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

[ronilse]

good post

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

esp. the first you mention with folder.jpg... imagine.........

A well structured music collection doesn't have this problem.

It doesn't take much time to use a program to tag, rename, add picture, etc to the mp3 collection & put them in own folders like Artist\Album.
Don't nag when ppl using their free time to make a good program like SteveV has, the Now Playing future is the most used on my HTPC & no problem with it, it's just wonderful.... Thanks SteveV for doing a great job with MyMusic & have a great vacation

Regards
Roy

 

[NLS]

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 .

Man don't worry I know and appreciate it.
:lol:

Don't get too sensitive on me!

 

[mzemina]

I have ~18000 files.

When I have had parties, the feedback is consistently:
1. Nice/cool graphics
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.
6. Why does so many songs have wrong covers?
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.


I would say:
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

knutinh - Regarding 4&5&7 - Do you have any suggestions which would help your drunken friends :lol: :?: (This was said in humor, please don't be affended, it is not meant to be hurtful).
I can understand this problem a little but I think I need more help in getting to a solution. I would like to hear some other people with some possible screen mock-up which could solve these three problems. Is there another music system that we can understand their layout for "ease-of-use"?

Mike

 

[knutinh]

I have ~18000 files.

When I have had parties, the feedback is consistently:
1. Nice/cool graphics
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.
6. Why does so many songs have wrong covers?
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.


I would say:
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

knutinh - Regarding 4&5&7 - Do you have any suggestions which would help your drunken friends :lol: :?: (This was said in humor, please don't be affended, it is not meant to be hurtful).
I can understand this problem a little but I think I need more help in getting to a solution. I would like to hear some other people with some possible screen mock-up which could solve these three problems. Is there another music system that we can understand their layout for "ease-of-use"?

Mike

No prob =)

I am no good at gui design. People that dont know how to do such things often come up with the ideas that sounds best but doesnt work in practice ;-)

1.
I have one idea that perhaps is too pc-application-centric. If you have ever used some FTP-clients or "dual" file explorer apps, they will have two similar lists, one "from" list and one "to" list.

I imagine something similar where the playlist will always be visible (in a certain mode) while the song selection tools will also always be visible, dividing the screen estate in two. Between the two halves there will be one >> button and one << button, allowing you to push and pop songs into the "stack" (playlist).

I have no idea if this would work in practice.

2.
I also think that the "album matrix" suggested by others seems clever, in that you can use 4 arrow keys to select artist and album at once, using visual album cues to navigate but I understand that this is hard to implement fast enough.

3.
One final thing. The big "play" graphic symbol is confusing. All my guests try to click it in order to play when it is actually only artwork =)

regards
Knut

 

[mzemina]

No prob =)

I am no good at gui design. People that dont know how to do such things often come up with the ideas that sounds best but doesnt work in practice ;-)

1.
I have one idea that perhaps is too pc-application-centric. If you have ever used some FTP-clients or "dual" file explorer apps, they will have two similar lists, one "from" list and one "to" list.

I imagine something similar where the playlist will always be visible (in a certain mode) while the song selection tools will also always be visible, dividing the screen estate in two. Between the two halves there will be one >> button and one << button, allowing you to push and pop songs into the "stack" (playlist).

I have no idea if this would work in practice.

2.
I also think that the "album matrix" suggested by others seems clever, in that you can use 4 arrow keys to select artist and album at once, using visual album cues to navigate but I understand that this is hard to implement fast enough.

3.
One final thing. The big "play" graphic symbol is confusing. All my guests try to click it in order to play when it is actually only artwork =)

regards
Knut

Regarding your #1. response - Do you think this approach maybe only needed during "party mode"? I am assuming that "party mode" is creating a temporary playlist that is added to but maybe never saved. This screen could be brought back up even while this current "party mode" play list is being played? I have some additional questions (just focusing on this) once this "party-mode" play list has been created and has started to play and a person comes up to add song(s). Should that song be inserted so these are the next songs played or just added to the end of the list? Also, what should happen if you (or anyone else) things that the song played is unappropriate and wants to get rid of it from this list?

These questions help to define the requirement. They may not be all my questions but at least all that I can thing of at the present.

Mike

 

[knutinh]

Regarding your #1. response - Do you think this approach maybe only needed during "party mode"? I am assuming that "party mode" is creating a temporary playlist that is added to but maybe never saved. This screen could be brought back up even while this current "party mode" play list is being played?

I dunno. I guess "party mode" is not that different from "washing the dishes" mode so if it works good, it could be the default bahaviour.

I have some additional questions (just focusing on this) once this "party-mode" play list has been created and has started to play and a person comes up to add song(s). Should that song be inserted so these are the next songs played or just added to the end of the list? Also, what should happen if you (or anyone else) things that the song played is unappropriate and wants to get rid of it from this list?

