[mythtv-users] MythMusic browsing ...

[Peter Wurmsdobler]

Hello,

This post will not be so much about an issue with MythMusic, but rather 
an issue with the common, and to me not satisfactory way of browsing 
music which follows in general the Artist/Album/Song paradigm. Where 
should I start?

Well, on my hard disk I organise my music as I rip CDs using Exact Audio 
Copy in a directory structure reflecting mostly the media, resulting in 
something like the following with Beethoven piano sonatas by two 
pianists or with a symphony ranging over two CDs:

Classic/Beethoven/Piano sonata-Brendel/CD5/01-Sonata No.8-1.Grave.flac
:
Classic/Beethoven/Piano sonata-Gilels/01-Sonata No.8-1.Grave.flac
:
Classic/Mahler/Symphonies-Solti/CD09/03-No.8-1.Teil-1.Veni.flac
:
Classic/Mahler/Symphonies-Solti/CD10/01-No.8-2.Teil-1.Poco adagio.flac
:
Jazz/
:
Rock/
:

Setting the MythMusic browsing to "directory" reflects this chosen 
hierarchy. Setting the browse string to “genre artist album title/” 
mixes classical genres with pop or jazz genres. However I do not like 
categorising too much, in particular in Rock&Pop, and consider the genre 
rather an attribute and not as a branch in a tree. I would very much 
prefer to browse my music in a more musical manner, e.g.:

Classic/Beethoven/Piano sonata/Brendel/Sonata No.8/1.Grave.flac
:
Classic/Beethoven/Piano sonata/Gilels/Sonata No.8/1.Grave.flac
:
Classic/Mahler/Symphonies/Solti/No.8/2.Teil-1.Poco adagio.flac
:
Jazz/Miles Davies/..
:
or in a more general way:

Domain/Composer/Work group/Performer/Work title/Part

The problem now is that this would require either a manual organisation 
of tracks (e.g. into playlists, or into a different directory tree, 
which I would not like to do), or more tags, such as "Composer", "Work 
group", "Work title" or "Part". And to make things more complicated, 
different composers, depending how prolific they were, would need a 
deeper hierarchy than others, even more tags.

The scheme described above does, however, not fit to Jazz music or to 
Rock& Pop either. In both cases the approach of Artist/Album/Song is 
sufficient, in the former the composer would be interesting to know and 
to browse with, and for the latter it does not matter (in most cases). 
Sorting jazz music by composer would probably be not good and confuse me 
more, as I tend to listen to it rather an entire album.

This leads to the concept of "domain", where different domains such as 
“Classical”, “Jazz”, “Pop”, and “Dance” would require different tags and 
views. The primary tree would always be the file tree as music is ripped 
from CDs or purchased. Then, however, there are several secondary views, 
depending on the domain. In the domain “Classical”, one may wish to be 
offered:

Classic/Composer/Genre/Work group/Performer/Work title/Part
Classic/Epoch/Composer/Work group/Performer/Work title/Part
:

but also

Classic/Performer/Album/Track
:

Or even combinations of these categories. “Genre” would be "Piano 
Concerto", "String Quartet" etc. It would then be nice that the system 
drops a level for a given leaf if there is only one sub leaf, e.g. if 
there is only one recording of a classical work, no need to add a level 
for the performer. Nevertheless, the performer should appear in the player.

As I would not like to depend too much on tags in the flac files, would 
it be possible to have a more complex database accessible though an 
external tool and allow editing of tables such as composers, performers, 
works and their parts, and even lyrics. Then associate tracks in the 
music file system to these meta-data database and construct several 
trees, not mutually exclusive as it is now.

Would this kind of behaviour and feature set be sensible and of interest 
to other users ?

Kind regards,
peter