[mythtv-users] 0.25 Music

Sun Mar 11 15:54:01 UTC 2012

On Sun, Mar 11, 2012 at 8:37 AM, Paul Harrison <mythtv at sky.com> wrote:
> On 11/03/12 08:35, Steven Adeff wrote:
>>
>> I'll be the jerk, I *HATE* the new mythmusic interface and I think it
>> is a giant step backwards from 0.24, which was not fun to begin with.
>>
> Ha Ha are those nasty MythTV devs not making it work the way you want it
> to. Shame on them, I'd ask for your money back :)
>
> Every one who has contacted me privately about this have been full of
> praise for the new MythMusic it's just a few very vocal uses who are
> complaining like yourself.

well yes, that's the nature of the beast, I don't see why you would
expect it any other way? I did preface it with "I'll be the jerk",
that was meant as a warning that I was going to be pissy =P

MythMusic has been a contentious subject for years, those that had no
problem had no reason to speak up, those that had issues and wanted to
be able to use it did, most just didn't use it and ran XBMC or one of
several other apps to be able to play music. I wasn't the happiest,
but at least with the directory browse mode I could easily find the
album I wanted to listen to and do so with little effort.

I can understand the bugs issue, it's beta, but that also means, as a
person who did not develop the code I can't tell if something is a bug
or a feature. Other things are obvious design decisions.

>> - I can't create smart playlists, no matter what theme I use when I
>> select to create a new smart playlist nothing happens.
>
> This sounds like it could be related to the problem with dynamic casts
> that Stuart Morgan discovered
> https://github.com/MythTV/mythtv/commit/d59f4f4ae. Using dynamic casts
> in the plugins is going to be a problem until a fix can be found
> although it only seems to be affecting a few people so it's more to do
> with your setup than what MythMusic is doing wrong.

I'm running the mythbuntu auto-builds on my frontends. Is this then an
issue with how they compile and I should bring it up with them? you
say its more with my setup, do you mean for compiling or in some other
way post-compile?

>> - no directory browse mode. This is a deal killer for me. I have way
>> too much music with way too many artists to not be able to browse this
>> way, just the scrolling time is ridiculous enough, it takes about
>> 8minutes to scroll from the first artist to the last.
>
> I wouldn't have thought there would be much difference navigating a
> directory tree and the playlist tree but each to their own.  Adding
> browsing by directory was on my todo list but I've since removed it. I
> wont be bullied into adding something that I would never use myself. If
> people are civil with me I will try to help them, even adding something
> that I would never use myself,  but things are just getting nasty.

How do you imagine a persons directory tree is layyed out? I think the
flaw in your thinking is that you imagine everyone's directory tree is
in a specific format that you think mimics the artist/album/genre
filter system you've implemented. For some this is probably true, but
I can tell you that for me and at least a few people I've lived with,
this is not the case.

Some of us use our directory tree to separate music by other means. In
previous email threads on this list regarding MythMusic the directory
method is mentioned as the way a lot of people use MythMusic, so it
seems odd that it would be completely removed from the update. I
understand that the new implemented methods were meant to out-do the
old way MythMusic worked, it just seems odd that the one method people
did seem to like was removed.

I'm not trying to "bully" you into doing something. I just don't
understand why it would have been excluded. 8 minutes to scroll to a Z
artist seems a little ridiculous to me when in 0.24 using directory
browse mode I would be 7minutes into listening to music by that time.

Could I offer you a bounty to re-implement the directory browse mode?

>> - I have music in different formats (FLAC, HD, mp3, etc) that I can
>> now no longer easily view on their own like I can with my directory
>> structure.
>
> I have a mixture of formats as well but it's the song that matters to me
> not what format it's in. Anyway tags will help you there when it's
> implemented, you could just add the relevant tag to the track and then
> browser by tag.

