Music Improvements Wishlist
#1
I've often heard users and even team members say they don't use the music feature in XBMC that much due to lack of functionality.

So I thought I would write down some "nice to haves" for the music section:

One day, maybe a developer would pick some of these up:

- Top 10 charts from countries (see https://rss.itunes.apple.com/us) example https://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/topalbum...t=true/xml
- Top 5 tunes by each artist (see theaudiodb.com API) example http://www.theaudiodb.com/api/v1/json/1/...2ba2e14234
- Last.fm charts for trending music (see Last.fm API)
- Integrated scraper Music Artist Banners
- Integrated scraper Music Artist Logos
- Improvements in Various Artists sorting (separate button on music menu, not shown in full artist list)
- Improvements in single track sorting (separate button on music menu, not shown in full artist list)
- Support for DJ sets
- Support for album grouping (Such as for a specific festival, maybe use smart playlists)
- Support to show next Live performance (see songkick.com API) example http://api.songkick.com/api/3.0/artists/...ur_api_key}
- Support Genre and Sub Genre grouping
- More music Visualizations
- Filter tracks by how many stars you rated them. Example, only show tracks that have a 4+ star rating
- Import "mood" and "Style/Sub Genre" so they can be filtered as a single text field
- New Bootleg/Live performance category option to show/not show
- Support for Music Decades filtering
- Music database Node support *Done*

Feel free to add any more, of reply if some of these features are already possible..
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#2
I've posted similar in other threads but my main feature requests would be to support custom tags. In foobar2000 I use custom tags to sort through my trance radioshows:

Image

Being able to filter your music like using facets in foobar would also be great:

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I'd love to be able to filter through my music library in xbmc on "one page". What I mean is having a column for artists (using artists thumbs) and scrolling down to choose an artist, then the second column would filter all the related releases for that artists (e.g. albums). After selecting the relevant album, a third column would show all the relevant songs (sorted by disc number) from that album. In fact I'd love to be able to customise what information I want to see in each view/column like you can in Foobar2000 using "title formatting" strings.
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#3
(2014-05-19, 13:41)phool Wrote: I'd love to be able to filter through my music library in xbmc on "one page". What I mean is having a column for artists (using artists thumbs) and scrolling down to choose an artist, then the second column would filter all the related releases for that artists (e.g. albums). After selecting the relevant album, a third column would show all the relevant songs (sorted by disc number) from that album. In fact I'd love to be able to customise what information I want to see in each view/column like you can in Foobar2000 using "title formatting" strings.

Ahh yes you mean like a dynamic jukebox view?

Something like this I guess, obviously you could change the year to Genre or Artist name ect

Image
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#4
^ Pretty much. You could even take it further and include sub categories for the releases column to make provision for albums, singles/EPs, radioshows, livesets.
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#5
More or finer statistics. Right now there are the top 100 songs (of all time) and top 100 (of all time).

My wish would be

Top 100 from last week, last month, last year, all time (Winamp had great statistics)
Top 100 Rock, Pop, Dance, whatever (of all time in that case)
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#6
(2014-05-21, 23:01)DarkHelmet Wrote: More or finer statistics. Right now there are the top 100 songs (of all time) and top 100 (of all time).

My wish would be

Top 100 from last week, last month, last year, all time (Winamp had great statistics)
Top 100 Rock, Pop, Dance, whatever (of all time in that case)

This would be a trivial code change I think.

But often you also have to think about the GUI at the same time.
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#7
(2014-05-22, 11:10)zag Wrote:
(2014-05-21, 23:01)DarkHelmet Wrote: More or finer statistics. Right now there are the top 100 songs (of all time) and top 100 (of all time).

My wish would be

Top 100 from last week, last month, last year, all time (Winamp had great statistics)
Top 100 Rock, Pop, Dance, whatever (of all time in that case)

This would be a trivial code change I think.

Uhm what makes you think that?

Currently Top 100 Songs simply gets a list of all songs, sorts it by the playcount and limits it to 100 items. There's no real information about when which song was played (except for the last time) so you don't know how much the playcount value has changed in the last day/week/month/year/whatever which is what you'd need to get the Top 100 Songs from last week/month/year.
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#8
(2014-05-22, 11:34)Montellese Wrote:
(2014-05-22, 11:10)zag Wrote:
(2014-05-21, 23:01)DarkHelmet Wrote: More or finer statistics. Right now there are the top 100 songs (of all time) and top 100 (of all time).

