Music Albums II V0.5

[paulg]

For those who loved the simplicity of MusicAlbums Plugin I have posted my updated version called Music Albums II (MAP2). I have tested it against the latest GBPVR release on my home system. It all seems to be working fine. As a summary of the features I have added:

Version 0.5
Configuration
- Delay before displaying song lists
- Multiple sources for music files

Plugin
- Loads albums/MPU3 from multile source directories defined by the configuration
- Does a recursive walk through each of the directories looking for playlists and music files. Any folder that contains music files is considered an album.
- Display of the album list and song lists are delayed to give better initial response and to allow faster navigation of the album list. The delay is set in the configuratin panel.
- Navigation is simplified. Use UP/DN arrow to browse album/song list. Use right arrow to go from Album List to Song List to Now Playing List. Use left arrow to go back. Use select key to add an album or song to the Now Playing List. Channel UP/DN give paging in album/song list. The colored keys on the Hauppauge remote shoudl be the same as MAP. Yellow = Pg DN; Red = Pg UP; Blue = select; PAUSE will pause; PLAYwill resume from Pause; STOP will stop everything and clear the Now Playing List
- Some clean up on file name handling

There are a few items I would still like to do:

- Support for ID3V2.4
- Edit of Now Playing List (Music Queue)
- Undo Last add
- AutoPlay for operation without having the TV turned on
- Maybe a simple playlist editor
- Shuffle Play

All input is welcome.

Paulg

[bluesxman]

Hi, just installed it and find on the whole it's just what I'm after for a music plugin - good work!

However I've a few suggestions/comments:

1. Pressing replay or skip plays the previous or next track as expected but it also acts as if you pressed left or right arrow.
2. It would be nice to be able to scroll the list of tracks to be played.
3. It would also be nice to remove invidual tracks from the list.
4. I'll add my vote to having a shuffle feature.

Thanks for the work so far!

[capone]

It's a great idea, but it needs a database for anyone w/ a lot of MP3s. I had to trim its access way back so it could even finish loading.

Also, it would a good idea to join the trend of putting what the buttons do right on the screen (like video archiever and new xrecord)

[bluesxman]

Button functions are displayed on screen.

[tieke]

Just installed it - looks good (after a minor install problem - checking the log it showed I had two copies of a playlist in the recursed directories, which caused the plugin to hang for several minutes then reports 0 songs found - just in case anyone else has the same problem).

Looks like I will have to change my filenaming slightly, but should be good (had one base directory with playlists pointing to all the albums for Music Albums to use, as well as playlists in individual directories called "00 - PlaylistName.m3u" so they would appear first in the MyMusic listings, but I will have to get rid of the leading zeros on the recursed playlists to make the Music Albums display a bit cleaner - no biggie.)

I know it's well down on the order of things, but could you put a bit more skinning in? Primarily I want to be able to change the box background colour from black really, so if it's possible to add this in to a future release that would be great.

The response time seemed fine to me, but I selected to use .m3u rather than folders, so that could be why - I have only around 600 playlists, as opposed to around 13,000 mp3s. (and more to come - I've still got a couple of hundred CDs to rip ).

[capone]

Ah...nm...I thought the color keys did something more specific.

[tieke]

If you want to add info about the colour keys, you can just put it in the skin as part of the background. I've added the following info in the skin.xml just after the "DrawText text="Music Albums" line:

<DrawRoundedRect loc="201,426" size="20,20" radius="10" borderWidth="1" borderColor="Transparent" fillColor="Red"/>
<DrawText text="Up" loc="221,425" size="230,28" textStyle="KeyInfo" align="Left"/>
<DrawRoundedRect loc="271,426" size="20,20" radius="10" borderWidth="1" borderColor="Transparent" fillColor="Yellow"/>
<DrawText text="Down" loc="291,425" size="230,28" textStyle="KeyInfo" align="Left"/>
<DrawRoundedRect loc="369,426" size="20,20" radius="10" borderWidth="1" borderColor="Transparent" fillColor="Blue"/>
<DrawText text="Add" loc="389,425" size="230,28" textStyle="KeyInfo" align="Left"/>

cheers,

tieke

EDIT: forgot to mention that you first have to define the KeyInfo text style - add the following under <TextStyles>:

<TextStyle name="KeyInfo" color="LightGray" typeFace="Arial" size="16" style="bold"/>

[tieke]

I also changed my copies of the helpimage.jpg files to match my standard skin style a bit more, and have attached them if you want to try them.

cheers,

tieke

[paulg]

I have extended the skin.xml a bit. There are now three boxes. You can play all you want with them and a few of the text items. I am still working on more skinning but I thought this should help some who wanted some basics.

paulg

[tieke]

I have extended the skin.xml a bit. There are now three boxes. You can play all you want with them and a few of the text items. I am still working on more skinning but I thought this should help some who wanted some basics.

Thanks paulg, this looks like just what I wanted. Just one other minor thing - would it be possible for the helpimages be pngs or gifs rather than jpgs? it's just that then I could have a transparent background around the helpimage text, and wouldn't have to colour-match it to the standard background if I change it.

tipstir, it looks like you can get rid of the black boxes with this latest version of the plugin - what black are you referring to?

cheers,

tieke