[mythtv] Proposed Change to MythMusic

[Stuart Morgan]

On Tuesday 10 July 2007 18:37:24 Joseph Caputo wrote:
> However,
> there've been no significant changes to the MythMusic architecture in
> the past couple of years... mfd has basically been abandoned... I'm
> not pointing any fingers, I just think that utilizing already existing
> pieces can get us where we want to be quicker.  If someone is stepping
> up to the plate and dedicating themselves to revamping MythMusic (and,
> to some extent, Myth's audio subsystem in general), then great.

That's exactly what I'm doing. Up until now mythmusic hasn't been my highest 
priority. There were other things I wanted to work on first, but now I'm 
hoping to spend some time on mythmusic and although I might not be starting 
where most people *think* mythmusic needs the most work I have to lay the 
groundwork for any further changes.

> One of my main pet peeves is that I **don't like** managing my music
> collection within Myth.  I'd much rather maintain it elsewhere and
> just let MythMusic worry about reading a playing it, without having to
> worry about setting up an NFS or a CIFS share.

There may be a future mechanism for editing playlists etc outside mythtv.

My plan is to experiment with using the new upnp interface to remove the need 
for nfs mounting the music directory on every frontend. Music will be stored 
(or at least accessed) on the backend and streamed to the frontend. This 
isn't going to be the solution for everyone - I know some people are talking 
about an entirely different setup, but it's a start.

> A lot of time and 
> effort has gone into MythMusic features like ripping, scanning,
> tagging and maintaining the music DB... effort that could have gone
> into enhancing the UI & general browsing/playback experience.  But
> that's just my opinion, and since I'm not stepping up to the plate to
> develop the code right now, I'll just leave it at that.

It's all about laying the groundwork for the bigger changes. My scanning and 
tagging changes have already reduced the scanning time for mp3s from 25 
minutes to just a couple of minutes on my system. By separating the scanning 
code into a new class I'm also working towards splitting mythmusic into two 
halves, a frontend component and a backend. The tagging changes, when 
finished, will help to reduce the number of dependencies further, increase 
overall speed and allow more information to be read/embedded in tags. 
Re-arranging the database was necessary to make changing the playlist editing 
code much easier. 

The UI is difficult, we all know it could be better, but few people have come 
up any better solutions. I'm working on some playlist editing changes right 
now which should make it much easier to use. It's not going to happen 
overnight though as I can't work on it full time.
-- 
Stuart Morgan