My wish would be

Top 100 from last week, last month, last year, all time (Winamp had great statistics)
Top 100 Rock, Pop, Dance, whatever (of all time in that case)

This would be a trivial code change I think.

Uhm what makes you think that?

Currently Top 100 Songs simply gets a list of all songs, sorts it by the playcount and limits it to 100 items. There's no real information about when which song was played (except for the last time) so you don't know how much the playcount value has changed in the last day/week/month/year/whatever which is what you'd need to get the Top 100 Songs from last week/month/year.

Ahh yes I didn't notice the time related stuff! I just saw the SQL statement which could be modified.

The second request should be easier though as we store the genre and the style (argh I hate the way we use allmusic.com fields). The difficulty is how do you show that to the user. Do you show all genres ect
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#9
I have one simple improvement I would like to see.

Remove "Artist" nfo dependancy on folder structure, and instead allow use of a single artist.nfo file to document information about any or all artists.
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#10
(2014-05-22, 14:39)whitebelly Wrote: I have one simple improvement I would like to see.

Remove "Artist" nfo dependancy on folder structure, and instead allow use of a single artist.nfo file to document information about any or all artists.

What advantage would that give?

Currently its the same as how movies and TVShows work so why change it?
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#11
(2014-05-22, 15:10)zag Wrote:
(2014-05-22, 14:39)whitebelly Wrote: I have one simple improvement I would like to see.

Remove "Artist" nfo dependancy on folder structure, and instead allow use of a single artist.nfo file to document information about any or all artists.

What advantage would that give?

Currently its the same as how movies and TVShows work so why change it?

There are differences between movie and music implementation. Movies do not require a two level folder structure, or even a single level, but the common implementation is to have a separate folder for each movie. A separate folder for each album makes sense as well, having to over-arch that with artist folders is where the difference comes in to play.

The best reason for music is flexibility. What is the benefit of having /ARTIST/ALBUM/ structure required to support artist nfo? Why can't I have artist nfo and have a simple /ALBUM/ structure? For music, all the needed info for the album and song are embedded in the tags, easy to manage, leaving only the artist info to deal with seperately. If I could have one global Artist.nfo file that had all the artists and information within, it would be easily managed, customized, and transported.

I don't want to create a new directory for each artist. When I look at those directories on my PC, I can only view one artist's albums at a time. All my albums are in a flat structure /Artist - Album/. This way, I can see all my albums in one view when working outside of XBMC. This way, I also don't have unnecessary levels when I only have one album for an artist, which is quite a few in my collection. If the ARTIST folder dependency were gone, you could organize album directories in any manner you wish. By Genre, Year, etc. It would not matter.

Bottom line is, there really is no need for the ARTIST folder dependance for defining artist info. It was a chosen solution, I understand why, but in a world where database are used, its unneeded and clunky.

If not a global artist.nfo, if you could do like movies and have 'artistname.nfo" just like you can have 'moviename.nfo', and place in anywhere, that would be satisfactory, while still not ideal IMO, as it may bring in to play problems with special characters in some artist names.
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#12
(2014-05-22, 12:12)zag Wrote:
(2014-05-22, 11:34)Montellese Wrote:
(2014-05-22, 11:10)zag Wrote: This would be a trivial code change I think.

Uhm what makes you think that?

Currently Top 100 Songs simply gets a list of all songs, sorts it by the playcount and limits it to 100 items. There's no real information about when which song was played (except for the last time) so you don't know how much the playcount value has changed in the last day/week/month/year/whatever which is what you'd need to get the Top 100 Songs from last week/month/year.

Ahh yes I didn't notice the time related stuff! I just saw the SQL statement which could be modified.

The second request should be easier though as we store the genre and the style (argh I hate the way we use allmusic.com fields). The difficulty is how do you show that to the user. Do you show all genres ect

As a start I'd just show the genres the user has played songs from, i.e. if no Pop has ever been played, there would be no Top 100 in Pop.

And statistics for other time spans other than "all time" would be really sweet. In my Top 100 there are so many songs, that I used to listen to, but no longer want to now. My music database is some eight years old or even older.
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#13
For the time based charts we would have to have a new table in the database that records the plays and times of those plays.
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#14
And that's not possible?
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#15
(2014-05-23, 22:10)DarkHelmet Wrote: And that's not possible?

Everything is possible if someone submits some code Big Grin
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Music Improvements Wishlist2