[Dominik]

First post so please be nice
I am setting up an xbox that will be used only in my car. I plan to control it (mostly) using a 4x20 LCD and an Xbox remote

But for now I have been trying to configure my MP3 Collection for use in XBMC, and of course i am particularly interested in the whole music navigation issue (I dont want to crash while trying to navigate to a song). I have done some searching and found that this is something that has undergone a bunch of improvement in the last few months, but after playing around with it i have some suggestions which might be helpful (or not)

1. Is it possible to extend <hidecompilationartists> to work with the list of artists filtered by Genre?

95% of my 25gb MP3 collection is compilation albums (i listen to dance/hip-hop etc). Most of these artists have only one decent song and you never hear about them again (particularly in trance & happy hardcore).

When i use <hidecompilationartists>, the Artists list only shows artists with albums (I cant remember if it puts one for 'various artists' that contains all my compilation albums - I saw it somewhere)

BUT when i go to artists via Genre I see all these one-off artists!


2. In addition to this, is it possible add another root level menu option to go from Genre straight to Albums without having to click on *all albums?

i.e. at the root you would have

Code:

[Genres->Artists]
    [* All Artists]
        {List of All songs in this Genre}
    {List of all artists in this Genre - Excluding compilation artists}
        {Albums released by this artist that include songs in this Genre}
    [Various Artists]
        {Compilation albums that include songs in this Genre}

[Genres->Albums]
    [* All Albums]
        {List of All songs in this Genre}
    {List of all albums in this Genre - Excluding compilation albums}
    [Various Artists]
        {Compilation albums that include songs in this Genre}

[All Albums]
[All Artists]
[All Songs]
[Top 100]
etc...

(where items in square brackets are fixed menu descriptions, curly brackets represent multiple entries and indenting represents menu levels)

Note that in [Genres->Artists], clicking [*all artists] goes straight to all songs in that genre - because if you wanted a list of all albums you would go to [Genres->Albums]

Or would this be better be achieved with a modified skin?

3. Am i missing the "Now Playing" screen? After i have queued up a bunch of songs to play, how can I get to a screen to view the queue/clear it etc?

Thanks in advance!

[jmarshall]

Hi there,

1/2: The navigation works as follows:

If you press All Artists while in a genre, then it will show all albums under this genre - effectively the "* All ..." items remove the filter at that level, so artists is no longer a filter criteria. Pressing All Albums after that will take you to all songs matching the genre, so 2 clicks.

Otherwise, yes, all the artists (even one-hit wonders) show under a particular genre category, so that we make sure that all songs/albums are available under that category. Yes, we could list "Various Artists" in this category, but if the majority of your artists are various artists, then this wouldn't solve much I think - it would be practically equivalent to going to the albums level via * All Artists.

Obviously I'm willing to look into it if it is highly demanded though.

3: Press BLACK or WHITE - either one will get you there. There's also a link from the full screen visualisation via the music OSD (start).

You can probably use the smart playlist stuff to get some nice refined views (song level only though) that may be useful to you. There's a GUI editor now included in SVN.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Dominik]

Hi Jonathan, thanks for the reply,

The problem with having all these one hit wonders inside the Genre's link is that it makes it quite difficult to find the artists that do have full CDs - I have only uploaded 5gb of my collection so far and already i have 250+ artists under "Techno". While i can always go to "artists" to see the full album artists, that then gives me all artists from all genre's.

I actually spent quite a bit of time searching the forum for anything to do with "various artists", "compilations", "navigation" etc, and yet i had not seen anyone mentioning the fact they have mostly compilation artists

But I think i am also being overly critical because i plan to use it in my car where even one less keypress would be a big improvement... Basically I want to be able to do this literally with my eyes closed and with an absolute minimum of keypresses!

Hopefully some others agree :o

And thanks for the tip about how to get to "Now Playing". I have been using the remote so i didnt see it - if its not there already i will assign a key to it.

I am about to try using the AlbumArtist tag to add "Various Artists (Techno)", "Various Artists (Hip-Hop)" etc to all my compilation albums - that way they should all show up grouped together in the Artists list...

[jmarshall]

I can add it in as a second advanced setting perhaps, or you can do it yourself if you like.

The magic is in CMusicDatabase::GetArtistsNav(). Note it's called with a boolean and in the case of no genre filter (idGenre == -1) then it filters out the various artists albums).

You'll just have to replicate that in the more complex case of idGenre != -1.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[navanman]

I've a suggestion for the music library. By default when you scan your music directory, it presents itself in album list which is really nice.
I was wondering if it is possible to change the trigger navigation so that when you are at the end or beginning of list of albums, that pressing the left trigger would bring you to the end of the list; move from "A" album to "Z" album in one move rather than have to scroll through "A-Y" to get to "Z" and vice-versa with the right trigger.
Don't know how difficult it would be to implement or if its even possible.

[navanman]

The video library will let you do this with the D-pad but the music library will not.

[jmarshall]

That's skin configurable - I'll see if I can remember to mention in to Jezz_X next time he's around.

Cheers,
Jonathan