MusicCabinet - artist radio, genre radio & related artists

[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.

[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!

[hakko]

Two known issues with the media scanner:

- on a CD where the same track appear multiple times in different versions, only one of the tracks will actually be indexed
- a character encoding bug for certain combinations of tag encodings + platform encoding. : (

[vollbr0t]

i gave it another try and found two main "bugs":

- other clients / androids-apps won't work correctly with 0.7; the random albums, recently played ... functions do not work; search and browser the lists do work, but i think those other functions (random albums etc.) are important for android-apps
- your index-engine priors id-tag v1.x over 2.x. aren't 2.x-tags better? a lot of my mp3s have broken 1.x-tags but good 2.x-tags

[hakko]

Thanks! I'll look into that. Please note though that recently played requires a last.fm username. I went back on forth on that but then I decided that it would make sense to have it like that for future possibilities of importing play statistics, synching starred tracks with loved tracks on last.fm etc. I haven't actually looked into id3 v1 vs v2, I just used an external library (jaudiotagger) and added a few changes to it. But yes, id3 v2 is obviously better since it has a larger limit for text fields etc. So those are all most valid bugs / things to fix.

[vollbr0t]

on login from another client (for example an android-app) the login-username and password are shown in clear text inside the logfile, viewable for everybody who is logged in!!!!!!!

[hakko]

Oops. So much for added security. But to be honest/harsh, that's about how unsecure the REST API (that other clients use for communicating with Subsonic) is. Every single time you do something from an app, like browsing, playing a song, asking for random albums - the password is sent in clear text as part of the URL. That makes it super super easy for somebody to eavesdrop and steal it and it's by design. I wish Sindre would have been more paranoid and removed this kind of authentication, but it's been around since the project started so I guess it won't happen. So, a bit embarrassing but at the same, it's almost good that it removes the false sense of security that comes from not knowing how bad it is. But yes, I'll obviously remove that.

[vollbr0t]

Urgs, that's uncool. But you're right, i have never been aware of this behavior

another thing: i think single tracks that are located on compilation-cds should be displayed with each artists, maybe grouped as "Other Tracks" or something like that

except for the lost of my folder structure (eventually i will get over it ), i think the new features from 0.7 are really awesome
GREAT WORK!!!
thx

[jake-]

another thing: i think single tracks that are located on compilation-cds should be displayed with each artists, maybe grouped as "Other Tracks" or something like that
thx

I don't think so But fortunately we can use both behaviors by using the album-artist tag in one way or the other.

jake-

PS: Is the nightly auto-scan switched off in the beta?

[vollbr0t]

what i meant was: the compilation cds should be displayed only under the album-artist-tag (for example "Summer Hits '94") in the left frame. additionally each single track should be displayed on the page of each corresponding artist. on an artists page there will be his albums and the single tracks spread over different compilations. that way every track you own from one artist can be found by clicking on the artist, but the artist-list in the left frame won't be spammed.

[jake-]

what i meant was: the compilation cds should be displayed only under the album-artist-tag (for example "Summer Hits '94") in the left frame. additionally each single track should be displayed on the page of each corresponding artist. on an artists page there will be his albums and the single tracks spread over different compilations. that way every track you own from one artist can be found by clicking on the artist, but the artist-list in the left frame won't be spammed.

I don't think "Summer Hits '94" is an Artist Mine will all be sorted under VA ("Album-Artist-Tag" if "is-compilation"=true)

But sorting the songs with "Artist-Tag" != "Album-Artist-Tag" on the artist frame is a design decision. What if this artist isn't existing (No albums - tracks on compilations only).

[hakko]

volbr0t: can you send me an mp3-file with both id3v1 and id3v2 tags where the id3v1 gets chosen? I've created some myself and written testcases but I can't reproduce, the tag library chooses the id3v2 for me. Wondering if there's some difference between id3v2.2, id3v2.3, id3v2.4 or what it could be...

[hakko]

jake-: the nightly scanner is supposed to work (if you've configured it to run at Settings -> Search), however, it doesn't force an update of the left frame or publish a "Your library is being scanned" message. I think the left frame updating needs some kind of change for nightly scans.

[vollbr0t]

i'm sorry hakko, i think i might have been wrong with that 'bug'. i think the problems i had, were caused by wrong album-artist-tags. at first i thought the problem was idtagv1, because the v1-tag was wrong too.
sorry about that