[mythtv] [SUGGESTION] Ideas to improve the music plugin

Matt Goebel matt at goebelnet.com
Mon Mar 29 14:45:34 EST 2004


I understand the music plugin portion of myth is being rewritten and I
have a few suggestions for features I'd like to see.  Those are:

1. A better way to navigate large music collections.  Everyone organizes
their music differently.  All mine is in the format /Artist/Artist -
Title.mp3 ... that way there's no duplication of the same songs from
different albums and there's less work involved in adding new stuff. 
Right now I have music from some 2500 or so artists... so using the tree
view to navigate is difficult.  I'd like to see some new optional way to
view my collection.  If there was a way to navigate based on the first
letter of an artist's name it would make things quite a bit easier.  I'd
also like to see a search function and a folder view option.

2. The ability to display album art.  All my artist folders contain album
art from various albums (One named Folder.jpg).  I do this so on my
Windows systems I can switch to thumbnail view in Windows Explorer and
visually navigate my collection and/or get an idea of the type of music in
the folder.  So this same sort of thumbnail view would be useful I think
(like what Myth's Image Viewer does now).  I'd also like to be able to
display a slideshow or just a thumbnail of the images in the same folder
as the files that's currently playing.

3. Some way to flag the names of files that have a quality issue or are
incorrectly labeled.  I have WAY too much music to go through and listen
to every song to check for problems.  So sometimes when I'm playing a song
I find out it's got a problem... I unknowingly encoded the song from a
scratched CD... There was a problem with the PC while the encoder was
running and it's altered the song... the song is a live version and not
labeled as such... etc...  So what I'd like to have is someway to flag
that filename and add it to a "bad song list" which I can then go through
at some later date and replace the files with good copies.  Right now I
have to find a piece of paper and pen, write down the song name, and
replace it with a better copy before I lose/forget the piece of paper. 
Just hitting a button would be a lot easier.

4. This is kind of a big one and a little farther out there but it would
be nice to be able to look up info on an artist from the web.  Something
like what the video player plugin does with metadata for movies.
Allmusic.com has a ton of information on each artist/song and that's the
sort of thing I'd like to be able to get from within Myth.  I do know that
there's a Perl module available already to parse allmusic.com so that
would make this a lot less work.

Keep up the great work guys!




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