Please add to this post "donation for music support"

Yep, I'd donate if it was updated

Like the idea and I donate to when it has updated :) Sort on genre, artist are my wishes for this and maybe an option to add a good/proper way to add online radio stations :)

ebr has mentioned if I would have a look.

I'm currently not using the Music part myself, haven’t even got Video sorted yet.

So first I'll try and fix any bugs.

I'm not up to date with what bugs there are with the Music plugin, could anyone enlighten me.

@Bas: Would much rather see a new fresh take on bringing music to mediabrowser

In that case any ideas of what features would be nice.

I've not looked at the plugin yet, but my gut feeling is that Music could be organised in the same way as Movies is.

You could then store all your albums in one directory, Artist/Genre etc.etc, would be shortcuts to the MP3’s.

What makes this approach nice is that the structure becomes very flexible, eg.

\NAS\music\All Music Albums \Album1 \Albun2 etc.

The above would be the only stored place, the rest below would be shortcuts.

\NAS\music\Artists \Bon Jov \Elvis
\NAS\music\Genre \Rock \Pop
\NAS\music\Year \80’s \90’s
\NAS\music\Publisher \Sony \EMI

Playlists could also just be another Folder

\NAS\music\Playlists\Wifes \Slow \Rock
\NAS\music\Playlists\Children \Bedtime \Party

etc. And of course custom Folder.Jpg’s could then be applied to each section.

Now one issue here is that if you have a massive collection of MP3’s, a lot of this information is probably already there, so a utility to extract meta info and create the shortcuts would be a must.

I would donate again for an improved music-plugin with more support for tags, indexing, mediainfo etc as my music collection is as important to me as my other media collections.

Display basic mediainfo for Music

There are a few requests for more support etc for the music-plugin so it would be good for people to throw their support into 1 thread.

All i can say is fantastic thanks ebr and kpj,, and all other posters for this support. sounds really cool “ a fresh take on music eh” hopefully more supporters will make a wish so to speak.. ill be watching closely hope ebr and co can keep us posted on this thread. like you say karlos get everyones support into 1 thread just need to spread the word to get the support.

SO USE THOSE WISHES FELLOW MEDIA ENTHUSIASTS…

Long live the media browser comunity.

oorah.lol

@KpjComp

It would be good to have the music-plugin as a more integrated plug-in, by this I mean that it behaves differently for each theme. Some themes can randomnly play tracks from the top level where as others can’t. Some themes in the past have struggled to populate albumart after an update, although now I think all are good. The now playing screen uses Mediacentre’s album wall whilst playing although I don’t mind that.

I do not have a problem sorting my collection by Artist but there are quite a few requests regarding this topic, sort by Genre, Year would be cool.

Personally I would like to see more info for tracks displayed whilst playing i.e Play Time, Bitrate, Year and Genre. Not sure how difficult it would be to implement and users would have to Tag their colections accordingly to what they would like to see displayed.

edit Possibly integrate a streaming radio plugin too ;)

One feature I would like to see is an online metadata provider. The current music plugin feels incomplete without it

Can’t wait for Music plugin to be rewritten, definitely will donate to this project.

i dont really know who all the developers are, but im hoping they pop on and give there support here. i have read that people don’t use the music support plug-in. well maybe it can be change so all media is solely used by MB

cheers all for posting

I've added my support here.

I'd donate if I could have all my music in a single folder – and then in MB I could “Index by Artist” and it would then show all the music split into artist folders – much like “Index By Actor” works now.

Ok, been looking at the Music plugin tonight.

It looks like it inherits most of it’s attributes from the Movie DB side. So I'm not sure this will take much work to bring it into line with the Movie side.

The folder short-cuts work the same as the Movies so the idea of just sorting the media into shortcut / directory / files works.

So, would I be right in thinking the main thing missing is extra meta-data information?.

Now if you have a large collection of music, doing the Directory short-cuts is going to be a long / boring task (not so bad with movies), so on top of getting local meta data extracted, would an automatic Short-cut directory generator be the best route. Also doing this it won’t matter what layout you currently have your music setup as MB wouldn’t even need to see the original, everything could be run from short-cuts.

I've also noticed in my small collection of Music, that I'm using Cover.jpg, the utility could also just do a copy to folder.jpg to keep things consistent in MB.

So my idea is –> You tell the Music plugin were to store Genre / Artist / Album etc. and an App is then run that scans all your music and automatically generates the required short-cuts.

One thing I did notice with the Music plugin, the Album artwork is fine, but no artwork is displayed for Songs, I assume what we want here is for the Album artwork too appear.

