MusicCabinet - artist radio, genre radio & related artists

[hakko]

Looking good! I might even switch myself. I'll definitely include this in future releases so that others can benefit from your work on it. Thanks!

[Ultraviolet]

I just wanted to chime in and say how much I am enjoying this mod/branch/whatever it is becoming. I have discovered more new music in the last couple weeks than I have in the last couple years--really fun. I did do a complete reinstall of Subsonic and musiccabinet to drop down to a less experimental version--the autospawning players disappeared after that.

I did have a question and a couple of suggestions. Will this new tag based version of musiccabinet negate the need for artist parent folders? I have made a copy of my music collection and generated parent artist folders and am currently using that in Subsonic, but it does have it's limitations. I know you have the work around of using "_" for artists that end in symbols windows doesn't like, but I've also run into severe Windows file name length problems with my classical collection. Additionally, there are some collections that I like to keep separate from the rest of the artist like The Hanssler Bach Collection, Beethoven Complete Works or The Blues Collection. The last one is actually 90 different artists. In all cases though, the parent folder isn't an artist folder. Again, you aren't designing MusicCabinet to my specific needs, I was just curious what your plans were. I'm deriving so much enjoyment from this that I will do my best to tailor my organization structure to your requirements--I just wanted a clearer idea of what those were.

Additionally, you mentioned something about the Album Artist tag before (which I don't currently utilize). Is that the secret to getting Various Artist/Soundtrack albums to show something other than artist info for the first track? Last.fm does allow you to view the info for something like "Ghostbusters". I didn't know if there was something currently in place that would also allow me to display that in Subsonic.

Thanks again for the great work.

[hakko]

I'm glad you're enjoying it!

I've been working the last week on replacing Sindre's file scanning mechanism from scratch. I came up with a solution that seems very promising, fast and clean code. But I've only written automatic test cases for it so far, not even used it myself. It scans your whole media folder(s) and builds up a database model of present artists, albums and tracks, solely based on tags. Your folder structure is from now on only used to map folder artwork to a certain album, apart from that, you can spread your artists/albums however you want. So a double cd for example using "cd1"/"cd2" folders becomes one single album in the database. If you used to depend on "cd1"/"cd2" folders, you have to change to rely on disc number tags now.

The "Album Artist" tag (most software use id3 key TPE2) is read during scanning, and "Album artist" takes precedence over "Artist".
So, for a soundtrack, you could give each song it's correct artist tag, but enter the value "Various Artists" as "Album Artist". "Various Artists" will then be displayed as Artist name in the left column, but when you expand the album in the main window or add tracks to the playlist or scrobble songs to last.fm, the actual artist name of each song is displayed.

If you don't use "Album Artist", it would then be interpreted as if all the participating artists on the soundtrack had their own album. So "Album Artist" is highly recommended to use, I think that's the best way to group releases where multiple artists appear together.

It also reads the Composer tag by the way, I'm not sure what to do with that value yet, but it's stored for future use. And so is sort artist / sort album artist for people who prefer "Lennon, John" rather than "John Lennon".

So, basically: my current plan is to get rid of the inefficient folder/file handling, and replacing it with an elegant and fast database solution. I'm very excited about the idea actually. I like it that MusicCabinet now takes care of all logic, as it will give more possible options to radio playlists, like excluding short tracks, adding a year interval to it etc. It's a lot of work (I think I wrote 2500 lines of code over the last week) but it will be a very good base for future improvements.

[precipitous]

Looking good! I might even switch myself. I'll definitely include this in future releases so that others can benefit from your work on it. Thanks!

Thank you for the kind words. I am really glad that you like the new theme! For the most part I consider it done (for now) with the exception of one thing. I still need to set the colors for when the genre tags on the Radio screen are hovered over and/or selected, but I can't seem to find where they are set. Can you please let me know?

I am also definitely open to suggestions and requests from the Subsonic/MusicCabinet community for enhancements and changes to the theme, so if anyone has ideas let me know...

[hakko]

Oh, they're very hard-coded (in radio.jsp). Shame on me. I guess the best thing would be to move them from radio.jsp straight to sonic_white.css, right? And give them some understandable name, so that it can easily be changed in sonic_black.css etc and other future themes?

I think you can tell every now and then that I like back-end development and stay away from interface design...

[jake-]

I've been working the last week on replacing Sindre's file scanning mechanism from scratch. I came up with a solution that seems very promising, fast and clean code. But I've only written automatic test cases for it so far, not even used it myself. It scans your whole media folder(s) and builds up a database model of present artists, albums and tracks, solely based on tags. Your folder structure is from now on only used to map folder artwork to a certain album, apart from that, you can spread your artists/albums however you want. So a double cd for example using "cd1"/"cd2" folders becomes one single album in the database. If you used to depend on "cd1"/"cd2" folders, you have to change to rely on disc number tags now.

