MusicCabinet - artist radio, genre radio & related artists

[hakko]

Minor update: Aktarus asked if it was possible to have the newest albums displayed first on the artist page. And also if it was possible to choose which tab to open by default when pressing the Home button (Random, Recently added, Top rated etc).

Now it is! Each user can choose to have it their way.



Replace your current subsonic.war with http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.war (0.5.35b) and restart your Subsonic service.

[TheWarden]

I tried this on linux (Fedora) and I'm pretty sure the postgres service is running and setup correctly but MusicCabinet doesn't seem to see it. There are no attempted login attempts in the postgres logs either.

Daire

[hakko]

What's happening when you go to Settings -> MusicCabinet? Something like this? http://i.imgur.com/ap2YB.png

Are the Subsonic process and the Postgres process running on the same machine? From the machine where Subsonic is running, can you issue "telnet localhost 5432" and get a connection? Or do you get something like "Connection refused"?

Do you have any internal firewall that could stop it (unlikely)? In your /etc/hosts file, do you map "localhost" to 127.0.0.1?

Which version of Postgres are you running?

[TheWarden]

What's happening when you go to Settings -> MusicCabinet? Something like this? http://i.imgur.com/ap2YB.png

Yep that's the one.

Are the Subsonic process and the Postgres process running on the same machine? From the machine where Subsonic is running, can you issue "telnet localhost 5432" and get a connection? Or do you get something like "Connection refused"?

I seems to seems to be connecting... well it doesn't say connection refused but telnet eventually times out (Connection closed by foreign host).
# netstat -l | grep 5432
unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 12610058 /tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432

Do you have any internal firewall that could stop it (unlikely)? In your /etc/hosts file, do you map "localhost" to 127.0.0.1?

Nope. iptables is disabled. "127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost" in /etc/hosts.

Which version of Postgres are you running?

Running 9.1.3. Does it really have to be 9.1.13 exactly?

[hakko]

I seems to seems to be connecting... well it doesn't say connection refused but telnet eventually times out (Connection closed by foreign host).
# netstat -l | grep 5432
unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 12610058 /tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432

That looks good, it's expected behavior. It's waiting for you to send some HELO characters and when you don't, it closes the connection.

Running 9.1.3. Does it really have to be 9.1.13 exactly?

Nah. One guy reported errors for 8.4.8 (his installation hadn't plpgsql by default and function names where truncated to 32 characters). I just wrote the latest version but I'd expect it to work with the latest major versions (7.* or so).

Since you've given such a detailed error report and everything looks good in theory, the only solution I can think of is adding more logging to nail what's going wrong. Do you build from source or use the subsonic.war?

What's happening behind the scenes is that it assumes that Postgres isn't there. Then, it tries to open a socket to localhost:5432. If that works, it writes a certain sequence of characters to the stream (what psql would write) and then it checks that the answer returned is what Postgres would write (to make sure it's not another service running at port 5432). Only if this succeeds, it decides that it's OK to continue.

I'd be interested to see which part's going wrong, but to do that, I'd need to either send you code or a new subsonic.war with added logging. Would you be up for that? I'd appreciate it but I don't expect you to go out of your way to help me.

[TheWarden]

Yea no problem testing things for you. Just put the war somewhere and I'll install it.

[hakko]

Thanks! I have a new subsonic.war with added logging (no new features) up here: http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic-thewarden.war

Rename to subsonic.war and install as usual. There should then be a file called musiccabinet.log in your temp directory (wherever that is.. probably /var). I guess you have to search for it.

Just paste the content from it here and I'll see if I can make something out of it!

[jfmus]

Really loving this mod, but I am noticing one quirk . I have two folders that I am pulling my library from. Studio and Bootleg. So when you are in the Left frame, you see artists that can be filtered by Studio Folders, Bootleg Folders, or All Folders. Once the Music Cabinet has created the database, it creates two sets of related artists in the main frame. So in other words, if you choose the Related Artists link you get a duplicate listing for an Artist with the studio folders in one link, and the bootleg folders in the other. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

jfmus

[hakko]

jfmus: I actually fixed that yesterday night, I have a friend who organizes his music kind of the same way who made me aware of it. The new version removes the duplicate from the "Genre" view and the "Related artists" view, leading to the same artist view as you would end up on from the left frame.

The bad news is that it's still not gonna work perfectly from other links, like "Home -> Recently added" or from links in the playlist view. I'll post here when I have an update for that (it might take a while, I consider waiting for the 4.7 release that will help take care of it).

