MusicCabinet - artist radio, genre radio & related artists

[hakko]

You mean the lack of info for Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr?

Try renaming your directory to Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr_

it's ugly, I know.

apart from that, I don't see anything wrong?

[jacobthe4th]

Hakko,

I know from the log, it could look there is trouble with Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., in fact it is a problem in general with my install of SS and Music Cabinet.

It lacks the MusicCabinet tab found normally in the Settings view. When you view the Settings--> Search tab this is what I see...



If I view the Music Cabinet configuration, by clicking the URL, this what I see... it says is "Up to Date and Runner Normally"



If I click the Tag Configuration, it says I don't have enough artists, to make the list that is meaningful.



I have watched the Status info come up, but never start the Scrobble Stats or struggle to finish the Artists Biographies.



The mod will not create Play Artist Radio, Top Artists Tracks, do create playlists for any artist. The "Genre" and "Artist Radio" tabs are also missing.

I am running on WHS 3.0, Postgre 9.1, SS 4.6, MusicCabinet 5.50, and was before the server crash, without significant issue. Not sure this explains anything more, but that's where it's at.

Thanks,

Jacob

[hakko]

Given that you've had a crash, it's hard to know what state your Subsonic/Postgresql is in. But since Postgresql is normally very stable, I'd start off trying to get Subsonic back to a fresh state. Best way would be:
- stop the Subsonic service
- remove C:/subsonic/jetty
- remove C:/subsonic/subsonic15.index
- start the Subsonic service and force a search index update from Settings -> Search

if you're not on Windows, you probably know where else to find these files.

[jacobthe4th]

Hakko,

I know I said it crashed, but this was not a recovery, so much as a fresh install, b/c my HDD had failed. Fresh SS v4.6, fresh Music Cabinet 5.50, and fresh Postgre v9.1.

If I remove the files recursively from the c:/subsonic/jetty directory, aren't in fact deleting everything (the WebApp,JavaScripts, etc...)? I can wipe out the cache, and delete the subsonic15.index... n/p.



Did you mean something else? Since I really don't have much invested into the SS install I wipe it all clean and start again, it's just that was where I came from.

Hmmm.

Regards,

Jacob

[hakko]

The c:/subsonic/jetty directory does not contain any personal settings, only files expanded from the subsonic.war file. From what I've seen on the forums, it can sometimes get corrupt (no idea why and I haven't read that part of the Subsonic code in any detail), but simply deleting the jetty folder recursively and having all the files (webapp, js, etc) created freshly seems to fix it. I thought it was worth a shot.

[jacobthe4th]

Hakko,

You were right! It now displays the Genre and Radio, as well as, the Music Cabinet is now dispalyed as expected in the Setting Menu...

Let's see how it looks after it completes the Search Refresh.

Thanks again,

Jacob

[vollbr0t]

i just upgraded to 0.7... i have to say this looks pretty awesome, many very good new features!

there are two things i don´t like so far:

i do have a lot of sampler-cds, therefore with the new style of artists-display in the left frame (no folders, just artists) there are now a lot of artists displayed that do have only 1-4 tracks... i dont want to see those in the left frame. before this was solved through my folder-system (two folders, one for artists-album and one for sampler-cds).

the second problem i see now is, that there is no way to browse albums with different artists on it. it is only possible to go to an artists who is on a specific sampler, but then you won´t see the other artists!?

but still: thanks for your great work hakko

[jake-]

Just some quick comments after playing around with 0.7 for some minutes only:

- flawless install and scan
- very fast!
- Is it possible to combine the various flavors of VA (various, various artists, VA, V.A. ...)?
- I'm missing the folder selection. My audiobooks and videos are mixed up with the music
- Playing view is the same as Home for me
- "Weird" Al Yankovic should be sorted under W not #
- Umlauts should not be sorted to the end of the list (for ex: ö sorted as oe )

Lots of work to do with my tags. I don't like the "Artist feat. someone" showing up in the left pane. Any hints for tagging this?

An error view would be appreciated: Albums with one song, artists with one song, Artists without last-fm entry ... (command-list list output would be fine for me)

Very nice job hakko!

[hakko]

vollbr0t:

I believe that compilation CDs (like "Summer Hits 2012" etc) should have "Various Artists" as Album Artist tag in all files (TPE2 in MP3 files). Then, only an entry named "Various Artists" would appear in the left column containing all those CDs. But each file would still have a correct value for "Artist" that gets displayed, scrobbled to last.fm etc.

I also believe that you could use the same approach for your sampler CDs - just put "__ Sampler __" or whatever as Album Artist as tag in the files and they'll all get grouped as that in the left frame.

jake-:

I think combining VA, V.A. etc is up to you. Keep your tags uniform and it'll look good!
I'm not sure what to do about audio books. I intend MusicCabinet to be a tool for music. But I made the "file based" view so that people could still access videos. Maybe audio books should be ignored by the media scanner completely.
Playing view is supposed to take you to whatever is playing, doesn't that work? If nothing is playing, I think it goes to home view.
Sorting issues - I'll look into these. It works slightly different if you use reluctant artist loading (then Postgresql does all of it) or not as well so it's a bit confusing.
I have "Weird" Al Yankovic sorted under #, I believe he fits quite good in there. : )
I guess you could use "Album Artist" to avoid "Artist feat someone". If you use say "Kanye West" as Album Artist, it doesn't mapper if some track has "Kanye West feat somebody else" as Artist.
The media scanner writes warning for files with very bad tags to the log but an error view could be handy. Or maybe just the SQL code to get them...


thanks for your responses!

