[mythtv] improvement to MythMusic RIP location

[Colin Guthrie]

Ian Campbell wrote:
> In that case I'll outline my ideas here and solicit feedback (I assume
> Thor reads here).

He does yes, and I'd be very interested in helping you do this work. 
I've wanted to for ages, but seem to get myself involved in too many 
things like this to really motivate myself. With someone else it really 
helps to egg me on!!

> Basically: I've been very impressed with the principles behind the muine
> music player and I think much of them could be transposed into an
> interface very suitable for use on a TV set via a remote.
snip...
> That's it, nice and simple.

Yeah, I would like something like this. A really simple interface for 
playing whole albums and the like. I use the random facility far too 
much, as selecting specific albums etc at the moment is too awkward, and 
it takes a little bit of the enjoyment out of listening to music via myth :(

> The interface could also be quite nicely exposed via the mytbweb
> interface as well, which I think would be cool...

There has been some interesting discussions about integrating JinZora 
into MythWeb. (Jinzora.org IIRC). It is a nice web based music 
browser/playlist generator. Apparently their devs said their metadata 
system can be completely abstracted and should fit in quite nicely with 
Myth's own metadata DB which is cool. Not looked at it in much detail, 
but its on my list of desires!!

> The current queue can also be saved as a playlist and playlists can be
> loaded into the queue.
> 
> Support for ratings/shuffling and all that sort of good stuff comes from
> a feature to support "playlist filling". muine have a proposal for how
> they see it working for them here
> http://huizen.dds.nl/~jbaayen/proposal.html, again I think there are
> elements of the ideas etc here that could map rather nicely onto a myth
> interface.
> 
> The basic idea is that you can instruct the player to keep the queue
> full by selecting tracks from some predefined list (perhaps selected the
> same way you select stuff with the tree view now in current mythmusic,
> or just from the complete music collection). The selection from within
> the list could be restricted by genre, rating or any other criteria you
> fancy and the ordering could be random or intelligent (like the shuffle
> options we have today).

I really like the idea of automatic playlist extension from predefined 
lists etc. This is something I have wanted for a while, so I agree with 
you on this one.

> That's the basic premise anyway, I'm sure there are tweaks and
> extensions that would make it much more usable. I'll have to start
> digging into this mfe/mfd thing to see how realistic it is...
> 
> An unrelated cool thing about muine is that it looks up album art on
> amazon (or something) if there isn't some already present, which is
> really handy!

Yeah, this would defo be cool for MythMusic. Just something similar to 
how MythVideo finds it's coverart would be great. I'd love to see Lyrics 
being downloaded too, and some way to show them. I'm not a Kareoke freak 
or anything, but some of the more intense hiphop/rap stuff I has really 
needs lyrics to appreciate what the guys are talking about (Anticon 
stuff being particularly relevent here as there is strong, relevent, 
political messages in their words - I'm not talking about P Diddy 
rapping about big butts or something here!!)


> sounds neat, I currently use a grotty little homemade python script for
> my ripping needs but I'd much prefer a nice myth interface.

Yeah, it'll be far from perfect, but it'll probably suit my needs and 
I'm a bit anal about this kind of thing!


> I hadn't thought of using a dictionary -- that would allow for general
> text entry in lots of different contexts, which I can certainly see
> would be dead useful!

Yeah, I was actually meaning a list of words from a predefinded 
dictionary (i.e. all the artist names extracted from the meta data db), 
but /usr/share/dict/words could be used instead!!

> What I was thinking was of simply matching the artist + title of each
> album in the list against a regex. The regex would start empty (I guess
> then you'd either get every album listed). When you press a key a range
> of characters is added to the regex. For example pressing 1 would add
> "[abc1]", 2 = "[def2]" etc. I guess 0 would match "[^a-z1-9]" to catch
> all the other characters, punctuation etc. Pressing 'back' would delete
> a range or exit if the regex is empty.

This is similar to how the existing thing works functionality wise, but 
different approach. I was able to give a list of numbers to my class and 
it would return a list of matching words. It was pretty quick to do that 
too. I'll see if I can dig it out and post it for people to play with, 
see how it operates. It'll just be a command line thing, but it can use 
the mysql.txt to grab data and we can play with it and see if it works. 
It shouldn't take me too long. I'll see if I can do this over the 
weekend (assuming I can find the code!!!).

> Anyway, you then limit the display to those artists/albums that matched.
> The matching part of the string would be hi-lighted (bold for example)
> so you can see where you are in the match. 
> 
> By sorting the entries alphabetically and being a little clever about
> how the interaction with the currently selected item is handled when the
> regex changes (i.e. the current item no longer matches) I reckon we
> would have a pretty easy to use method for selecting for a very long
> list.

Yup, regardless of impl. I think it would be way neat!!!

Please keep in touch about this, either on or off list! I'm really up 
for making this work!!

Cheers

Col.

-- 

+------------------------+
|     Colin Guthrie      |
+------------------------+
|  myth at colin.guthr.ie   |
| http://colin.guthr.ie/ |
+------------------------+