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

[zombiepig]

As much as possible should be done to the music collection itself (ie adding folder images), not the MP database which is volatile. One may even want to use the music with another player at a later time =)

-k

i totally agree knutinh... getting your music collection properly sorted out and tagged should almost be a prerequisite before using ANY program like mp.

i'm not wanting to stir up anyone here, but instead of asking developers to use their time to support every random tagging/filestructure systems exist, people could spend a couple of hours themselves sorting out their own collections. i agree it's a sucky job... but it's MORE than worth it in the long run

 

[knutinh]

On the other hand, I see that we are "early adopters", willing to do this sucky job. Most people are not. When My Music is working perfectly, adding this features would be a great bonus.

But perhaps even then, making an external program/stuff in music import would be easier. Make a non-realtime app that sorts the music perfectly and standardised, and then have My music behave stable and fast given this standardiserd input?

-k

 

[Spragleknas]

Add a "Sort By: Artist" option when viewing albums.

^I agree!


And even better, sorting artist/album like this:

https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/viewtopic.php?t=11097&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

Is this:

A: Immposble/to much work
or
B: Not wanted
?

 

[knutinh]

I think SteveV said that this sexy GUI would be slow in the current implementation because many more images had to be fetched/scaled.

What about "pre-caching" pure images containing several folder images, and rather constrain the presentation options (for instance only alphabetically by artist) so as not to demand infinite pre-cached images?

-k

 

[rtv]

2. Why do I have to wait 5 seconds to select a playlist/view?
3. Why does the player stop at certain songs in the playlist (songs that arent recognized)
4. There are too many songs, I cant make up my mind =)
5. The GUI is confusing. Am I searching for artist or title now? The search itself is great though.
7. Figuring out the connection between normal play, playlist etc is a little hard after 4 beers and never having touched MP. This is the real-world test I think. Sober tinkerers will always figure out.
-k

Hi!

Some party-problems can soon be workarounded:
2, 5 & 7: No more view switching needed; set MP do directly switch to playlist mode, start one song and have scrobbling enabled :wink:

3. Try directshow player

4. There will be more scrobble modes soon ;-)
similar mode should be well, maybe increase the setting for songs to be added and let your guests re-arrange the dynamic playlist / delete unwanted, scrobbled songs 8)

 

[Efros]

revised wish list

A fix for this resolution problem would be good.

https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/viewtopic.php?t=17659&highlight=

Now playing button in the playlist menu.

Mini Visualisation in the now playing window

Volume OSD when Vis is fullscreen

Track name and artist when vis is fullscreen

Some means of setting view options for folders (slideshow) and tracks (list) en masse, i.e. without having to set for each individual folder and track listing, also this should be able to be locked.

Would be good if we could cross fade between tracks, I know this one is probly pie in the sky, such that there is no gap between tracks.

There I don't want much do I? hehehe

 

[SteveV]

Hi Olyrous,

Unfortunately, I only have time to respond to a couple of your comments as I'm on vacation and the family is sure to kill me if I'm on the computer much longer

- Currently "Media Portal" searches for cover art inside the album's folder, which is nice, but the cover picture has to be named "folder.jpg". I think most music collectors don't follow this rule which originates from WMP and have the cover saved in a file that has "cover" or "front" as an ingredient in its filename. Personally, I am reluctant to start renaming my covers to that, although it could be done with some effort and the help of a file renamer utility, because I prefer to incorporate more information in my cover files (I use an "%artist% - %album% cover" pattern). Thus, I suggest the program to search inside the albums' folders for pictures whose filename has a certain word in it, a word the user could specify [e.g. cover, front, folder or whatever]. I think making the word user configurable should cover most situations and please almost everybody. In case more than one pictures that have the "cover word" in their filename are present in the album folder, there could be an option for the user to specify a couple of words (number depending on the developed engine's robustness) whose presence in the filename disqualifies the picture for cover art (e.g. back, cd, alt etc.).
Alternatively, if this is too much work and has problems getting implemented, I suggest users to use a file renamer utility that can take care of this by changing the "cover word" in the other pictures not intended for covers with another word (provided of course that these other pictures can be easily distinguished from the cover art pictures, which is most likely if your cover art pictures follow certain filename patterns e.g. "cover", "front", "cover (front)", "%artist% - %album% cover").

While I agree that this would work, it's expensive in terms of cpu time to retreive all of the images in a folder and parse file names for various keywords. Particularly when you consider that thumbnail handling already slows MP to a crawl. We'll certainly revisit this at some point but for the time being you could copy an existing coverart image as folder.jpg.

