[IDEA] Overlay with resolution/sample rate

[codiac]

An idea would be that in Album View a overlay with bitrate/sample rate is to be placed over each album cover photo. Something similar to the attached image.

   

[Tim Curtis]

That might be very distracting visually on a grid of album covers and it would slow down the loading of covers because each file would have to processed by mediainfo in order to extract the encoded-at rate since it's not part of MPD database.

Ideally the encoded-at rate would be extracted during some batch process like generating the cover thumbnails. and then stored in a table using the cover hash for quick lookup.

Interesting idea but not trivial to implement.

[bitlab]

Lately I was working on other mods in the genLibrary function, I noticed that MPD supplies a Format attribute (like 44100:16:2).

After adding a soundquality attribute to the songData (server side) and extract it in the groupdLib (frontend), it was pretty easy to implement the overlays.
The value of soundquality is an empty string when it concerns a compressed file, else the samplerate/1000.

I have a basic working version, but the hard part is the flavour of the visualisation.

Some try-outs:

A


B


C


D



Personally I lean towards D, with some tweaks:
* Compressed Files also gets a overlay with no text (I don't have them but like to be warned about it).
* Most tracks in my lib are 44k or 48k,  maybe remove overlay and text for it ? 
* To save screen estate did leave the bitdepth out of it. In my lib almost all 44/48k are 16bit, but all 96 or higher are 24bit.
* No clue about which color for which samplerate ...

Any opinion or feedback is welcome!

Thanks
Marcel

[Tim Curtis]

Thats cool. I'm not sure when the format attribute was introduced into MPD status but it looks like it could work.

Feel free to post or email me your modifications and I'll test out on my end.

[Tim Curtis]

After noodling this for a bit and also examining the WIP PR it might be simpler to just add an optional line of text below the existing Album and Artist lines for example:

Code:

Waiting For The Sirens'...
   New Order (2005)
     16/44.1 FLAC

This way we would not be constrained by or clutter up the nice cover art.

[kit1cat]

After noodling this for a bit and also examining the WIP PR it might be simpler to just add an optional line of text below the existing Album and Artist lines for example:

Code:

Waiting For The Sirens'...
   New Order (2005)
     16/44.1 FLAC

This way we would not be constrained by or clutter up the nice cover art.

Great Idea.

[bitlab]

The more text, the harder it is to read. And will reduce the space available for album rows. The colours of the triangles makes it easier for your brain to fast regonize it.
In practice I found the overlays aren't disturbing at all, at least that is my opinion. Would say just try it for test and see how you like it. (No need to rebuild the mpd library only clear the libcache.)
And of course it should come with an option to enable/disable it. Or even better a choice for off, text, or overlay ?

[the_bertrum]

Does anyone ever choose their music by bitrate? "I'm really in the mood for some 24bit FLAC today".

[Tim Curtis]

Its a niche option for sure but some enthusiasts have collections with mixed sample rates and they would like to see this piece of information in the Library. There have been a few requests for it over the years. Filtering by sample rate isn't part of @bitlab 's proposal but it could be done.

MPD started to include the sample rate in its song file information but t's not a panacea. In my brief testing there were issues including DSF format showing no rate information and MP3 format showing a bit depth of 24 bit but of course there is no such thing as bit depth in lossy formats. I think in this case MPD is storing the decode bit depth.

Couple other points to consider when thinking about this as a generally applicable feature.

1. I think in addition to sample rate users would prolly want to also see the bit depth and format for example "24/44.1 FLAC" or "DSD 2.822 Mbps" same as what is displayed under the big cover in Playback panel. To do this requires executing the getEncodedAt($song, $outformat) function for each song file while the Library is being generated. This will prolly increase the time it takes to generate the Library. I won't know by how much until I test.

2. Displaying a badge with something like "24/44.1 FLAC" on each cover will prolly make the badge become the most dominant element in the panel instead of the cover art.  I don't think this is desirable.

-Tim

[the_bertrum]

Its a niche option for sure

Perhaps needs to be a configurable option I'd say then.  For my money it would be better to work on being able to filter by sample rate, and add in other filtering options as well (such as any tags there may be).  Perhaps a second stage of library scanning could happen when Moode is idle that builds a tag database that can then be queried with a full range of operators to the user's pleasure (select where equal not-equal like and or etc).  I dare say there could even be an option to define a query the result of which is displayed in the form of different coloured overlays on the album art.

How easy it is to dream these things up when one does not need to code them....