Composer list in library browser

[imazed]

My goal would be to have something thats useful for many people not something that works for everyone all the time cuz that almost always ends up being a Lowest Common Denominator solution. Anyway you can currently do search across all tags in the Browse panel so "Schubert Allegro" should work as you describe.

With a click schema any column can be used as the root same as existing Library panel. Each column would have a free text type-down search to help avoid long scrolling.

For example lets say I'm interested in seeing the list of performances of "Prelude and Fugue In C major, BWV 846". You could scroll or text search to it in the Compositions column.

The Performers column might list

Christopher Parkening
Friedrich Gulda
John Williams
Tzvi Erez
.
.

Something like that.

But maybe the task of re-tagging Classical tracks to match some proposed schema is too burdensome for most users and thus not worth the effort to develop the custom panel.

Not enough feedback at this point for sure.

-Tim

Tim,
Thanks again, I have had my say so happy to leave it there.  I am sure that whatever you do will be to the same high standard as the rest of Moode.

Just one small point to clarify - " Anyway you can currently do search across all tags in the Browse panel" .  Did you mean in Ver 4.1 or the improved search?

The reason I ask is I tried "Schubert  Allegro" and got 0 items although the title of the track is "Schubert: String Quartet No 14 in D minor 'Death and the Maiden', D810 - Movement 1: Allegro"  and I can find it with other combinations such as schubert death.

Is the problem the string length? "Schubert D810" or "Schubert Maiden" also produce 0 items.

Mike

[Tim Curtis]

I ment 4.1 but after looking at the code it appears to a bug :-O

-Tim

[imazed]

I ment 4.1 but after looking at the code it appears to a bug :-O

-Tim

Tim,
Thanks for the feedback.

Mike

[rhizomusicosmos]

Now that I've got a stable full of tag editors I can try to create variously tagged MP3 files to do black-box testing of MPD's parsing skills.

Hi Kent. Have you tried puddletag? I might try it out on the Ubuntu box when I get a chance.

[aknaggbaugh]

It would be excellent to be able to customise the music display. I have a mixed collection: quite a lot of rock, quite a lot of classical, some jazz. What I would love Moode to be able to do is have the music display customisable, so that I could load a "UI list" in a similar way to loading a playlist. The UI list would define what columns should be displayed and what filter should be applied. For each column visible in the UI there would be a dropdown so you could select the appropriate MPD tag, and you have the filter at the top. Perhaps the filter could be made a bit more flexible to allow selection of multiple genres. There would be a button for "save current UI settings as UI list". Maybe a "default UI" button might be helpful in case people mess up their UI. This would be completely customisable, allow for people who use their tags in different ways to categorise their music, and also reasonably simple (for the user - I'm not suggesting it's trivial to code!)

Then I could filter on the Classical genre tag and set up the columns to be Composer and Album, and save that as my Classical UI list, and I could filter on "everything except Classical" and set up the columns to be Artist and Album. Those who prefer to use the Name tag for Composition might want to set their Classical UI list to have Composer and Name columns.

It would also allow other completely different uses, perhaps custom UI lists to help with themed party playlists.

[Tim Curtis]

Currently, the Library is populated from a fixed-structure data array thats generated on the server (Pi) and then loaded into the client Browser. The array has the following structure:

{Genre1: {Artist1: {Album1: [{song1}, {song2}], Album2:...}, Artist2:...}, Genre2:...}

Different tags could be substituted for Artist for example AlbumArtist or Composer., Currently there is a setting on Customize for specifying whether to use Artist or AlbumArtist. Composer could be added as a 3rd option.

Implementing a "roll your own" Library would probably require something other than fixed structure data array for example a set of keyed SQL tables. Either way a substantial effort.

-Tim

[Tim Curtis]

I ment 4.1 but after looking at the code it appears to a bug :-O

-Tim

Tim,
Thanks for the feedback.

Mike

Hi Mike,

I've been unable to send any email including Forum generated emails to the Zen mail service that hosts your email address. I'm receiving bounce backs with the error "Please use a non-generic PTR".

Try contacting me via another email service like Gmail or Yahoo, or contact me on Skype. My Skype id is tim at moodeaudio dot org.

-Tim

[rongon]

Different tags could be substituted for Artist for example AlbumArtist or Composer., Currently there is a setting on Customize for specifying whether to use Artist or AlbumArtist. Composer could be added as a 3rd option.

That alone would be a nice feature, at least for me. 