Thanks so much for your work! I can't wait This is such a big improvement *excited*

The "Album Artist" tag (most software use id3 key TPE2) is read during scanning, and "Album artist" takes precedence over "Artist". So, for a soundtrack, you could give each song it's correct artist tag, but enter the value "Various Artists" as "Album Artist". "Various Artists" will then be displayed as Artist name in the left column, but when you expand the album in the main window or add tracks to the playlist or scrobble songs to last.fm, the actual artist name of each song is displayed.

This will show my bad tagging I use jaikoz for some time now but my old music will need a lot of work to get rid of different spellings and missing VA tags.

[calamitijo]

hello, it works with the musiccabinet beta (subsonic-beta) but, I don't find how it works on ios device like iphone on isub or z-subsonic? does the mod work on it? It says 'unable to stream....'.

How it is possible?

Jonathan

[hakko]

The beta is a bit of an experiment, sorry about that. I'm working on pretty large update right now, where that will be taken care of! But for now, the beta is web-only.

[precipitous]

Has anyone successfully set up an accordion view for the artist (left) panel of the MusicCabinet interface? Before I switched to MusicCabinet I used the Outlook theme by trickydick http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7238&start=15#p30390 and really liked the accordion feature. I tried to drop it into MusicCabinet, but was not successful...

If anyone has any advice I would really appreciate it...

[hakko]

I'm re-writing the left panel (artist names are now taken from database, not from file names). It will take a little while but still, it will work completely different in the next version I release. So maybe it's not worth putting lots of effort into it right now? Depending on how badly you want it here and now, though.

(in the next version, this can theoretically be done server-side so that only artists that start with an A are returned, for example. that will reduce the size of the page and speed up the load time for people with huge libraries)

[treminaor]

First off I want to thank you for this awesome Subsonic mod... the additional information is such a nice touch.

I'm having a bit of a bug problem with the mod however... when I click "Play <genre> radio", it empties my playlist and nothing happens. I also can't play genres from the Genre cloud. Any ideas why this is? My MusicCabinet page says that MusicCabinet has finished setup and is working properly.

Also, how do you get MusicCabinet to refresh/look for new contents when new artists/albums are added?

I also wanted to chime in by saying that I found the white theme to be blinding - strains my eyes to look at for very long. As a result, I did a quick reskin of the interface... not sure if anyone else is interested in having it this way:

[hakko]

Hi!

Thanks for the feedback but sorry about it not functioning properly!

Which version are you using?

How is your music organized? Do you have separate folders for different artists, different albums etc?

If you select the largest genre from the genre cloud (probably "indie" or "rock", the biggest word simply), does it give you a list of artists? The more music you have, the more songs does it have to pick from, obviously. Is your music tagged well in general so that your song titles has correct values?

When you add new albums/artists, new metadata (biographies etc) will be read from last.fm the next time you update your search index from Settings -> Search.

Could you search for the file musiccabinet.log (this gets written to a temporary directory) on your hard drive and upload it together with subsonic.log and send me a link and I'll have a look if something looks weird!

[treminaor]

Hi!

Thanks for the feedback but sorry about it not functioning properly!

Which version are you using?

How is your music organized? Do you have separate folders for different artists, different albums etc?

If you select the largest genre from the genre cloud (probably "indie" or "rock", the biggest word simply), does it give you a list of artists? The more music you have, the more songs does it have to pick from, obviously. Is your music tagged well in general so that your song titles has correct values?

When you add new albums/artists, new metadata (biographies etc) will be read from last.fm the next time you update your search index from Settings -> Search.

Could you search for the file musiccabinet.log (this gets written to a temporary directory) on your hard drive and upload it together with subsonic.log and send me a link and I'll have a look if something looks weird!

Thanks for your response!
Version: Subsonic, original version 4.6. Built with MusicCabinet plugin, version 0.5.49, on June 24, 2012.
Organization: F:\Music\<Artist>\<Album>\<Song files>

Yes, 95% of my music should have correct tags as I take care to rip them properly. Clicking any genre gives me a list of artists, but does not generate a playlist when I click "play <genre> radio".
315 artists
500 albums
5,273 songs
53.24 GB (~ 827 hours)

musiccabinet.log: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/7345145/image_ ... abinet.log
subsonic.log: <removed>

[hakko]

PM sent

[vollbr0t]

i think there is a lot of potential for expanding the use of last.fm within subsonic/musiccabinet... hakko, have you thought about creating chart-playlists using last.fm? there is an extensive subpage within last.fm (http://www.last.fm/charts) where all sorts of chart-lists can be seen... i think it would be really great to use this information to generate playlists in musiccabinet!