Song ratings

[TheOldPresbyope]

Looks like I am missing something here... my understanding was that all that is required is the front end change (display the rating and the means to set the rating) and a simple backend that would return/store the rating... what else is involved? Can you expand on the plugins bit, please?

The so-called "library" in moOde is in fact a highly specialized MPD "database" which is accessible only through MPD routines. Beyond the basic database read/write and other housekeeping functions, most features are implemented in the form of plugins. You can see them listed if you enter "mpd -V" from the command line.

All the metadata contained in tracks gets processed by one plugin or another in order to populate the MPD database. It's during this process that various items get transliterated into the tagset I pointed to in a previous message. So two things have to happen before moOde can see track metadata. There has to be a slot available in the database, e.g., an MPD-defined tag, for an item of interest and for each file format/encoding there has to be an input plugin which knows to map the corresponding item from that file's metadata tag into that slot.

To take my POPM example, the input plugin which deals with an ID3v2 tag has to know to map the content of the POPM field into some MPD-defined tag. Likewise, supposing that in FLAC files one has defined a VORBIS COMMENT BLOCK field name  as the text string "POPM", the input plugin which deals with VORBIS COMMENT BLOCK has to know to map the field value of that item into the same MPD tag.

And so forth for other metadata tagging schemes of interest.

Regards,
Kent

PS - I'm being a bit loose here. What MPD calls a "database" is not a full-fledged database. I forget if there's still some language to that effect in the MPD docs. Also, it's hard to differentiate between the industry's understanding of "metadata tag" as meaning the container of metadata added to a file and the MPD understanding of "tag" as meaning specific metadata items. I keep the notion of a tag straight in my own mind by remembering that my shirts come from the store with a tag which has items like stock number, size, washing instructions on it.

PPS - Obviously the VORBIS COMMENT BLOCK field name could be "RATING" or some other meaningful name as long as the MPD input plugin knows to map it.