[jake-]

I think combining VA, V.A. etc is up to you. Keep your tags uniform and it'll look good!

Of course. For new music I pull tags from last-fm using jaikoz but a lot of manual correction is necessary and I miss this sometimes. And it will take some time to get the old music fixed for my large VA folder;-)

Playing view is supposed to take you to whatever is playing, doesn't that work? If nothing is playing, I think it goes to home view.

I'll check again

I have "Weird" Al Yankovic sorted under #, I believe he fits quite good in there. : )

point taken

[hakko]

At one point I had beets go through my entire collection to sort out the tags of old stuff (before I started getting my music from more reliable sources). It was quite a lot of work but I think it was worth it. http://beets.radbox.org/

[vollbr0t]

well, i really do not want to have all my compilation-cds under "Various Artists". There would be 100 cds in the category "Various Artists", and they would all show up at once and nothing could be found. I have them sorted in categories (like Pop-, Mash-Up-, Rock-Compilations etc.) by folders. i think it is absolutley necessary to pre-sort these to even find something.

okay, i could begin to retag everything (to create albums artists like "____Pop Sampler____" and "____Punk Sampler____"). but i think this will be unnecessary work, since my folder-structure solves this problem very fast and simple.

i'm really sorry, i downgraded back to 0.5, it is really too confusing the way everything is displayed in 0.7. (luckily i made backups ) i see that people having only artist-albums won't have my problems... but at the moment i think v0.5 is better for my purposes.

[hakko]

Oh that's fine! I guess there's no "one size fits all" software. If you've spent a lot of time creating a folder structure to fit your needs, 0.5 sounds like a better option.

I mean, basically, I'm just building the music server I'd like to have myself, and then I'm sharing it for anyone else to use. But since people have such different setups and needs, it obviously won't appeal to everyone.

I haven't decided exactly what to do with "Various Artists" CDs. There could be a search box at the "Various artists" page for example, to quickly filter albums. If an artist has a single song on a compilation CD, it might be a good idea to display that song on the artist's own page as well. But those are the type of changes that can be expected - folder structure won't be used for navigation in 0.7, so if you've built your collection around that, simply don't use it.

I guess the only drawback is that I won't add anything new to version 0.5. But since the code + building instructions are publicly released, anyone who's willing to spend some effort on it can just pick up where I left and start adding their own favorite features.

[Aktarus]

Hello Sir,

I just update to new version... very good work Hakko, but some old functions very missing to me.

Where is the MORE button in the top panel ?? I used it to upload new stuff from work to home.
My library is tag wery well, but class in "folder" structure.. Ex F:\-=Rock=-\Wolfmother\Cosmic Egg\01-********** etc ...
and with the More button I was able to make a 50 song random playlist in the -=Rock=-Album ...
It was very nice feature for me !!

Anyway, I just buy a Synology SAN for my house and suppose to receive it today.. i know that a 'mashup-subsonic" package for synology san is available.
So, probably I will put my music server on san and just say goodbye to MusicCabinet... but again, REALLY GOOD WORK HAKKO !!!!!

MERCI BEAUCOUP

[hakko]

Hi Aktarus! I had to re-write heaps of code after creating the tagged based system. The whole Home page is completely new for example. When I was at it, I made a big spring cleaning and moved some stuff around.

• The "Users" tab that used to be on the Home page has been moved to "Status".
• The "Upload" link that used to be on the "More" page has been moved to the left column (at the end of the artist list).
• The "Podcast" information that used to be on the "More" page has been moved to the Podcast page.
• The "Random song" function has been moved to the Home page (together with "Random artist" and "Random album").

(The More page felt very scattered to me, so I tried to group the parts of it more logically)

I decided to make this version completely unaware of folder structure. It has some advantages and some drawbacks but I believe that the advantages are greater. (But that's a matter of taste of course!)

For me, organizing everything into folders (-=ROCK=- etc) like you do requires a lot of manual work every time you add something to your library. What genre fits best? How to handle artists like Moby that change genre all the time? Also, most artists fall into many categories (think of "Female vocalists" for example). So I prefer to just store my music somewhere without really caring how and then create detailed meta-data in a database instead. That way, I can either filter my artists by being "Rock" or by being "Female vocalists", or both. And then I have the "Play rock radio" or "Play female vocalists radio" generate random playlists for me. By using a database, I'll also be able (later on) to create a more detailed random song generator, like "songs that are classified as rock, released 1985-1990, that I've listened to at least five times and are at least 30 sec long" etc. I think that's a better solution. (but maybe I just like databases)

Of course everyone won't agree with me on this though. but then just use 0.5 or another mod or create something new out of any of them. I just wanted to explain how I've been reasoning when making 0.7.

thanks for your support : ) and enjoy your Synology SAN!