[mythtv-users] 0.25 Music

[R. G. Newbury]

On 03/11/2012 04:35 AM, Steven Adeff wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 6:25 PM, Scott and Nicole Harris
> <snharris99 at live.com>  wrote:
>>> Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2012 21:44:13 +0000
>>> From: nasa01 at comcast.net
>>> To: mythtv-users at mythtv.org
>>> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] 0.25 Music
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>> On 03/08/2012 03:26 PM, Nasa wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>> http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythMusic#Smart_Playlist
>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> does this make more sense?
>>>>
>>>> Putting together comments from two different people.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for the pointer,but .25 looks NOTHING like the wiki pages sets
>>>> out. Although the same bits and pieces are there, together with MORE.
>>>>
>>>> WHAT A BLOODY MESS. I an not impressed. There are apparently 7
>>>> different
>>>> filters for how I might like to look at my music. I cannot get rid of
>>>> those I do not want, and which just take up screen space. And making
>>>> music selections is....weird.
>>>> And no apparent method to remove a choice.
>>>>
>>>> Not impressed. I would prefer the drill-down view accessed by the
>>>> little
>>>> box in the 'search for music' page.
>>>>
>>>> Is there any way to get rid of extra crap?
>>>
>>> Boy do people like to bitch, hopefully developers have thicker
>>> skin than I...
>>>
>>> To your points,
>>>
>>> 1. Yes -- its changed, my bad.  Should have looked before I posted.
>>> 2. There's a lot of options available (I for one really apprecaite
>>> them all).
>>
>> Simmer down.
>> I never said (nor do I recall any "objectors" either) that I don't appreciate all the new features.  All I said, was I don't appreciate the inability to simply play a song without first adding it to the playlist (queue, whatever you want to call it) and the inability to navigate my music in the oldest, simplest, most intuitive (imo) way possible...directory navigation.  That's it, that's all.
>> FWIW, despite the "you can do X"s, I STILL haven't found a way to navigate the tree to a song and start playing it directly.  All the player commands only seem to function on the currently selected / playing song in the play list.  So, for example, I currently have Oasis - Don't Look Back in Anger playing.  I navigate the tree to Artists ->  AC/DC ->  All Tracks ->  Shake Your Foundations (which is not in my playlist) and do Menu ->  Player Options ->  Play, AC/DC does not get added to the playlist and start playing.....the Oasis song starts over.  I still see no way to start playing the AC/DC song other than to select it (thereby adding it to the playlist), getting into the playlist (which can be cumbersome depending on your position in the tree), navigating to the newly added song and selecting it.  That's not to say there isn't an easier way...I just haven't managed to find it.  The odd thing is, from the "Search For Music" view, there is an "Add to Playlist and Play" !
 option tha
t doesn't seem to be available from any other view.
>> I will say that I hadn't even seen the Search for Music view util seeing it mentioned in this thread, which is really sweet.
>> There seems to be this attitude that unless you can fix it, code it, supply a patch, etc, your observations / opinions aren't worth much, which is ridiculous.  I write a proprietary software packages (some extremely large projects as well) for the company I work for.  Some of (most of?) the best improvements to these packages have come from end users' (who cannot not implement their ideas) "what if I could...."s and "It would work better for me if..."s, etc.
>
> 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.
>
> - I can't create smart playlists, no matter what theme I use when I
> select to create a new smart playlist nothing happens.
> - 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 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 music for myself and my housemates, it is now impossible for
> a housemate to go to the folder for their music.
> - I can't switch between playlist editor tree and playlist editor
> gallery, bug or feature?
> -If I try and search list with no tracks in the queue I get a segfault
> -if I have tracks added to the queue/playlist/?? I can't select search
> list , bug or feature?
> -why do the playback buttons highlight? don't I have those on my
> remote already? this is rather clunky
> -search music is painfully slow even if the backend is doing nothing
> -why does Albums come before Artists?
> -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
>
> 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


You are not a jerk Scott, You have just called it as it is.

To my view this is built upside down. You should be able to search for 
the music easily, and select it automatically. Only then should a choice 
of  'play or add to playlist' come up. Listing and editing playlists 
should be at least visible. I cannot see how to easily make a playlist 
much less edit one. (Oh yeah, I amsure there is a way, but I cannot find 
it...it's probably off a menu which requires pushing a button/key I 
would not have thought of.

Yes I'm in a bad mood. I just wasted over an hour trying to set up a 
Harmony Remote. I had to use a virtual of winxp and download silverlight 
*before I could even login*.  That was NOT amusing. Nor is the mythmusic 
interface.

I MUCH prefer the interface in mythtv. Select a Series (*cough* artist) 
on the left), right arrow, scroll and select an episode (*cough* album) 
and push PLAY.. Maybe at that spot, you could select to stop the present 
music and play the new piece, or add to a playlist. The playlist could 
be the equivalent of a tv series and you could edit by 
preferring/deferring the position of the selected item,

Searching on a different basis could be handled at a higher level, so 
that the page presented is already sorted...Like 'Watch Recordings, 
Upcoming Recordings, Delete Recordings and Previous Recordings are all 
different sorted views of two main tables: record, recorded and oldrecorded.

Geoff


-
              R. Geoffrey Newbury