big Cover] Text
[Big Cover] Text


I would like to use the "Big Cover" for Album and the "Small Cover" for songs. And that's not possible because in the combobox only appear one "list" which define the "Small Cover" version of the view.

 

[SteveV]

If I understand correctly, when in the "Artists" database view you would like to see the the following:

Artists: List
Albums: Small icon
Songs: Big icon

Is this correct? If so, you can do this easily by doing the following:

1.) Launch MP setup (Configuration.exe)
2.) Select Music-->Music View
3.) In the "View" dropdown combobox, select "Artists"
4.) In the grid control, select the following options:
     a.) artist -- ViewAs: List
     b.) album -- ViewAs: Icons
     c.) title -- ViewAs: Big Icons
5.) Save

Note that these setting will only affect the "Artists" view but you can configure the other views similarly.

Please let me know if I have misunderstood what you're trying to do.

Steve

 

[CHli]

If I understand correctly, when in the "Artists" database view you would like to see the the following:

Artists: List
Albums: Small icon
Songs: Big icon

Is this correct?

Steve

No that's not what I want

I don't know it it's a bug in my computer or what but when I (in MP.exe) go to Artist View. And then I push the "Big Icons, Small Icons , List view" button when I come the 2nd time to List I've got a different view with a mix of small icons and list. That's what I described as :

Normal List is :

[Very Small Cover] Text
[Very Small Cover] Text
[Very Small Cover] Text
[Very Small Cover] Text

2nd List view is :

[Small Icon] Text
[Small Icon] Text
[Small Icon] Text
[Small Icon] Text


I would like to use the 2nd List View for Album (using the configuration.exe manipulation),the problem is that they have the same name and only one appear in configuration.exe.

If it's still not clear I will post a screenshot, but I can't at the moment cause I'm at work.

 

[jawbroken]

Not sure if this is the right place for this, correct me if I should place it elsewhere. I never used to have coverart in for my music, but today I got around to scanning for it. Most albums worked fine, but some never even came up as being searched for. Even if I only select the specific folder with the albums in it and tell MediaPortal to scan them, it just says finished, like there were no albums in there.

I have all my music organised in folders as Artist/Album/*mp3 files*, all with playlists for the CD.

For example: I have two albums by The One AM Radio. They are in Music/The One AM Radio/A Name Writ In Water and Music/The One AM Radio/The Hum Of The Electric Air. Playing the albums works fine, as does opening the playlists in the folder. If I select either the Artist or Album folder and tell it to search for coverart, it just says "All covers are up to date. 0 cover art images updated".

Any ideas what could cause this? It happened with a few of my folders, sometimes skipping over an entire artist, sometimes just a specific album. I would guess maybe it is filename related? I am not sure.

Also: I use the MCE skin (not sure if this is relevant) and the "Playlist" section always used to come up as a List. Today, because I had just gotten cover art, I had a look at it as Icons and Big Icons, now the option to view as a list is gone. It just toggles between Icons and Big Icons. Is this a skin issue or a My Music issue, or what?

 

[SteveV]

If I understand correctly, when in the "Artists" database view you would like to see the the following:

Artists: List
Albums: Small icon
Songs: Big icon

Is this correct?

Steve

No that's not what I want

I don't know it it's a bug in my computer or what but when I (in MP.exe) go to Artist View. And then I push the "Big Icons, Small Icons , List view" button when I come the 2nd time to List I've got a different view with a mix of small icons and list. That's what I described as :

Normal List is :

[Very Small Cover] Text
[Very Small Cover] Text
[Very Small Cover] Text
[Very Small Cover] Text

2nd List view is :

[Small Icon] Text
[Small Icon] Text
[Small Icon] Text
[Small Icon] Text


I would like to use the 2nd List View for Album (using the configuration.exe manipulation),the problem is that they have the same name and only one appear in configuration.exe.

If it's still not clear I will post a screenshot, but I can't at the moment cause I'm at work.

Sorry, still unclear. Please post (or PM me) some screenshots.

Thanks,

Steve

 

[SteveV]

Not sure if this is the right place for this, correct me if I should place it elsewhere. I never used to have coverart in for my music, but today I got around to scanning for it. Most albums worked fine, but some never even came up as being searched for. Even if I only select the specific folder with the albums in it and tell MediaPortal to scan them, it just says finished, like there were no albums in there.

I have all my music organised in folders as Artist/Album/*mp3 files*, all with playlists for the CD.

For example: I have two albums by The One AM Radio. They are in Music/The One AM Radio/A Name Writ In Water and Music/The One AM Radio/The Hum Of The Electric Air. Playing the albums works fine, as does opening the playlists in the folder. If I select either the Artist or Album folder and tell it to search for coverart, it just says "All covers are up to date. 0 cover art images updated".

Any ideas what could cause this? It happened with a few of my folders, sometimes skipping over an entire artist, sometimes just a specific album. I would guess maybe it is filename related? I am not sure.

With these albums, have you tried unchecking the "Skip albums with existing coverart" option? Also, the coverart grabber should report errors in the log file. It would be helpful if you could post relevent portions of the mediaportal.log file. All entries should begin with "coverart grabber:" (or similar--I'm at work and don't have access to mp).

Also: I use the MCE skin (not sure if this is relevant) and the "Playlist" section always used to come up as a List. Today, because I had just gotten cover art, I had a look at it as Icons and Big Icons, now the option to view as a list is gone. It just toggles between Icons and Big Icons. Is this a skin issue or a My Music issue, or what?

CVS builds after this past Sunday include some changes to the PlayList item list which allow deleting and moving items playlist items up and down (have a look at this post). These changes include skin changes that are probably causing what you're seeing. And while I generally try to include to relevent files for all of the cvs skins, I forgot to with this last release . You should be able to confirm that the issue is skin related by temporarilly switching to BlueTwo. I'll update the cvs skins later tonight when I get home from work.

Steve

 

[CHli]

Sorry, still unclear. Please post (or PM me) some screenshots.

Thanks,

Steve

Here we go :

What I want for default view for Album when Artist View is Selected is :

But what I get when I select list in configuration.exe and half of the time in mp.exe :

 

[dreamvoid]

If you want to make the Music section more powerful, take a look at this C# code: http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/msndesktopsearchqueryapi.asp

I don't know if Google Desktop has a similar API, but this could really be a big boost to the Music section (and Pictures and Video should also benefit from a better search). Now I realize that not everyone has MSN/Windows Desktop installed, but MP interfacing "behind the scenes" with such a powerful search engine would outsource a lot of really hard-to-optimize code (WDS and GDS are much much faster than the current MP tag database). This also has the benefit of automatically adding Smart Playlists capabilities to MP.

 

[Nightmare77]

LordMessi,
Do you know if the fix for the visualistation fullscreen has gone into the CVS , as i would love to test it out to see how it goes, thanks