- In the context menu of music, along with currently available "Show Album info" add "Show Artist info". I also suggest a different way for these two to work. Currently, you press F3 to query allmusic.com for album information and, if you are lucky and such information exists, it is then stored in the MediaPortal database, where you cannot make any modifications.
Since music collections follow the structure ...artist folder/album folder/music files, my suggestions are for "Show Album info" to use the text file it finds in the album's folder (typically the folder the songs reside in) and use it as the album's review and get the other information (artist, album, genre, year) from the media files' tags (other information not available in there, like tones and styles, would have to be dropped). The Artist Info window would display the artist's bio and a picture if it is available. Similarly to "Show Album info", "Show Artist info" would use the text file it finds in the artist's folder (typically the folder one level up from the folder the songs reside in) and the picture it finds in there named after the artist's name.
For Artist bio, it would be nice if the user could alternatively make the appilication search for the artist bio in a folder where all artist bios are saved as text files named after the artist's name.

Note that I don't think that all this information should be collected once from the suggested sources and then saved in the MP database. Instead, I think it should be retrieved everytime the user requests it "on the fly".

One of the planned changes is a fairly significant music database redesign that *will* allow database record editting (externally to MP) and non-destructive database updates. With these changes you'd be able to retrieve the info as we currently do, edit the data or add new records manually. Given this, does it really make sense to incorporate a text file scheme?

- The covers in "Now Playing" should occupy much larger portion of the window. Currently you only get to see zoomed-in thumbnail-sized pictures of the covers.

I suspect that this is a bug as it should be using the normal cover image not a thumbnail.

I can't understand what the progam chooses to save in "X:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\Thumbs\music\albums". I'm testing the program with a folder containing only 15 fully tagged albums that have their covers in their folder named "%artist% - %album% cover" and two of them have their covers named "folder.jpg". So MP should only be able to obtain covers for the latter two albums. Instead, for some of these albums MP saves thumbnail-sized pictures of the covers under the name "%artist%-%album%" but also larger versions under the name "%artist%-%album%L". It also saves the thumbnail-sized picture of the cover as a hidden folder.jpg file in the album's folder. Now, when you already have the cover named folder.jpg, in one instance it copied it in "X:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\Thumbs\music\albums" with the name "%artist%-%album%" and in the rest database updates it didn't save anything for that album although I do get cover thumbnails for that album in MediaPortal. Also, when I deleted some of the albums in the folder and did a database update, MP didn't delete the pictures it saved in its folder for these albums.

This is so complicated and inconsistent that it just makes me wonder... is all that necessary? I dread to think of the outcome if I use the application with my entire music collection (2,500 albums and counting)! I understand the need to generate and save thumbnail-sized versions of the album covers for when viewing albums in icon mode and for the currently playing area (note, only thumbnail-sized versions) but for the "Now Playing" and "Album Info" window I think the original covers should be used in an "on-the-fly" manner.

There are a couple of issues here; many people have their music lib located on a media server or other networked computer, retrieving images from a networked computer is needlessly expensive. MP attempts to get around this by caching the images to a local folder. Additionally, loading images that are 500 x 500 for use as a 20 x 20 thumbnail image is silly so MP creates 2 versions of the file; a copy of the original and a smaller thumbnail image. So what's supposed to happen is MP looks for the appropriate image in the \thumbs\albums\ foder using the artist - album.jpg scheme. If it finds it, it uses it. If it doesn't find it, it looks in the song's folder for a folder.jpg image. I'm not entirely sure if it *still* works this way but some time ago I commited code to persist the folder.jpg image to the local \thumbs\album folder.

Thanks for the suggestions and comments!

Steve

 

[SteveV]

good post

my music needs a major overhawl (the front end too I mean)

esp. the first you mention with folder.jpg... imagine how it looks for me that I don't use album folder structure at all! (I have all my MP3, properly named in the same folder)... for months all my MP3 had an... Evanescense cover (!) just because it happened for the importer to find THAT info for an MP3 in my huge MP3 folder... then I deleted that file and now I get a trashy icon that is hugely resized (no default cover in MP)...

this things really do need change

NLS,

I know you're not happy with the current state of My Music--you've said so at every possible turn. You have 2 choices; wait patiently while we work on it as FREE time permits or jump in and help.

I'm happy to work to improve it but I have very limited time available and the constant reminder the the music portion of MP "needs to change" does VERY little to motivate me to work on it furthur :x .

 

[CHli]

SteveV I really appreciate what you are doing ! So go on, have fun, and make the MyMusic Engine a must-have for all music-lover.

 

[knutinh]

Steve, I dont think that anyone wants to discourage you from your great work! Its just that everyone wants their opinion heard, and its always easier dreaming of better functionality than actually implementing it :-D

Have fun in your vacation and when you feel for it, return to us, we'll be patiently waiting right here ;-)

regards
Knut