Minor update:

I also noticed that some artists get an ugly biography, if they share their name with other artists.
Like this: http://www.last.fm/music/First+Aid+Kit

Therefore, there's now a manual update possibility for artist biographies:



The new subsonic.war is up at http://dilerium.se/musiccabinet/subsonic.war (0.5.37b)

[jfmus]

Thanks for the response....I will give the new version a try and report back. As far as perfect goes, this is such a leap forward from what subsonic could do before that the warts are really not a big deal. Keep up the good work. It is appreciated!

Also, I just noticed another thing in relation to the duplicate artist. The same thing is happening when you do a search. The results return an artist line for each root folder.

jfmus

[hakko]

Thank you! It makes me happy to hear. But keep reporting the oddities and I might fix them!

Edit: yes, regarding the search, the playlist and so on, that's Subsonic issues. I guess Sindre is aware and I think it's (rather coincidentally) gonna get fixed in 4.7.

[Ultraviolet]

Well, the current limit of what this can handle is somewhere below 500,000 tracks. It has slowed to the point where completion time will easily be in the months, if not years. I actually stopped it after a few days to see if I could restart the indexing again and have it pick up where it left off, but nothing was saved to postgres so I started from scratch again. Is it possible to do some chunking so that info is saved to the db incrementally?

[hakko]

Ultraviolet: I'm sorry to hear that. The only thing that worries me is whether the slowing down is related to my code (for example, holding too many artists names meant to be updated in memory), or if last.fm has some sort of "unfair usage" detection that identifies a lot of web service calls from your machine and delays the answers.

Obviously, there is some sort of upper limit given that last.fm allows 5 calls per second. If your library is humongous and you want it kept up-to-date, there is some point where your machine can ask last.fm for updates 24/7 and still not get as much as needed within that time frame.

But you've effectively made me aware that I haven't really written my code to handle this gracefully. Currently, it's just "get all artists names lacking last.fm metadata, put them into memory, iterate over all of them, ask last.fm for metadata, batch insert into database import table for every 1000 answers, when all is done, run the script that updates the real database tables from import table". This is fairly efficient for a library of my size but obviously not of yours.

I'll change this to keep less artist names in memory during the scanning, and to update the real database tables during the process. And also to calculate some upper limit for what's realistic to handle given the 5 calls per second limit, and then handle larger libraries differently than trying and failing.

I cannot give you a time frame of when this will happen. I'll finish a new feature that I'm halfway through and then I'll prioritize this, but I'll have significantly less spare time for the next weeks to come. So you can either wait for that, or try adding your music in batches (start off by having just one media folder containing 50.000 tracks, update search index, add another media folder with 50.000 more tracks, update search index, repeat until done).

[TheWarden]

Hey,

I haven't had a chance to try the debug version on Linux yet (tomorrow) but I did have a play around with MusicCabinet a bit on a windows install and I have some (personal) feedback for you. Firstly I think the Genre cloud and using the Last.fm tags for that is a great idea and seems to work really well. In the absence of mp3 tag browsing in Subsonic this seems like the best and simplest way to achieve this functionality. Here is a list a requests most of which are purely personal preference:

[*]In order to avoid having to create icons for every theme maybe it would be better to make the Genres and Radio buttons more like "shortcuts" and just have them as text links in the left hand frame? If you are planning on creating icons for all the themes then I'm fine with that too.
[*] Because Subsonic lacks genres it would be nice to be able to browse ALL the artists in your collection that match a certain genre instead of just showing the "top" 20 artists. It would have to be a list view like the left hand frame. So you could have a "Browse Genre" link along with Play radio/browse last.fm. Also can you make the number of top artists shown configurable (ie more than 20)?
[*] I think I prefer how albums were listed in the original subsonic with the album art to the right. The problem is that now you have to scroll to browse many albums - especially now with the artist bio (which I love btw). Also as a purely asthetic thing I don't like having the album art on the left and then having the album list indented such that the text doesn't line up with the playlist at the bottom. I just don't think it's the most efficient use of space and makes browsing albums a little slower than it used to be.
[*] I'm not sure exactly how last.fm's top tracks is worked out but it seems to include quite a lot of intros and filler tracks. Is it most played (that might explain the intros). Also for artist radio are you using the top tracks from the other similar artists or just randomly selecting the tracks? Again these seem to include a lot of tracks you would never hear on a real radio (tracks from mix comilations, intros, skits, crap songs!).

Like I said I think the Genre cloud and last.fm integration is a fantastic idea and well implemented but do we have to change the default album view so much? Could it at least be configurable? And my most important feature request is to include a genre browser for all artists in your collection. I hope Sindre takes note of this mod - keep up the good work!

[Alsaya]

Hello hakko,

is MusicCabinet compatible with the 4.7 beta?

Thanks