Official moOde 8 support thread

[Mr.R0b0t]

Album display problem. If there are participating artists in the mp3 tag and there are several of them, then in the album view there are Chinese bushes instead of the album's attribute.

[Tim Curtis]

PM myself and @TheOldPresbyope a download link to zip of the file and we will have a look.

[Busybox]

I can't seem to set my system's hostname from the Moode GUI. This is in the 32-bit version of 8.1.2, although I think it was present in 8.1.1 also.

My system's hostname had been "moode-1." Somehow in doing various updates the hostname got set to "moode-1-1" in /etc/hostname. When I tried to change it in the system page of the GUI, it showed the correct name of "moode-1", but didn't change the name in /etc/hostname so it came up as "moode-1-1." Just to make sure the new name got loaded I first set it to "moode-1X", then to "moode-1", and Moode claimed it set the new name correctly.

- Steve

P.S. I saw a previous forum post suggesting that the hostname should be included in a backup. I'm not sure this is a good idea since it could cause DHCP confusion after cloning systems. I have several Moode systems on the same network that I want to keep consistent, but with different hostnames. None of my systems use the default name "moode", so after a backup from one system and restore to another, I always check my DHCP server for a system named "moode" to know which is the new clone.

[Tim Curtis]

There is a TODO list item to have host name and the other names be configurable on a restore to allow a single backup file to be used to restore to multiple systems but in the meantime I would just save a backup file for each system.

[Busybox]

I have some more info on what may have caused hostname corruption. I had a moode system named "moode-amp2" running 7.1.x and made a backup of it. Then I flashed a new SD card with 8.1.2 using the Raspberry Pi Imager. In the Imager I explicitly set the hostname to "moode-amp2" as well. Then when I restored my backup, /etc/hostname became "moode-amp2-amp2." However the moode GUI still showed the name as "moode-amp2."

- Steve

[duke.g]

Hi all,
I have a little problem editing my playlists.
For some of them nothing happens if  I klick on edit playlist.
Is there a logfile I can have a look at to see whats going on?
If Yes, can someone please point me in the right direction.
I'm using Moode 8.1.2, 32 Bit installation, Pi 4B, 4GB.

Thanks in advance
   duke.g

[Tim Curtis]

Did you create the playlists in 8.1.x ?

[charlesky]

Here's an update of the fix in case there's anyone else annoyed by the 'Unknown AlbumArtist' bugfeature.
Simply transfer the attached patchmusiclib.sh file to your pi, log in  via SSH and enter the following:

Code:

chmod a+x patchmusiclib.sh
sudo ./patchmusiclib.sh

Then update the library and the misfiled entries will be back in their proper places.

'Performer' and 'Conductor' tags appear to be interfering with retrieval of 'Artist' or 'Album Artist' data.

I see there have been a few issues with music tags in the past and heartily agree with @TheOldPresbyope that this whole thing is a dumpster fire with no standards. But right now (release 8.0.2) it appears that any files that have a 'Performer' or 'Conductor' tag defined end up being dumped in the 'Unknown Artist'/'Unknown AlbumArtist' category in tag view. This occurs with all of the choices in the 'Tag view artist' field. 

My music is stored on a USB drive connected directly to the Pi. If I edit the file tags (using MP3tag 3.14 on a PC), solely remove the 'Performer' or 'Conductor' tag and update the library then the album turns up correctly listed under the relevant artist in tag view.

I should note that this is happening on AAC files (with the .m4a extension) that have been tagged using MP3Tag.

Ok, I found the place in the code that is causing this and fixed it. 

/var/www/inc/playerlib.php controls the way the library handles tags. If a file doesn't have the 'AlbumArtist' tag defined then it tries to construct this by building an array containing the contents of the 'Artist', 'Performer' and 'Conductor' tags (if they are present). This works fine. Unfortunately, it looks like a trap was built in at some point to catch cases in which a file has multiple 'Artist' tags defined - this is certainly undesirable, though not really fatal - and spit them out as 'Unknown AlbumArtist'. This gets tripped when it encounters the Artist/Performer/Conductor array that was accumulated earlier, which certainly looks like an unintended behaviour. 

The easiest way to fix this is simply to remove the trap. While multiple 'Artist' tags are a bad practice, music tags are such a wild west that it's not unknown, and probably not a good reason to disrupt the way the library is displayed. 

The problem occurs at line 577 in playerlib.php:

Code:

'album_artist' => ($flatData['AlbumArtist'] ? $flatData['AlbumArtist'] : (count($flatData['Artist']) == 1 ? $flatData['Artist'][0] : 'Unknown AlbumArtist')),

I changed this to:

Code:

'album_artist' => ($flatData['AlbumArtist'] ? $flatData['AlbumArtist'] : ($flatData['Artist'][0] ? $flatData['Artist'][0] : 'Unknown AlbumArtist')),

in a freshly-flashed copy of moode and rebuilt the library. Everything now works fine, with no aberrant 'Unknown AlbumArtist' categories. A file will now only get assigned to this if none of 'Album Artist', 'Artist', 'Performer' or 'Conductor' are defined. Since there are no real standards when it comes to music tagging this allows the tag view display to be more flexible to handle different approaches.

If anyone else is bothered by this behaviour and wants to make such a change feel free to PM me, though it's a slightly tricky process doing it from a Windows PC and needs special tools.

[Edit] The same change needs to be made to line 772 since there's a separate function to handle UTF8 encoding.

[duke.g]

Did you create the playlists in 8.1.x ?

I've created the playlists on my windows pc using the software musicbee.
I can play the music, i.e. I klick on the Playlist and add the music to the play queue. That works fine. But for some lists (all lists were generated the same way) nothing happens when I klick on "Edit playlist".

Kind regards
    duke.g

[Tim Curtis]

The playlist feature expects playlist files in the format generated by MPD. When a playlist is created by MPD moOde adds two #EXT tags at the top of the file to store Genre and Cover information. If the playlist does not confirm to this format it may or may not be able to be edited via the UI.

An import utility would need to be developed to convert playlist formats created in other applications to the format needed by moOde's Playlist view. This would be a good project for an interested developer :-)