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

Joseph A. Caputo jcaputo1 at comcast.net
Mon Mar 29 16:24:29 EST 2004


On Monday 29 March 2004 14:45, Matt Goebel wrote:
> 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.

This has been suggested a number of times... some form of UI overhaul 
will probably happen in the future; I think most developers are holding 
off from major UI overhauls at this point until we see how the new mfd 
infrastructure works out for serving content.

>
> 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.

It already does this to a degree... check out the "AlbumArt" 
visualization.  I believe it looks for "folder.jpg".

> 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.

Now that's a new suggestion... and a feature I would find very useful as 
well.  It would be pretty simple to add a keybinding to flag the 
current song in the database.  Wouldn't even really need a UI for it to 
be useful, as you could just extract the info using mysql or 
phpMyAdmin.  All it would require is a column in the table... hmmm....  
maybe a little UI element in the theme just to show the song is 
"bad"... "bad" songs could be highlighted in a different color in the 
playlist selector... hmmm....

> 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.

It already looks up artist/album/track info via cddb when you rip a CD 
directly in MythMusic.  I seem to recall someone was working on a 
similar feature that would work for tracks that were already ripped but 
didn't have complete meta-information.

-JAC


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