Good day,

Well done and many thanks indeed KpjComp for taking this plug ins.

One thing tho, why not get the plug ins getting the info from the id3 tags? for sorting\indexing and a like.

Regarding donation for this or older one, I for sure will donate.

My best

Ok, a bit more detail on short-cuts, as I'm not sure everyone understands them.

Firstly, short-cuts are not a new idea, it’s already built in at the core of MB, the Movies and Music already support this. If your not using short-cuts then your missing out on one of MB’s best features.

To explain better I'll create a pretend scenario. Say, me and my wife both like different music, in some cases we like the same music.

So if I had my music stored like –>

\\NAS\Music\WifesMusic
\\NAS\Music\MyMusic
\\NAS\Music\MusicWeBothLike

In MB I could create a Directory structure like-> (these could even be placed on local drive in case your NAS is read-only)

c:\music\WifesMusic
   \Albums
   \Artists
   \Genres
   \Playlists
c:\music\MyMusic
   \Albums
   \Artists
   \Genres
   \Playlists

And then I could create an automatic scanner that looked in \NAS\Music\WifesMusic and \NAS\Music\MusicWeBothLike extract the Album information and place into the Wife’s Album directory. And then also create another rule that did MyMusic etc. You could then have separate rules for Genre’s / Artist’s etc, so in theory you could have your Artists stored at a deeper level to say Albums, (your choice).

Your layout might be totally different to this, but the nice thing it doesn’t matter. :), if set up correctly using Filters/Sorting would hardly ever be needed.

A bit more thinking on this, I would think a Tool to organize folder/file shortcuts would also be useful for Movies, the only difference would be that one would be looking at MP3/WMA meta data, the other would be looking at MyMovies.xml.

Since we're tossing out ideas here…

Currently, I use iTunes because the smart playlists (w/ live updating) and genius mix are hard to beat. I have no idea what an MB plugin might be capable of, but if anybody can figure out a way to allow for smart playlists and some sort of genius mix, I would absolutely pay for that (and possibly name a child after you).

I'd definitely donate for music functionality. I have a couple of requests/suggestions some of which have already been mentioned.

1. Where a movie library with a couple of thousand titles is considered “large”, a music libray with several thousand tracks is pretty small. Which has me wondering if a file based/shortcut based solution makes good design sense. I'd strongly suggest a database approach that stores artist, album, and track info allowing for fast query result on just about any imaginable search criteria.

2. Additional views; Album, Genre, Decade, Rating (number of *’s), etc, easily made possible with #1 above.

3. Smart Playlists again, easy with #1 above.

4. Suppport for lossless Monkey’s Audio (.ape) format. TagLib# can read APE tags and adding .ape support to the existing music plugin required adding one line of code to the MusicHelper.IsMusic method.

5. Playlist sorting/randomization

That’s just off the top of my head. I'm sure there’s much more :)

Steve

@SteveV: Suppport for lossless Monkey’s Audio (.ape) format.

Ok, done that one as a test of using HG commit, never used it before, it appears to have updated repository. :)

Good stuff here. I've been waiting for an update for a while and I'd definately be willing to donate for it.

well im chuffed to say the least, this post may change the face of MB.. thanks everyone. including the MB team really appreciate the work..

thanks

Have you made any more progress Kpj… looking forward to whats in store.. thanks for working on it, wish i could help.

cheers again

Hi KpjComp

Not sure if it helps any, but Throgmorton managed to display more mediainfo than most in Centrality. Although info is over 2 tiers, he has total album time, genre, total track numbers and year displayed.

i have found a program that embeds and finds album art and sorts tags.. its called album art fixer. when i say find it was on a storage drive. could this be looked at or implemented (like coverart). i used it with xp and vista.. was good. as most albums downloaded were never tagd

would we benefit

I really would like to see this plugin being developped further. It have offered a wish for this.

There is an open source library API for tagging music called id3lib could this be used for the musicplugin.

I also would like to see that the playlist will be auto saved when shutting down and that the playstate will be rembered so when playing the next time it plays further where it ended earlier.

This plugin needs some major attention, i agree. This is a key part of “media” browser’s future I'd say as it gets more and more users.

Wish ADDED from me! ;)

Wish added… I would even add another for some sort of iTunes support/integration… not even sure if that i sin the realm of possibility.

kpj any more progress dude, really excited about this….

yes sort by artist is a must.ie sort by actor. plus all other on this post but the basics would be nice as well as mete data. i know your busy.. thanks again