Subsonic Forum

Hello everybody,

I didn't see this type of request when I looked, so my apologies if something similar has been requested.

I was wondering how hard it would be to implement something similar to or exactly like the Subsonic welcome message that you can set for specific Artists or Albums. For an example, I am trying to learn up on Classical music history and it would be great to be able to write a short biography for a composer that would show up with his/her album entries while I am selecting music.

To me it sounds like it would be pretty complicated to make an interface that could set it for each artist or album, but maybe it could be as simple as putting a text file in the artist or album directory.

I wish I better understood these things so I could look into it myself, if anyone has any ideas of how it could be implemented or opinions on whether it's a useful idea or not I appreciate any criticism.

Thanks!

Wow!!! I was just thinking about this earlier today, and posting it here.

I used to (still do, for the moment) have Jinzora running on my server. That has/had a feature that would go out to whatever various sites you specify (lyricwiki, amazon, audioscrobbler, etc....) and collect bios, band/artist photos, similar music, etc... and display that when clicking on an artist. Now, that all stopped working some time ago since Jinzora is no longer developed and the old code just stopped working at some point. But it was a really cool feature...

What about using the comment section on the web interface? On my instance of subsonic, I modified it so that only admins can modify comments. This may not be exactly what you are looking for, but it's better than nothing (I think).

All mp3 at least have a comment tag where all this info should go.
All we need is a way to get SS to display it (same goes for lyrics)

Hmmm..

The comment thing would work, but not for a lot of different artists/composers at once. Though of course I appreciate any and all suggestions.

I haven't looked into having Subsonic read the mp3s' tags and displaying them somewhere on the page, though that probably sounds like the easiest if I knew anything about how Subsonic reads the rest of the tags.

A method I found that uses php and a text file seems like it could be pretty easy as well, but I don't know (I don't think it does) if Subsonic uses php, so that would mean anyone using such a mod would have to go through and install php on their system, which doesn't sound like the best solution either.

Anyway, not much on this post worth looking at, just wanted to say thanks for the suggestions. I am going to look further into this, if I find a solution using one of the mentioned ideas of another way I'll be sure to post it.

Thanks everybody

+1
I very much like the way Pandora has implemented this feature. I honestly spend hours reading background information of artists.