I have no problem with the idea that in Western art music (concert music, or so-called "classical music") each work is primarily identified with its composer, while in other music forms the Artist or Performer is more important. But that begs the question... 

If one were to choose the proposed 3rd option of Composer in Customize, would that have to be a global setting, applying to all Genres? 
Or could the Composer be chosen for specific Genres, while Artist could be chosen for other Genres? 

For Genres like Classical, Chamber Music, Symphony, Symphonic, New Music, Avant-Garde, Romantic, Late Romantic, etc. I'd want to organize the Library view by Composer. (When I'm in the mood for Bartok, I don't look for George Szell or Ivan Fischer. I look for Bartok.) 

For Genres like Pop, Rock, Jazz, R&B, HipHop, Soul, Country, Country & Western, Folk, Big Band, etc. I'd want to organize the Library view by Artist. (When I'm in the mood to listen to John Coltrane, I don't care much who the composer is. I want to hear John Coltrane play.

My current workaround for "classical" music is to give it all the same Genre (Classical) and manually change the ID3 tags so that the Album is the name of the work followed by who's performing it, and the Artist is the composer. So for Mahler's 9th Symphony played by the Columbia Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bruno Walter, I'll re-tag everything to: 

Track = track number (in this case, it's "01")
Title = name of work and individual movement, etc. = I - Andante comodo
Artist = name of composer = Mahler, Gustav
Album = name of work and name(s) of performer(s) = Mahler: Symphony No. 9 (Columbia SO, Walter)
Genre = Classical 

All the Tracks in the work will be in that one Album. 

This way, in the Library, I can choose to see Albums by Mahler, Gustav, or I can see Albums by John Coltrane, and choose which to play. 

When I select the genre Classical, I still have to choose by Artist, but now I see a list of composers to choose from (because in my 'classical' tracks I've changed the Artist tags to the name of the composer of the work). 

It would be really nice if when the Genre chosen was Classical or any of its other varieties (Chamber Music, Romantic, Late Romantic, Baroque, Renaissance, Modern, Minimalist, Opera, Lieder, etc.) the Library displayed Composer instead of Artist. 

But in Rock, Jazz, Pop, R&B, Soul, Country, Folk, HipHop, etc. it should stay how it is now, with Artist (not Composer) displayed in the Library. 

Is that a huge ask? 
--

[Tim Curtis]

A while back I tested substituting Composer for Artist in the Library and it completely messed up non-Classical genres. Even with my small Classical collection it did not produce a good result.

The main problem with Classical collections is that very often users organize them in very different ways.

What i ended up doing for moOde 4.3 is to add Composer to the tracks list for display purposes.

[AnnaBlume]

Hi Tim,

I strongly recommend not to go the way having different versions of moodeaudio (i.e. one for poular and one for classical music).
Of course most of the classical collections are organized in different ways, due to a very individual way of search structure. It all starts when tagging and ripping the music, because in that early stage one has to decide what tags one is using for searching music or even browsing through her/his collection.

Additionally it's not a good advise to "mis"use a tag for other purposes. When I started ripping with dbpoweramp I filled the tag "artist" with work-numbers (e.g. opus-numbers etc.) - a total mess. Luckily dbpoweramp allows user-defined tags, so I created one called "opus".

I´ve learned now that there is a restriction by the tags mpd is supporting - unfortunately no user-defined tags, or opus/work etc. I assume we have to live with that for now.

What I´d love to see in the near future is a version of moodeaudio where it's possible to define the tags used for creating the library individually:
One of the main advantages of Linux is that it's a library-based OS, i.e. all definitions are stored in individual ASCII-files.
Just take a look at what spoon (the guy developing dbpoweramp) is doing with his upnp-server called asset upnp. There's a certain file where all the tags used for creating the library are listed (and defined), this file is user-accessible and can be modified. Additionally one can define whether the sort-tags or the "normal" tags are to be used for sorting the entries. Wouldn´t something similar be possible for moode as well?

Keeping a long story short: Taking the restrictions of mpd into account, adding the tag "composer" in the library creation of moode is a very good starting point (thanks for doing this instantly in the 4.3 version). If it's possible to individualise the selection and the order of the list tags - even better (e.g. one searches by genre -> artist -> album, another one by genre -> composer -> album). If then one could choose how the generated list is sorted (e.g. by sort tags or by normal tags) - much better. The perfect world for classical music libraries would go beyond the restrictions of mpd, but this is not the point here.

If you see a way I can support you kindly let me know, I´ll then get in touch with you by email or whatever you prefer.
Cheers, AnnaBlume