2015-10-27, 15:37
I know non-devs and non-team members aren't welcome here, so I'll just leave some observations on recent music developments, and some no-doubt naive questions that maybe people can consider at their leisure.
Music Ratings
Recent Jarvis nightlies include the new user rating update screen. It seems there was a lot of debate about this on github, including the continuing debate about whether ratings should be out of 5 or 10. Zag's earlier thread about this was shut down pretty quicky, so I'm not going to bother re-stating that AllMusic, iTunes, Rate Your Music, etc, all use rating 1-5 including half stars. The only one that uses out of 10 is The Audio DB, which I believe Zag has changed to fit in with Kodi. This all seems to be going in the wrong direction to me. Anyway, here's the question:
In the Movie database years and ratings seem to be stored as text. So a movie rating is stored as 8.10000 or 7.90000, etc. I can then create smart playlists to select movies rated greater than 8 for instance or years greater than 2005. It seems though that when it comes to music ratings are to be an integer and therefore half marks aren't allowed, and hence the burgeoning crappy way of rating that is either going to limit it to a 1-5 scale or is going to require thousands of tracks and albums to be re-rated on a 1-10 scale specifically for Kodi. Simply amending the music ratings to text seems to me the easiest solution, and I don't understand why this couldn't be done.
Music Development
Dave Blake has obviously been doing an enormous amount of work on the music library, for which I think everyone is enormously grateful. The emphasis of this work seems to be with the MusicBrainz ids for multiple artists, instrumentalists, conductors, etc. etc. For years a number of us were asking simply for the Composer tag to be scanned into the library, so that we could create smart playlists that way (pre-dating nodes and all that). Many people using mp3tag or foobar probably already have those tags fully populated, and don't overly care about the whole musicbrainz bit.
So, what I don't understand is why it isn't possible to just scan the composer tag to the library and then if you want a playlist of Paul McCartney compositions you could have Composer Contains McCartney to include compositions by Lennon & McCartney or Lennon / McCartney or however you have it tagged. To me as a non-prgrammer that woudn't seem to be vastly different from the other tags, for example a movie playlist where Plot Outline Contains Alien. While I really do appreciate the work Dave's doing, it does seem he's going a number of stages further with orchestras, conductors, MBID integration, etc, than what seemed to be a reasonably simple feature request that's been hanging around for years and years.
In general it seems to me that Kodi music is moving slowly but steadily moving towards a stand-alone library structure, assuming people don't use things like iTunes, tagging programmes or nfo creators like MediaElch. It also seems a bit confused as to whether it is targeting newbies with little computing knowledge who will never need to press more than one button, or it is for home theatre enthusiasts who want to bespoke it for their preferred set-up. It seems to be trying to be all things to all people and that's a very hard thing to achieve. To me, the greatness of Kodi (XBMC) over the years has been its ability to import a lot of raw data and display it in flexible creative designs. The music system seems to be on a trajectory of having to use it in the way prescribed, which may well be inconsistent or incompatible with other programs people may use, and I'm afraid that may be going in the wrong long-term direction (though it will make it more like Apple).
Music Ratings
Recent Jarvis nightlies include the new user rating update screen. It seems there was a lot of debate about this on github, including the continuing debate about whether ratings should be out of 5 or 10. Zag's earlier thread about this was shut down pretty quicky, so I'm not going to bother re-stating that AllMusic, iTunes, Rate Your Music, etc, all use rating 1-5 including half stars. The only one that uses out of 10 is The Audio DB, which I believe Zag has changed to fit in with Kodi. This all seems to be going in the wrong direction to me. Anyway, here's the question:
In the Movie database years and ratings seem to be stored as text. So a movie rating is stored as 8.10000 or 7.90000, etc. I can then create smart playlists to select movies rated greater than 8 for instance or years greater than 2005. It seems though that when it comes to music ratings are to be an integer and therefore half marks aren't allowed, and hence the burgeoning crappy way of rating that is either going to limit it to a 1-5 scale or is going to require thousands of tracks and albums to be re-rated on a 1-10 scale specifically for Kodi. Simply amending the music ratings to text seems to me the easiest solution, and I don't understand why this couldn't be done.
Music Development
Dave Blake has obviously been doing an enormous amount of work on the music library, for which I think everyone is enormously grateful. The emphasis of this work seems to be with the MusicBrainz ids for multiple artists, instrumentalists, conductors, etc. etc. For years a number of us were asking simply for the Composer tag to be scanned into the library, so that we could create smart playlists that way (pre-dating nodes and all that). Many people using mp3tag or foobar probably already have those tags fully populated, and don't overly care about the whole musicbrainz bit.
So, what I don't understand is why it isn't possible to just scan the composer tag to the library and then if you want a playlist of Paul McCartney compositions you could have Composer Contains McCartney to include compositions by Lennon & McCartney or Lennon / McCartney or however you have it tagged. To me as a non-prgrammer that woudn't seem to be vastly different from the other tags, for example a movie playlist where Plot Outline Contains Alien. While I really do appreciate the work Dave's doing, it does seem he's going a number of stages further with orchestras, conductors, MBID integration, etc, than what seemed to be a reasonably simple feature request that's been hanging around for years and years.
In general it seems to me that Kodi music is moving slowly but steadily moving towards a stand-alone library structure, assuming people don't use things like iTunes, tagging programmes or nfo creators like MediaElch. It also seems a bit confused as to whether it is targeting newbies with little computing knowledge who will never need to press more than one button, or it is for home theatre enthusiasts who want to bespoke it for their preferred set-up. It seems to be trying to be all things to all people and that's a very hard thing to achieve. To me, the greatness of Kodi (XBMC) over the years has been its ability to import a lot of raw data and display it in flexible creative designs. The music system seems to be on a trajectory of having to use it in the way prescribed, which may well be inconsistent or incompatible with other programs people may use, and I'm afraid that may be going in the wrong long-term direction (though it will make it more like Apple).