[quotaholic]

Hi All,

5 years ago I would not have pictured this however today my music folder is loaded with subfolders. XBMC does not seem to organize "music" in the logical way we would go about it ourselves. AKA pay attention to the sub folders.

/music/5.1 is anything from iso files of the "extra" dvd that came with the CD to 5.1 flac files. Surround sound is the element that makes non video bearing music land here.

/music/flacs is the standard two channel section. Could have been mp3 or wav as well.

/music/concerts are all my concert dvd's like Dave and Tim Live at Radio City or my collection of MTV Unplugged appearances.

/music/videos are all music videos that could have played on MTV back when they actually played videos. Some of the "extra" content dvd's that sell with CD's would have gone in this folder if they had music videos on them.


The way XBMC is currently structured one can not have video content in the "Music" Library. I am sure some of you have this same organizational challenge. Scrapers don't seem to differentiate between music videos and recorded live concerts let alone those "extra" content dvd's. I'm not sure if anything can be done on this level as I do not know of scrapers that differentiate between the content as I do. I thought it would be worth mentioning though. It would be cool to open "Music" to see subdirectories and have video content in the "Music" section.

[GJones]

Actually, it can accommodate this, as far as I can tell. The music folder that should be listed as a Music Source is actually /music/flacs, not /music. A second source would be /music/5.1 . Name one source Music (flacs) and the other Music (5.1) and you can navigate them separately. Both will appear in the library as music, though.

You can have it scraped or you can have it organized to your preference in file view. You often can't have both.

[quotaholic]

Thanks. I do realize this. Actually that is how I have two of the mentioned sources set up currently The problem is that I cant put any iso files in /music/5.1 as they wont show up under Music. This negates any "extra" dvd's or cd's containing surround sound mixes that come with our purchased music.

I was more curious about video content in the music library as most of my music is actually in concert dvd/blu-ray form. I dont think of it as "music videos" as they are concerts and only one of the many concerts I have scrapes on MTV Videos scrapers. I do have some music videos and my mind associates them to music and not anything else for some reason. I know that xbmc organizes videos and my idea of "concerts" as video content under the mtv-videos scraper however my thinking was more of is it time to consider music as being in or coming from many different sources and to rethink how we organize it? I spend a lot of time navigating menus versus listening when playing "my music".

A friend of mine has an Xtremer Pro and I have to say he has it much easier. Everything is within a few clicks. I have to bounce out of "Music" head over to "Videos" This next part is my fault because I have an imon remote which does not have the backspace key mapped by default so I have to scroll up to the top of the directory that opens up and hit the two periods to go up a directory, repeat and repeat again to get up to the top level "videos" directory then I can go to "Concerts" or "5.1" and then I can go about selecting some music to listen to. If all of this was within the "Music" section it would be much easier to navigate.


quotaholic

[GJones]

This could largely be alleviated by a good skin. With a customizable home icon, you could leave the music genre (in the video library) as a home menu option.

I do agree that individual pieces of music (video or audio-only) should be considered nearly identically within XBMC. Obviously display has to be handled differently, but artist info, album info, etc for music videos (or single-song concert excerpts) should be considered to be the same.

On a personal note, I consider concerts (as a whole) more like movies and individual songs (from a concert or as a music video) as a music video. I believe this is consistent with the long-form or short-form content model that a lot of us take for granted.

I do agree that there should be better integration between music videos (stored as individual songs) and standard music (mp3, etc.). My personal opinion would be for the music video scraper to follow the information from allmusic instead of going after a video-specific source. As it is currently implemented, music video years are often by dvd release date instead of the date of the original song. That is only marginally related to your question but I think it is pertinent.