My Music 3 Beta (DB Version)

[reven]

have you guys found any more bugs?

i was playing around with the code today, and ive fixed the
- rating45 issue
- geoff's album art issue

ive also added the ability to delete tracks from the current playlist (deleting tracks you already played can cause wonky effects thou).

im going to work on this tomorrow and try and get another release out, i just want to sort out a few more bugs (that means i need some more reports ) first. ill also fix the config app so you dont need to manually edit the config.xml file (config app is always the boring part, after the skin...)

yeah i know its been slow on the my music front, but the my vids front is coming along nicely

ps ive also fixed the bug where the music panel would disappear during animations (entering my music or navigating). errr i think thats it.

[djdafreund]

Hey Reven,
Is it possible to have the animations a little smoother? Just wondering if to add on a wish list. It's cool if not. That would be nice though. As well as the transition effects when going through the pictures when in slideshow mode.

[reven]

animations are about as smooth as i can make them, they're fine on my 2.6ghz machine.

[LilY0da]

I'm seeing a logic problem, but I don't know if it's me or the tool that's wrong
I have albums which contain misc artists. An exemple is "Songs in the key of X"
So the way I use the tags, is that I set an "Artist" tag with the real artist name on each track, but I set a "album artist" tag to "Various", or "Compliations" for all of them.

[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]
[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]

Which allows me to go into the "Various" folder and listen to the whole "Songs in the key of X" album

With the new plugin, I can't do that anymore, since the tool only reads the "Artist" tag, and not the "Album Artist" one.
When you select sort by album in the plugin, it sorts them by artists first, so that doesn't solve my problem :-|
Here is my "Album View"
[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]

The easiest way out would IMHO be to:
- add an entry in the table for Album Artist. If the tag doesn't exist, then use then copy the artist tag of the track into the album artist tag
- name the current default view as "artist", cause that's what it sorts it into
- add a "album" view, that displays albums with the format "album artist - album title"

Also, I noticed you are reading the genre tag, which is cool, but there's a couple more that would be awesome. Namely the "mood" one, and the "rating" one. If that's possible, then you could add a sort for it

Last, there is a possibility to store the album art in the file itself, instead of having a "Folder.jpg" file. Dunno if it's easy to add for you to read the album art. Here's a screenie of the tag set in the file itself
[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]
I can send you files with various tags, if you want to test them, just don't tell the FBI on me

[djdafreund]

animations are about as smooth as i can make them, they're fine on my 2.6ghz machine.

Well, I'm using a 3ghz machine with a GF6800 card and 1gig of pc3200 memory. And it isn't smooth. Is there something that might be different on my faster machine that would cause this? (Thats funny sarcasm of course. :-)) Ok, seriously though, it's not slow really, but what i mean is it's not really smooth, it's like it's at 8fps or something. Instead of like 20-30 fps. Or really, a better choice of words would be it doesn't seem FLUID.

[reven]

it will never be 20-30fps, its using GDI+ which is slow, its smooth on my machine, but only about yeah 8fps i guess.

gbpvr uses images for everything because of the 350, mvp and xcard, mediaportal uses directdraw which is painted by your graphics card (well as far as i know).

[reven]

i just uploaded a new version with the bug fixes i mentioned before, plus the config app is now fixed. so for the new testers, first run the config and configure you "music directories" (this is what virtual root use to be, but doesnt use any of your old locations, so you'll have to reenter them)

and then run the mymusicdbloader.exe file, just double click it or run it from the command prompt.

[reven]

- add an entry in the table for Album Artist. If the tag doesn't exist, then use then copy the artist tag of the track into the album artist tag

ive never seen this tag in any file, and its not available in the tag reader i use

- name the current default view as "artist", cause that's what it sorts it into

ive done this in the new version.

- add a "album" view, that displays albums with the format "album artist - album title"

this would be kind of pointless, the "artist" view does this just with an extra stetp, artist/album/songs. if i had it display like "aritst - album"/songs it would just create far more entries in the first list, which would make it longer to navigate through the list.

Also, I noticed you are reading the genre tag, which is cool, but there's a couple more that would be awesome. Namely the "mood" one, and the "rating" one. If that's possible, then you could add a sort for it

Last, there is a possibility to store the album art in the file itself, instead of having a "Folder.jpg" file. Dunno if it's easy to add for you to read the album art. Here's a screenie of the tag set in the file itself

once again these tags are available in the id3 library i use, and plus i dont really want to start add new attributes to the database that arent support by wma, ogg and ape files. i may add composer since someone asked for that and their request made sense....

[LilY0da]

Well in that case, ppl won't be able to use the plugin to listen to compilations or bestofs, or soundtracks. The tracks from these types of albums would be scattered in several different menus for each artist that participated in the soundtrack, for exemple

If you at least had a view that would display the album first (even without the artist), then it might be usable.

Or is there another way to use the plugin to be able to listen to a music soundtrack with misc artists on it, for exemple?

EDIT: BTW, album artist and rating are stored strandard in MP3, OGG, WMA, MPC, FLAC, APE and WAV (using different protocols for each file type, ID3v2 or APEv2, etc...), from what docs I read. Mood and album art aren't.

[reven]

most cddb entries just store the artist as "Various Artists" for soundtracks etc, so the artist is usually wrong. but cd tracks on soundtracks are usually also released on a album by the artist, so if you really like the artist you probably already have that song in a seperate location. for example i may have the godzilla soundtrack (but i dont) and also green day insomniac, brainstew is on both on those albums.

i know this has always been a stupid way to do it, but its the standard way to do it now, and i dont have access to the extra tag you mentioned.