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

[SteveV]

Hi Steve,

For some reason I cant get at that MusicTag
In the below (from MyBurner) I can read out the playlistitem.FileName quite happily but MusicTag is always NULL.

        PlayList burnlist;
        burnlist = PlayListPlayer.SingletonPlayer.GetPlaylist(PlayListType.PLAYLIST_MUSIC);
        
        Debugger.Launch();
        Debugger.Break();
        
        foreach (PlayListItem playlistitem in burnlist)
        {
          GUIListItem pItem = new GUIListItem();
          pItem.Path = Path.GetDirectoryName(playlistitem.FileName);
          pItem.Label = Path.GetFileName(playlistitem.FileName);
          pItem.MusicTag = playlistitem.MusicTag;

          GUIControl.AddListItemControl(GetID, (int)Controls.CONTROL_LIST_FILES_TO_BURN, pItem);
        }

Any ideas??

Egon

Hi Egon,

How is the playlist being created--by adding tracks via the My Music GUI or are you creating it manually? If from the My Music GUI; which view--share or database? And does the "Now playing screen show the correct info?

Steve

 

[SteveV]

As my music is sorted and properly id3 tagged like so:

%abc/%artist/%album/%track - %name.mp3

id like to see the possibility to configure a different viewtype for each view like so:

artist list: list
arists albums: big icons
album songs: list

Have a look at Configuration.exe-->Music-->Music Views

Steve

 

[JulianBuss]

Steve,

I'm about to move from Meedio to MP again, and the music part is very important to me. So I'm glad you developed some cool stuff here.

I read the list in the first post, and I have two important suggestions which Meedio had:

1.) In all views, Coverart is only showed when I'm at the album level. When I for example have the "gerne" view, the gerne items have no coverart at all, which does not look nice. So if you have no coverart for a view item, you should take the covert from the first or last album contained in this part of the view (for example I have the genre "Pop", so you can take the converart from the first album with the genre "Pop").

Meedio does that and it's very nice and improves the coolness factor.

2.) I can restrict views with the "=" or "like" operator, that's similar to Meedio. But I cannot hide a selection :-( So I have my music tagged with genres like "Pop entry", "Pop party", "Pop live" and so on.
Now I want a view which lists all albums having a genre "Pop*", so that I can browse through every which is pop music.

When I enter the "like" operator with the "Pop%" argument, MP shows me a view starting with the elements "Pop entry", "Pop party", "Pop live" etc. But I don't want to see them, because I don't know in which "sub-genre" the album I search is.

So in short: I miss the possiblity to simply restrict a view without "seeing" the restriction. You could do that by implementing a list type "hidden".

Thanks for listening.

 

[knutinh]

The flipping visualisation/cover art should be off by default, as it is more irritating than cool.

What is the best way to structure my music? I have done a major job of tagging/coverart d/l for my music collection. I have organised them into alphabetically sorted "album" and "singles" etc:

Albums A-F
Albums G-K
...
Singles A-F
Singles G-K
...
Lossless

And each song is named as following:
Artist\Album\Tracknumber - Artist - Title

I still do not see how Compilation albums should be organised ideally. Some people use "Various Artists" in the artist tag, then "#Artistname\#song title" in the title tag. Bur this messes up artist search etc? Stupid thing that id3 etc doesnt allow treating an anlbum as a separate entity...


Should I add my album folders first ("treat folder as album"), then add my singles folders ("do not treat folder as album")? Would it be possible to improve database update if, say, only 2 files were changed? Some kind of fast pre-filtering?

Also, I dont have gapless playback of my lossless ripped albums (FLAC). I do believe that my ripper did not insert any silence?

with regards
Knut

 

[Smirnuff]

Hi guys -

I've been looking at the C# source for Banshee this morning and have stumbled across something that may be of interest.

The Audioscrobbler website offers a number of XML sources for obtaining information on similar artists in addition to top albums and track listings on a per artist basis.

To see the XML content replace {0} from any of the following URLs with an artist's name:

http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/artist/{0}/similar.xml
http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/artist/{0}/toptracks.xml
http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/artist/{0}/topalbums.xml

The following XML content is for The Beatles:

Similar artists...
Top tracks...
Top Albums...

It would be nice to see MP using content such as this to offer recommendations, smart playlists and more.

In addition to this little gem the Banshee project has some other pretty nice features and well written code, its a Mono based Linux project with dependencies on GLib so its not possible to compile it for Windows without some changes but is well worth a look.

The project also provides features for connecting to MusicBrainz, including a C# wrapper for the MB API, this coupled with the fact that the above XML feeds can contain the MusicBrainz ID offers great possibilities to make My Music very information rich.

Cheers,
Smirnuff.

 

[tourettes]

The Audioscrobbler website offers a number of XML sources for obtaining information on similar artists in addition to top albums and track listings on a per artist basis.

Also submitting playing statistics to the AudioScrobbler / Last.fm would be a nice feature.

 

[knutinh]

Perhaps integrate www.pandora.com with My Music and have an option to stream similar music beside every music file?=)

-k

 

[zag2me]

In my opinion online music features and statistics should stay as a plugin as they break too often when relying on 3rd party websites.

 

[tourettes]

In my opinion online music features and statistics should stay as a plugin as they break too often when relying on 3rd party websites.

Last.fm / Audioscrobbler use specific API, not just some HTML pages to rely on the data transfers. If I remember correctly XBMC has also the support build in. Of cource it wouldn't harm if it the support was just implemented as a plugin.

 

[Smirnuff]

It has taken me until now to actually look around the Audioscrobbler site, being the sometimes slow person that I am. The full list of features offered through the Audioscrobbler Web Services API are listed here.

IMO there's some pretty interesting content being exposed that could power some really clever and accurate smart playlists.