MrSinatra;600469 Wrote:
> its in that thread. i can repeat it here, but lets break down the
> detail there. suffice it to say...
>
> ...think of it this way, the scanner already gets pretty much all the
> important tags into the DB. all that has to be done, is change the
> manipulation of the presentation of the DB info, via straightforward
> filtering and sorting. let the user decide what criteria should be in
> a given library view, (and allow more than one view!) let the user
> decide when and where to toggle artwork on/off. let the user decide,
> via as many drop down boxes as they want, how to sort the contents of a
> given view:
>
> albumartist, year, album
> album, year
> genre, artist
> tag1, tag2, tag3, tag4, tag5, tag6, etc...
>
> whatever, put the power in the users hands! don't have restrictive,
> unintuitive, ridiculous, silly methods of entry (home>albums,
> home>artists, etc...) that operate on a single set of data that you
> can't even change without rescans and prayers.
>
> Jim made it very clear, he LIKES being able to change INSTANTLY,
> between browsing Artist and browsing Album Artists on his device. i
> love that ability on winamp, and i can do lots more than that.
>
> if the power of SBS is the DB, lets leverage it. right now, all it is
> in its current implementation is a Boa Constrictor. i'm not trying to
> be rude, but in order to get the message across i apparently need to be
> blunt, and the blunt truth is it currently sucks.
>
You know, I really want your input/help on something as what you
describe is something more or less close something I'm working on
together with a number of community members.
If you have the time and is interested in helping, I would love if you
would try the "Tags" menu provided by "Custom Browse" when used
together with the "Mixed Tag" scanning module in "Custom Scan" plugin
and give me some feedback.
To installl/configure it you need to:
1. Install "Custom Browse" and "Custom Scan"
2. Goto "Custom Scan" settings page and hit the "Scan all" link, the
scanning will take some time, it will scan using the "Custom Tag" and
"Mixed tag" module by default, wait for the scanning to finish.
3. Restart SBS (I think this is needed to make the "Tags" menu
visible)
4. Goto "My Music/Custom Browse/Tags" menu and see if it's anywhere
close to what you want.
Focus on the IR and Controller/Radio/Touch interfaces, the web
interface needs a separate solution to be really user friendly.
If you don't have the time or interested to try this, I understand. It
just feels like your input would be really good to get a better
understanding of what we should/shouldn't do.
If you don't have the time/interest to help, a brief description of the
"Tags" menu follows below.
The menu is based on that the user always want to select where to
browse next:
- A user might want to start by browsing into "Album Artists" and then
select one of the genres which the artist has recorded albums for and
finally get a filtered list of available albums matching the selected
album artist and genre.
- Another user might want to start browsing in "Artists" and then
select one of the years when the artist has recorded music and finally
see which tracks the artist recorded during the selected year.
The menu structure is basically:
Code:
--------------------
Tags
<List of tag types>
Matching songs
<List of matching songs>
Matching albums
<List of matching albums>
<List of tag values matching the selected tag type>
<List of tag types>
Matching songs
<List of matching songs>
Matching albums
<List of matching albums>
<List of tag values matching all the selected tag types>
--------------------
Where "List of tag types" contains strings like "Genres", "Years",
"Albums", "Artists", "Album Artists", "Track Artists". This list is
configurable, so each user can configure what he/she want to show.
Besides the standard tags scanned by standard SBS scanner it also
support any custom tags scanned by Custom Scan plugin.
And "List of values matching the selected tag types" is a list of
genres or a list of artist names or a list of years.
The "Matching songs" and "Matching albums" are special menus that makes
it possible to to jump out and show songs or albums matching the
selected criteria at any time. So you can select "Genre" on first level
and then select "Matching songs" and you will get a list of all songs
within the genre.
I'm not sure I'm able to describe the concept good enough in text form,
so if you have the time I'd really appreciate if you would try it and
give me some feedback. I think you really need to try it in your own
system to understand the concept.
A solution like this will be very flexible, the disadvantage is that
the menus will be a bit deeper. However, I think combining this with a
number of predefined hierarchies could be pretty good. I'm asking you
to try it because I have a feeling you might realize possibilities I
haven't realized yet.
MrSinatra;600469 Wrote:
>
> hey, they are adding DLNA/upnp support. thats a nice, unexpected, out
> of the blue turn in the right direction. there is no way anyone who
> uses the SBS browsing can say "this is how it should be, this is good,
> this is intuitive."
>
I still believe that UPnP only was added to make it possible to use the
Revue with SBS. Unless Revue succeeds the UPnP interface isn't going to
be a priority as it won't sell any more Logitech hardware, at least not
until they decide to make a working dedicated server device with SBS
pre-installed. I haven't tried the Revue myself but based on the demo
videos it feels too complex for normal users and it has huge problems
because no one has made any business deals with the content producers,
but let's not turn this into a Revue discussion, we have a thread in
the "General" section for this. The UPnP interface can obviously sell a
lot of server boxes if Logitech decided to make a server hardware
product with pre-installed SBS, but so far they haven't shown any kind
of interest in this kind of product. However, in my mind the UPnP
interface doesn't make the existing Squeezebox products more attractive
as these still will continue to use the old proprietary
SlimProto/SqueezePlay interfaces.
MrSinatra;600469 Wrote:
>
> so my hope is that if they can eventually see the light on DLNA, they
> can see the light on revamping a broken, ridiculous methodology that
> only Phil loves.
>
Maybe I'm missing something, what does UPnP/DLNA have to do with
compilation album logic ?
MrSinatra;600469 Wrote:
>
> to me, it isn't about any of that above. the whole "comp, not a comp"
> game is a ridiculous rubric. to me its about browsing whats in your
> tags. do you want to browse the "big list" of all artists, or do you
> want to browse the "small[er] list" of album artists. K.I.S.S. thats
> how most people think of it, one or the other, (or both together), b/c
> that reflects what they have in their tags. its just that simple.
>
Honestly, I really don't care what's in the tags, I care about what's
in the database, it's the database contents that's displayed to me as a
user not the tags. I would love to move SBS more towards a library
manager where you can actually manage your library and not just import
tag values. As a library manager it would of course have to be possible
to write back some information to the tags, mainly to be able to use the
same music files in other software or in portable devices, but the idea
is that we shouldn't limit SBS discovery functionality to what can be
stored in tags. There are a lot of information on sites like
discogs.com, musicbrainz.org, allmusic.com, amazon.com that can't
easily be stored in tags but would be very good to integrate in the SBS
music discovery experience.
Tags work for simple use cases but it gets complex when you want to
represent multiple artists (with custom sort name for each artist) or
relations between artists. The reason is that there is no standard how
to represent this in tags and the tag structure is too flat to
represent relations in a good way.
Then again, it's not like this is going to change as long as Logitech
is in control because music discovery related features really hasn't
been a priority as long as I've been here.
--
erland
Erland Isaksson ('My homepage' (http://erland.isaksson.info))
(Developer of 'many plugins/applets'
(http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/User:Erland). If my answer
helped you and you like to encourage future presence on this forum
and/or third party plugin/applet development, 'donations are always
appreciated' (http://erland.isaksson.info/donate))
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