These questions help to define the requirement. They may not be all my questions but at least all that I can thing of at the present.

Mike

Let the "admin" decide if songs can be skipped and inserted anywhere (ie stuff it in MP setup).

My intuition is that I would force finish every song, but allow new inserts to be made between songs.

People will not like having to wait 10 songs before "their" song is played, but having every song interupted after 10 secs is also irritating.

But this isnt any different from the current party mode. My main idea was a different GUI for inserting songs into the playlist that means the user never looses the view of the playlist and thereby isnt "lost" in the mnus.

-k

 

[Olyrous]

Concerning SteveV's comments

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.

Ok, forget about searching for keywords and non-keywords in filenames, I understand that it is easier and less stressful for the program to look for covers in files with a single and certain pre-determined filename like "folder.jpg". However, I'd just like you to consider the thought of making this filename configurable by the user.
So the program would still look for a jpg image with a certain filename, but this time the user would decide what that is, eg. "folder.jpg" or "cover.jpg" or "cover (front).jpg" etc.

Anyway, I think how "Show Album info" and cover viewing work in the program is far more important , so let me elaborate a little on that.

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?

I tried to stress in my post that I think MP should collect the bare essentials for its database building and get the other, more advanced I might say, information on demand without saving it anywhere. The bare essentials in my opinion are the typical tag information (artist, album ,year, genre) for music library building and cached thumbnail-sized versions of covers for swift navigation in icon mode. The more advanced information is album info (plus artist info, if it ever gets implemented) and full-sized covers.
With that philosophy, I believe a text file scheme is the optimal way. That way, when viewing album info MP would 1. Display the already available typical tag information for the album (artists, album, year, genre) 2. Show the cover it finds in the album folder scaled to fit a predetermined space 3. View the text file it finds in the album folder (similarly to covers, it could look for a text with a certain pre-determined filename e.g. "folder.txt")

The advantages of this method is 1. Minimal information saved in MP database which will facilitate using the program with huge music collections 2. Album information is saved externally and independently of any MP software. That way information can be viewed and edited independently of any MP software or database, since anyone can view and edit a text file. (I cannot stress this enough, even if MP database gets deleted somehow or you move/copy/edit/retag your collection or move to another computer, this information would still be available!) 3. Saving a text file in the album folder with album information can be made into one more step of your tagging routine. Actually, Softpointer's Tag&Rename software, that can use Amazon websites to fetch album information and covers, has the option to save the Amazon review it finds in a text file with a user-configurable filename. You can also edit the information through the program before it is saved (I personally copy/paste the allmusic.com review into there). But visiting websites on the web and copy/pasting information into text files can still be done if necessary or preferred.
Also note that my suggestion does not prohibit fetching album information from allmusic.com from within MP by pressing F3. This function can still be maintained, it would just have to be adjusted so that it only saves the album review in the album's folder as a text file.

But of course I'm no programmer and I'd be glad to hear what you or other MP programmers are thinking of doing with more details. And if you think my ideas are good, feel free to use them also.

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.

I understand MP cannot look for images in folders all the time that's why I believe the program should cache thumbnail-sized versions of the covers for using them promptly when needed. It is only for displaying covers in the "Now Playing" and "Show Album Info" windows that I suggest the program to look for and use the original cover in the album's folder without caching. I can't see how a person who streams his music on his network when playing it would have a problem with streaming a jpg file (or txt file) when opening these two windows.

Thanks for taking notice and listening.

 

[Nemulate]

Hi,

seems that there is a long term 'bug'? with Now Playing in that it can't send the right database information to an external plugin i.e. my imon vfd. It only shows the name and artist of the last track upon entering now playing and stays that way! Also although track progress changes the duration field doesn't change when displayed by the skin on screen? Hope this makes sense and are these indeed known issues?

Thanks

 

[sleepycol]

I have been using MP for about 3 months now and I am still amazed at how good this software is. Keep up the good work everyone.

I have one request/question.....When viewing my songs by artist, i would then like to view by album. HOWEVER, I would like to view the albums in the "Big Icon LIST" setting all the time. This cannot be set in the MP setup>Music>views options as a default. It can be set when viewing by albums. Its called "album" on the setup page, but "Big icon list" in MP software itself. Basically when viewing by artist and i then select an artist, i want to see albums but viewied like in the album/big icon list view. God I'm waffling ....did any of that make sense?!?!?!?!?

Cheers,
Colin

 

[JulianBuss]

need help from a music developer

I have a question regarding my next patch for MP.
Please have a look at https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/viewtopic.php?t=17751 . Thanks.