MusicCabinet - artist radio, genre radio & related artists

[jake-]

Unfortunately i experienced a huge problem with MusicCabent. At the moment i can't say what conditions lead to this: but at least once a day it is no longer possible to play any songs from MusicCabinet. Browsing still works. But it is not possible to play any song. When clicking on play or any song in the playlist just nothing happens. The only way to fix it, is by restarting the MusicCabinet-Service manually. Until now i have not searched the detailled log for any errors. The log within MusicCabinet looks fine...

Anyone else having this problem?

I was able to recover from this sometimes by switching to the next song with >>

[hakko]

Sorry about the recent bugs. But again, this is probably to be expected for a little while to come. There's way too much new code to believe that everything will work exactly as planned.

Tracks failing being played - this is obviously top priority. Any log file from when it's happening is welcome. PM me and include the files listed at About -> Bug reports!

Scrobbling - with the kind help of precipitous, I began looking into some new last.fm features but then I had to postpone it due to bug fixes. I forgot about it and it made it's way into 0.7.3 anyway. Because of that, everyone has to re-authenticate with last.fm from Settings -> Personal to get scrobbling working again (if you haven't already). This is not the normal case for a new version - scrobbling should work until you actively turn it off from within last.fm. My mistake.

Artist info in other languages - this is indeed supported by last.fm, but not currently possible to turn on from MusicCabinet without changing the code. I'll add it as a feature request, but I won't add new features until this whole release gets a bit more stable.

Recently played/most played are associated with personal last.fm accounts - jake-, have you configured MusicCabinet to use one? From Settings -> Personal.

Search does only find complete words right now. I switched from using Lucene and moved the search functionality into Postgresql to allow for integrated searching within other queries (for example, search for "recently added albums" that match some criteria, I think that's very handy). I admit that the "complete words" search is not optimal in all scenarios (a fuzzy search would be a better alternative) and this might change in future releases.

[Ultraviolet]

hakko, when "Prefer last.fm artwork" = "No", does it take all the last.fm artwork and store it in postgres, then retrieve it from there, or does it just grab folder.jpg/cover.jpg/artwork in tags? Hopefully it's the first option, but I know you mentioned at one point that you weren't sure if last.fm's terms of service allowed that. With "Prefer last.fm artwork" = "Yes" I just experience blank album covers fairly frequently.

[hakko]

No actual album artwork is fetched from last.fm, only URLs. When "Prefer last.fm artwork" = "Yes", albums having such an URL will use it for album artwork when browsing (and then depend on last.fm for hosting it). If there's no such URL present, MusicCabinet will fall back to the same behavior as "Prefer last.fm artwork" = "No". That is, use embedded artwork from one of the MP3 files if present, then use folder.jpg/jpeg/png/gif, then cover.jpg/jpeg/png/gif.

If "Prefer last.fm artwork" = "Yes" gives you blank album covers, you could you fire up PgAdmin and issue this SQL command:

Code: Select all

select ai.largeimageurl from music.albuminfo ai inner join music.album alb on ai.album_id = alb.id inner join music.artist art on art.id = alb.artist_id where art.artist_name = upper('Nirvana') and alb.album_name = upper('Nevermind');

If there's no row returned, last.fm won't be used at all for album artwork. If there's one row returned, you can check that it is a valid last.fm URL by just pasting it into a browser window.

[vollbr0t]

Sometimes, when playback is no longer possible, the log says "DEBUG MediaFileService media file not in memory, load meta data from db!"
In this case, i can't find any way to recover MusicCabinet. I have to restart the service.

maybe this helps?

[hakko]

Is something written to the log after that or nothing? Does it happen when you're listening to saved playlists, from tracks that you've searched for and started playing, from tracks added when browsing the artist view, from tracks added from file-based browsing, from tracks added from the artist radio, from any tracks? Have you done scans inbetween? Have you edited the tags for the files that can't be played?
I haven't been able to reproduce this but if you can narrow it down to something like that, it would be very appreciated!

[vollbr0t]

Is something written to the log after that or nothing?

I don't know, until now i didn't look in the actual log. I always wanted to restart music-playback as fast as possible . I will do that when the error appears again.

Does it happen when you're listening to saved playlists, from tracks that you've searched for and started playing, from tracks added when browsing the artist view, from tracks added from file-based browsing, from tracks added from the artist radio, from any tracks?

I do not think it has anything to do with specific tracks. I experienced this with tracks from artist-view and radio. And the same tracks do work without problems after the service-restart.

Have you done scans inbetween?

It is possible that i did a scan inbetween. Til now i didn't make the connection. Anyways i can not reproduce the error by playing back music and doing a rescan inbetween. But i feel it's hard to find the excact condition that might trigger the error (for example only when adding a specific amount of new files to the library while playback...)

Have you edited the tags for the files that can't be played?

No.

[vollbr0t]

got it again... no library-scan inbetween... no log-entry/error at all...

[hakko]

Is it only some files that can't be played or all of them? In this specific case, how had you created the playlist including this file that couldn't be played? I'm using my Subsonic a lot but I haven't run into this (yet), that's why I'm asking so many questions trying to figure what's actually happening. Obviously I've made a mistake somewhere but right now I don't know where to look for it I'll add even more debugging to the next version to make sure the error gets trapped (so that I can fix it).

[jake-]

Low prio request: would it be possible to have "Play Top Tracks" and "Play Radio" on the related artists page?

[hakko]

I think I'm against that. It's impossible (I think) to reach the "related artists" page without passing the main "artist" page. So if you'd like to play top tracks or artist radio for an artist, you already had your chance. It should be easy to add for yourself though by modifying related.jsp and copying the "play artist radio" and "play top tracks" links from artist.jsp.

[vollbr0t]

When selecting a genre in the left frame, but no album-artist in the left frame matches this selected genre, the left frame kind of crashes, the dropdown box with the genres is not longer displayed and it is not possible to change the genre-selection for the left frame.

[hakko]

thanks, fixed. until the next release, just use the Back button.

[jake-]

I think I'm against that. It's impossible (I think) to reach the "related artists" page without passing the main "artist" page. So if you'd like to play top tracks or artist radio for an artist, you already had your chance. It should be easy to add for yourself though by modifying related.jsp and copying the "play artist radio" and "play top tracks" links from artist.jsp.

Is it possible to play the top tracks of all related artists from an artist page?

[hakko]

Oh, I actually built that a while ago, but I never added it to the web interface. I made it so that for an artist, you could automatically get a playlist of the top N tracks for each M top related artists. Would that be useful? I just don't want to add a lot of meaningless functionality ("because it's possible"), I like to keep the interface clean and simple.