My Music - need your thoughts on how to improve and enhance (3 Viewers)

[hwahrmann]

fixed some issues with problems reported above.

HappyTalk, please test.
If the problems still persist, please PM me, then we could discuss, how to obtain a copy of your musicdb for me to debug.
I need to look further into the issue with the limit you've talked above. Nothing has been done for that yet.

 

[HappyTalk]

OK tried svn 10241 (I think as not sure on TortoiseSVN how I check MY current ver)

set artist view

selection    Operat    Restrict    Limit
artist          Group          1   
artist          Group          1   
artist
title

After selecting 'A' it gave
A 16
A. 4
A1 3
A2 3
AA 2
AB 5 .....
I Selected the first entry presumably 'A ' (A followed by space) for artists like 'A Certain Ratio', 'A Guy Called Gerald' etc but it then showed ALL artists beginning with the letter 'A' so not 16 entries as axpected, I presume the space is being dropped. I also notice that unlike on first column where all non A..Z first chars are put in #, on second column they aren't so I get 'A ', 'A1', 'A2' etc as opposed to A#,AA,AB,AC as I might expect. That said I would probably not choose to do a SECOND sort based on the first 2 letters if we could group by every 20 artists starting with A instead.


set album view

selection    Operat    Restrict    Limit
album         Group          1   
album         Group          1          
album
title

It grouped everything OK, however a compilation album had one album entry per artist (not per track as I originally thought, checked it against comp album with same artist more than once) when on the 3rd view level (album no grouping)

The songs view still seemed to crash according to the log.

11/09/2006 15:09:57 156 [ERROR] musicdatabase exception err:Index was outside the bounds of the array. stack:   at MediaPortal.Music.Database.MusicDatabase.GetSongsByIndex(String sql, List`1& songs, Int32 level, Boolean artistTable, Boolean albumTable, Boolean songTable, Boolean genreTable) in D:\devel\vs7\mediaportal\Databases\Music\Database.cs:line 616

I intend rescanning all the music in just to double check the db integrity this end as I ported from musicdatabase5 to MusicDatabaseV7 to avoid a lengthy rescan (saved as sql file from 5 imported into 7, tables looked structurally unchanged). I will re-test and then pm you a www link for it, if you like. It'll take a long time to rescan so prolly by tomorrow. Cheers

 

[hwahrmann]

happytalk,

yes, i would be interested in having your db to test with, as the above errors don't occur with my db.

thx,

Helmut

 

[HappyTalk]

Ok well it will prolly be tuesday evening before I can upload my db. I rescanned, just finished and all problems persist.

I presume the compilation album issue is reproduceable or not?

adding an artist called 'A Artist' should repro the 'A ' showing all artists when view is as in prev post.

The song one maybe needs a large db to repro it

will pm when upped, cheers

Update: having re-examined database I notice that the album table has an idArtist field, consequently for compilation albums there are multiple entries in the album table andiNumArtists always = 1. I would not have expected the album table to have an idArtist field as the idArtist field in song would be used to get all album tracks.
as in

> get all albums for artist
SELECT * FROM album WHERE idAlbum IN (SELECT idAlbum FROM song WHERE idArtist = 21);

> get artist(s) for album
SELECT * FROM artist WHERE idartist IN (SELECT idArtist FROM song WHERE idAlbum = 34);
(if > 1 then => compilation)

idArtist 21 = 'Air' & idAlbum 34 = 'Moon Safari' in my case

Same for AlbumInfo. The artist table seems to have this correct. Also any track without ANY album info seems to get assigned it's own album entry = 'unknown', so you end up with loads of them in the album table when they may as well all point to the same entry or none at all.

 

[hwahrmann]

HappyTalk,

i'm correcting some of your issues from above.
The reason for Compilation albums not shown as such, is that you didn't check this feature, when importing.
The flag is called "Scan albums for various artists"
With that you would see the field iNumArtists of the Album table having a value > 1.
This is not the case in your database.

Update:
Problem with Songs is fixed. Sent you a PM as well.
Artists with 'A ' are shown now like this. You were right the space at the end got dropped
Compilation albums (see above in this post)

i was looking also into the issue of grouping numbers on the second level, that takes more time. Don't know if that will work ok. What if you have a song named "A#", how would i know then
that the next level should be "A1", "A2". I think that's a bit too much work for the gain we get.

Your suggestion with the limit from above looks very nice, tough maintaining those tables and constructing the right query is a bit complicated tough.
I'll have a look into it, when i have more time.
for the time being, i think it should be ok, how the views work now.

At least for us with 20k songs. ))

 

[HappyTalk]

The reason for Compilation albums not shown as such, is that you didn't check this feature, when importing.
The flag is called "Scan albums for various artists"
With that you would see the field iNumArtists of the Album table having a value > 1. This is not the case in your database.

Just checked and this flag was definately ticked. I unticked and reticked it re-imported ALL songs and iNumArtists still = 1 for every entry. I'm not sure why anything special would need to be done for comp albums anyway as I don't know why album table has idArtist or iNumArtists when this info can be easily obtained via the songs table anyway.

dont think i got pm (got one when you said u had db)

re second level i was figuring assuming level1 was 1 char then A# would group all records where second char was not A-Z. That said if a group based on record count was also available then grouping by this on second level would be better.

Haven't actually had chance to dl svn and try it, will do it tonight. I need to work out how I can have latest release 2.04 & debug-svn in diff folders on my tv box as currently testing on devel machine (with vs7). I presume some files need to be copied into system folders, maybe by running batch file before launch.

 

[JulianBuss]

Comments to "now playing" screen

the new "now playing" screen is quite cool. I explained it to my wife and she had the following useful comments:

- it is not clear that the text above the visualization / album art displays the album name and not the current title. Suggestion: show artist name before it and the year in brackets behind (if present), for example: "Kylie Minogue: Fever (2001)"

- the current title is displayed at the bottom, the album name is missing there. Suggestion: title name on the first line, artist and album name on second line

I know that then the album name and artist is displayed twice on the screen, but I think that's accetable in favor of a more logical GUI.

 

[JulianBuss]

I think I found a bug in the "now playing" screen: in the section "hits of this album": when I press the first title, nothing happens. Only on the second and third title a click will enqueue it in the playlist.

 

[zurik]

One thing I don't like is that non-music folders (ie. License Backup) are listed when browsing music. MP should be smart enough to ignore folders containing no music.

 

[zurik]

Another wish I have. When browsing music, I can hit the play button on an album and it plays all songs. But when I select the album to display the tracks, there's no way to select all.