Update to music database scanning (1 Viewer)

[nzsp]

Just a small suggestion to make MP even better...

Below is a question I put to SteveV, and his reply, about fields in the music database. His reply is that some further development of the share scanning code is required to take advantage of the new tag reader. I thought I would post this here to see if anyone else feels this is needed, and in case one of the devs would like to take this up while SteveV is busy on the music engine.

Cheers
Steve


QUOTE

Hi Steve,

I posted this on the forums but didn't get any replies. I hope you don't mind me coming to you directly with a question like this. I you have any ideas I would appreciate it. I know you're busy with the new music engine which sounds great, so no rush...

I have a question about how music tag fields are handled, namely the use of "artist" versus "album artist". This is, I'm afraid, another "I used to this in Meedio... can I do it in MP?" question.

I have a number of compiliation albums. The tracks are all tagged as having "Various artists" as the "album-artist" field, and e.g. "Madonna", "AC/DC" etc. as the artist field for each track.

Currently in the MP configuration I cannot find a way to differentiate between the two. The Meedio confugration used to refer to the "artist" field as "artist" and the "album artist" field as "Band". This allowed sorting by band and artist etc. It also meant that a track within a compilation album would show the correct individual artist as the track artist.

In MP it seems to read the "album-artist" tag field as the MP artist. So every track within a compliation album comes up as having "Various artists" as the artist.

I tried re-scanning my music files with and without the "treat files in the same folder as an album " box checked, and that made no difference.

Is there a way to fix this currently in MP? Is the MP music database limited to a single artist field?

I couldn't tell if the new tag reader will help in this regard or not.

Many thanks,
Steve


REPLY

Hi Steve,

The current database doesn't support the notion of different "Album Artist" and "Artist". This is in part, because the existing tag reader does look for the "Album Artist" field. The new tag reader should fix this but we'll still need to make some database changes and do a fair amount of redesign to the shares scanning code.

So, currently, it's not possible to get around this problem. Unfortunately, I have little free time ATM and likely won't get to this for a while. It is possible however, that an other dev might take on this task.

Regards,

Steve

 

[orencha]

I also think adding columns to the database, epecially for the "song" table, is required. "artist vs. album-artist" is one issue, ReplayGain values (already mentioned in another post) is also an issue.

I just love Steve's work on the MyMusic engine, and I'm really waiting for his new tag reader to become integrated in MP.

Maybe this post is a good place for people to share ideas about additional useful information to put in the Music Database.

After a while, we can sum up everyone's suggestions from this post, and expand the DB schema accordingly.

 

[zombiepig]

ok, here's my thoughts on a possible music database structure:

basic changes are:
- addition of dateadded and datelastplayed to the song table. would make it possible to have views like 'tracks i haven't heard in a while', 'tracks recently added', etc
- added 4 replaygain fields to the song table
- added a 'songartistlink' and 'songgenrelink' table, to enable multiple artists/genres per song. these would be split up from a delimated list in the tags, ie, like how wmp does using the ; character. ie, the artist tag for a song could be "Dr Octagon;DJ Dexter", thus making it appear under both "dr octagon" and "dj dexter". same thing with genres - would let you classify a song as "reggae;hip-hop" to appear under both genres!

- added a 'songtag' table. this is the one i really wanna see basically, when a track is scanned, any non standard tags (ie, not 'artist','year',etc) get put in this table.
the custom tags could be semi-standard things, like 'composer','publisher','conductor',etc... or something totally user-defined, such as 'record label','mood','speed',.. whatever! totally up to the user

secondly, i propose that the music views setup be changed so it's like this:

selection  operation   restriction   limit   sort   sortorder   viewas

operation, restriction, limit, viewas will be the same as they are now.

selection and sort will list:
album
artist
albumartist
title
genre
year
track
rating
favourite
, then all unique tag names from songtag table eg:
composer
conductor
record label
mood
... (depending on how user has tagged files)

my theory is that this will allow almost infinite flexibility with organizing music, without penalizing new users or people who don't want to configure things!!

here's some example views that would be possible:

albums (sorted by artist) -> tracks
albumartist -> albums (sorted by year descending (newest first)) -> tracks
composer -> year -> conductor -> tracks
composer -> year -> orchestra -> tracks
genre -> mood -> tempo -> tracks
.
.
.
.
.


ok - now let me know what i've got wrong

 

[nzsp]

Great work zombie - certainly this would have everything for my needs. Hopefully this gets some traction...

 

[hwahrmann]

zombiepig,

thx for your posting.
i've started thinking abot db redesign last week.
haven't done too much, because of lack of time.

i'll have a look into your suggestions and will include other things, that have been mentioned in Steve's thread.
But be patient, as any changes i want to discuss with Steve first and both of us are having too much non-mp related issues on the table.
so it might take some time, before a new database design will be released.

any further comments / additions are welcome.

thanks,

Helmut

 

[zombiepig]

thanks hwahrmann - if there's any questions/issues you've got, i'll be more than glad to elaborate or help out