MusicCabinet - artist radio, genre radio & related artists

[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

[precipitous]

I just updated to the new MusicCabinet Version 7 Beta on my Ubuntu 12.04 computer. The upgrade went very smoothly. It is worth noting, though, that In order to get it to work I had to uninstall OpenJDK 6. At first I had both OpenJDK 6 and OpenJDK 7 installed...

Media scanning went very smoothly. The only problem I noticed with it is that if an artist name starts with a character such as Ö they get filed in the # section...

I like most of the cleaning/re-arranging that was done, for example getting rid of the More tab.

One thing I absolutely do not like, though, is the new system for selecting random tracks. The problem is that once I select Random > By Track, there is no way to edit the list, or quickly add it to the "play" area at the bottom of the screen. Clicking the buttons for either Enqueue or Add Last is not a very good work-around as that each time I click I am prompted to send the track to my external player (Songbird). Under the old system I would setup the number of random tracks I wanted and they were automatically added to the play area at the bottom. I could then remove the tracks I did not want to hear, add more tracks, etc., then click Play. This would then send the whole set to Songbird...

Another HUGE problem I have is that I am no longer able to use Songbird (I have not tested any other external players yet)... When I try, instead of the set of tracks in the "play" area being sent, I get one of the tracks sent as many times as the total number of tracks in the "playlist". If I have 20 tracks selected I get one of them sent to Songbird 20 times!

The only other thing I don't like is that when I set the view to "Playing" the artist/album displayed no longer updates automatically to keep up with what is actually playing. I have to click the Playing button in the main toolbar everytime I want to refresh the view to the current track being played. This is very annoying...

I REALLY love what you are doing with MusicCabinet, though, and am sure that over time these minor problems will get worked out. Even with them I am still convinced that it (MusicCabinet) is the BEST friend Subsonic ever had!

[hakko]

Thanks for your response!

I'll look into the external player handling. I actually forgot to check that completely and it sounds really broken. Random songs does look like this, right? http://imgur.com/6cpt3 (well, without the fat orange rectangle) but it's the external player that stops you from using the "Play all" button? I meant it to be easy to either choose a few songs or the whole bunch, but I guess the external player issue screws it up.

I also guess that you're using the "reluctant artist loading" mode in the left frame? It behaves slightly different than the normal mode regarding sorting artist names into groups, I should fix that. I just felt that it was better having that option like it is right now than not at all. And I had to go back to work (= less spare time) so I wanted to release 0.7 to get feedback meanwhile from the brave ones willing to test it.

I thought it was annoying having the main screen change content all the time when browsing around while listening to music, that's why I removed the auto update. : ) But I guess that should be configurable.

I'm working on fixing what you've all reported even though nothing new has been released yet. Thanks!

[precipitous]

Thanks for your response!

I'll look into the external player handling. I actually forgot to check that completely and it sounds really broken. Random songs does look like this, right? http://imgur.com/6cpt3 (well, without the fat orange rectangle) but it's the external player that stops you from using the "Play all" button? I meant it to be easy to either choose a few songs or the whole bunch, but I guess the external player issue screws it up.

I also guess that you're using the "reluctant artist loading" mode in the left frame? It behaves slightly different than the normal mode regarding sorting artist names into groups, I should fix that. I just felt that it was better having that option like it is right now than not at all. And I had to go back to work (= less spare time) so I wanted to release 0.7 to get feedback meanwhile from the brave ones willing to test it.

I thought it was annoying having the main screen change content all the time when browsing around while listening to music, that's why I removed the auto update. : ) But I guess that should be configurable.

I'm working on fixing what you've all reported even though nothing new has been released yet. Thanks!

@hakko: I feel like an idiot. I did not at first see the Play All, Enqueue All, Add All buttons at buttons at the top of the list of random songs... I guess that is one issue solved!

With regard to external player issues, let me know if you need help testing anything... In the mean time the internal Flash player works fine. I just prefer using Songbird because it has an equalizer, its volume control is more sensitive (and responds to mouse wheel events), and I really like the information available in its MashTape add-on when playing tracks...

I would love to be able to have the ability to turn Now Playing auto-updating on or off. Again - let me know if you need help testing anything.

Thank you for including my black theme in this release. I really love the way MusicCabinet is evolving, and can't wait to see the next round of improvements!