I will wait to see how this is implemented. Right now when I search I
get a list of matching tracks, so if tags work in the same way they
won't be of much help if I have thousands of tracks in a specific
format.

>> -If I try and search list with no tracks in the queue I get a segfault
>
> Yep, that's actually a bug in the buttonlist search code. I will fix it
> shortly.

excellent!

>> -search music is painfully slow even if the backend is doing nothing
>
> I have over 11000 tracks and don't see the problem. The BE isn't
> involved in the search it is purely an sql query. It could be the search
> for the album art that is making it slow for you but once it's cached it
> shouldn't be a problem.

"Local Server Statistics

Songs: 106644
Albums: 21705
Artists: 12837
Genres: 1475"
and that is with everything tagged properly, duplicate artists are at a minimum.

sorry, I should have been more specific, not the backend process doing
nothing, but the computer that acts as my backend, and also runs sql.
when a search takes as long as it does and I see little going on
process wise on the computer I start to get scared that MythMusic
won't be able to handle large music libraries.

How does one cache the album art?

>> -why does Albums come before Artists?
>
> Now you are taking the piss. If it offends you that much I'll change it
> but is it really that important?

Just seems like an odd order to me, I've never seen a music app/device
that gives Album sorting higher priority than Artist sorting.

>> -in Search Music, if I search an artist I get a list of tracks that
>> match that artist, not a list of artists that match? similar for
>> searching albums
>
> The search for music screen always shows the matching songs based on
> what search criteria you enter. That's just how it works. If you change
> the search to artist it shows you the songs with an artist that matches
> what you have entered.

Right, but if I'm searching for an album I expect to see a list of
matching albums, the same, if I search for artists, then when I find
the one I want I can then choose to see the tracks/albums under that.
This is how the rest of the update to MythMusic works, so it's odd
that the Search part breaks with that. If I choose to browse by
artist, I get a list of artists, then under them the albums and such,
it would seem to me that if I'm searching for an album I would be
presented with the same organizational layout.

>> I'll stop there. I'm frustrated and sad, I will now have to ssh into
>> my frontends to be able to play music and my housemates will basically
>> no longer be able to play their music through MythTV
>>
>
> It could be MythMusic will never work the way you want but the beauty of
> open source software is if it doesn't do what you want you can change
> it. And before we get the usual rants about why should I have to do that
> let me say I was once a user like yourself unhappy about Myth not doing
> what I wanted so I learned to programme  in c++ and got stuck in.

I understand, and if I had the time and energy to learn enough C++ to
be able to be of any use with the MythTV code this rant would have
been a patch to implement a directory browse mode (or even more so, I
would have begun a rewrite of MythMusic years ago).
As it is, learning perl to do write some helper scripts a few years
ago was painful and time consuming enough for me. My brain just wasn't
wired to code.
All said, I'd be much more willing to offer a bounty to re-implement
the directory browse mode for now, at least until all the other
additions you plan for MythMusic come to fruition and possibly replace
the need for it.

A couple more things I noticed, and am not sure if I'm using it wrong
or if it is intended to work this way...
If I'm browsing by artist and decide to then browse by that artists
albums, and then I find the album I want to listen to, is there a way
to queue all the files in that album or do I have to go into the album
and select each one individually? I've tried clicking select on the
album name and on "All Tracks" under that album but neither seems to
do it. I've also tried the following under the menu, "Replace Tracks"
and "Add Tracks", neither of which seems to do anything? I have quite
a number of albums with 20+ tracks, so I'm hoping to be able to queue
a whole album without having to choose each track on it's own.

I also just noticed that if I'm in the Playlist Editor - Tree view
that I can't switch back to the Current Playlist view, I assume this
is also the dynamic cast issue?

Thanks! and sorry for being a bugger, I was just very frustrated after
spending 20 minutes trying to play an album by an R artist for which
the album name did not come immediately to mind, something that took
less than a minute before.

-- 
Steve
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/User:Steveadeff
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