MusicLibrary2

[gbq57]

First impressions - great - congrats.

I like the fact that the folder/filename structure is independent of the music navigation and that the folders are rescanned each day, but i would like to follow up on johnvk's comments...

You have a database, you can allow the user to navigate by any tag first e.g. genre, artist, album, or other information e.g. foldername, playlistfile.

in other words, why make the top level navigation Artist, and the second level Album (in fact you may not need the second level navigation at all)

I'm going to look at playlists next - I'm sure to comment

Regards

[dais3]

Great Plugin. Works great - a little bit of feedback though

I'm running against an MP3 library of some 750 albums. Moving through the collection is rather slow in terms of responsiveness.

Only other comment is that I'm running my system on a touchscreen, and hence it would be really useful if I could navigate the collection with mouse clicks (ie screen touches) rather than just the remote. And Play pause etc...

Many thanks
Dave

[psycik]

gbg57:

Album art is possible from folder.jpg, default.jpg (in the folder of the songs) or in each individual song using ID3V2 cover front tags. I imagine that putting in a jpg into the directory would be easier.

In terms of the navigation, yeah it might be possible to remove that second level as well, nobody seems to have really got it, and I don't know how used it is.

So what I may look at doing is just having Artist/Title, then a switch to album, title, then later on I could add some genre's in.

dais3:
Yes i've noticed that it can be quite slow to navigate through the artists, but I suppose it's might be a trade off with memory. I could look at storing every single artist and title is a great big hashtable, but your memory usage would sky rocket.

I think, though, I could add an option to NOT read the MP3 tags off the files, since i do that, and i also check that the file exists. I might make these options inthe config file, and therefore you may get a slight performance increase.

And you click request is not unreasonable. I had it in there to start and then it started causing problems. I'll revisit it.

[LilY0da]

nobody seems to have really got it, and I don't know how used it is.

So what I may look at doing is just having Artist/Title, then a switch to album, title, then later on I could add some genre's in.

I like my album sort :-(
Playing a specific album of an artist would become a pain...

[psycik]

I was going to look at a poll. To see what to do.

Ok, I'll keep the 3 panels but allow them to be juggled.

Let's see.
Artist/Album/Title
Album/Artist/Title?
Genre/Artist/Title??

That better??

[stu8080]

I second LilYoda, sometimes i want to listen to an artist, others a compilation - the simplest way to switch between the two would be great.

Adding genre support would mean lots of time spent updating my ID3 tags but would be well worth it.

[psycik]

Yeah i'd have a pretty big tag update as well.

You know I wish winamp had an open media library....would save me writing a heap of code. I tried just using windows media player for a media library but something about running as a plugin didn't seem to work, so I had it write my own media library , so some of these features that these stable media programs take a little bit of time to implement......like m3u importing.

Now with this one, do we want to import the m3u's and maintain them in MusicLibrary or just display them with the other playlists read directly from disk??

[stu8080]

I never found an efficient enough way of building and saving playlists in GBPVR so far, so tend to not bother... Now if you could develop an intuitive way of doing so it would be another feather in MusicLibrarys cap... ;-)

[LilY0da]

Now with this one, do we want to import the m3u's and maintain them in MusicLibrary or just display them with the other playlists read directly from disk??

Your call. Wether you can edit them in GBPVR or not is up to you.
Even if you decide to make them editable, simple editing of the playlist after you imported it (like add and remove a track, and shuffle) is far enough for me.

My 2 cents is that a multipurpose tool like GBPVR can't beat dedicated tools for auto-generation of m3u playlists based on tags like genre, ratings, etc... And it's not its purpose. So personally, I'll keep building my m3u outside of GBPVR, and have them imported. Quick edits are cool, but I don't see me editing a thousand song long playlist in GBPVR...

[psycik]

I'd be tempted to make them virtual, rather than imported, and maybe find them when the music scan happens.

This means they can change quite often, and by loading them with the library scan, mean's i'm not hunting for them when I switch over to the playlist page.