[mythtv-users] Mythmusic food for thought

[Mark Winder]

I've long had an MP3 set up and although I'm quite new to myth and quite
like MythMusic,
It certainly does more than my original set up, in many ways I feel that
Mythmusic will prove too cumbersom for my needs.

I mean count the key presses needed to hear a piece of music.

Because it may be of intrest from a design point  of view, (And we do seem
to be discussing Myth ideas at present), this is how my old system worked.

To hear an album (I have about 150 collections that I call albums) you enter
the album number. The number is in the range
2 to 199
then hit the red key (play now) or the green key (queue now)

 To hear a particular song, you hit the album number followed by the 2 digit
song number, followed by red or green as before.
Fore example track 6 on album 32, you enter  [3] [2] [0] [6] [red]
perhaps. For the whole of album 32, you just enter [3] [2] [red]

This system works with xmms and a special lircfile. Also a suite of special
playlists generated by a perl script when I print out the song list. The
printed list of album titles, and individuel songs, is kept as the
definative guide for anybody who wants to use the system but in practice
I often know the number of the songs I want, and surprisingly so does my
girlfriend. (Have to keep moving Sean Paul as otherwise
this gets played WAY too much!!).

As a matter of fact the system worked originally with Winamp using an Irman
, and since then I've ported it to lirc (with the irman but thats not
important!)  and XMMS Redhat.

Note that when you get above 199 albums the number scheme needs an update:
album 2 would need to be moved thus freeing up space for another hundred
albums. This is coded in the perl script.

Note that one key design feature is that you do not need to have the TV
switched on, indeed there is no point in doing so, it was not connected in
my old system.

Mark Winder
mark.winder4 at-sign btinternet.com