Before getting to my problem I think it is best to describe what I have done so far. In the past I have used both custom browse and custom scan but I am now using 7.9.1 and the virtual library functionality which is not supported by these plugins. I have written a variation of the LibraryDemo plugin that get me a long way towards what I want. It removes unwanted top level menus and creates three libraries classical music, audio books and music (could not think of a better name sorry). The classical music and audio books are each in their own directories and music is defined as not being on either of those directories. The three libraries have a menu structure appropriate to them.
_Music:_ ALBUM ARTISTS *All Artists* uses artists but limited to BAND, I put normalised versions of the artist tag separated into the individual artists in BAND, this allows a display of x feat. y on song info but to navigate by individual artists. Normalisation helps bring the variant spellings/names together in the navigation whilst preserving the display of the variants in the album/song info. It does mess up the use of musicbrainz artist ids though. I can also put cross references into BAND so for example I have Sandy Denny in BAND in those tracks she sang with Fairport Convention. I set Filter Contributor Roles at the Album & Track Level to Show all albums and tracks. ALBUM *Genre* -Audiobooks- AUTHOR[/B] USES ARTIST LIMITED TO COMPOSER *SERIES* USES ARTIST LIMITED TO ALBUMARTIST *READ/PERFORMED BY* USES ARTIST LIMITED TO ARTIST *BOOK* USES ALBUM *GENRE -Classical Music- COMPOSER* USES ARTIST LIMITED TO COMPOSER *CONDUCTOR* USES ARTIST LIMITED TO CONDUCTOR *PERFORMER* USES ARTIST LIMITED TO BAND AS WITH MUSIC LIBRARY, RATHER THAN FOLLOW THE RECOMMENDATIONS FOR TAGGING CLASSICAL MUSIC I PUT SOLOISTS, ORCHESTRAS AND CHOIRS IN BAND *ERA/FORM* USES GENRE RATHER THAN PUT CLASSICAL MUSIC I FILL THE GENRE TAG WITH SOMETHING USEFUL [B]ALBUM So far so good. This meets most of my family's needs but I would like to add a couple of menu options and change how one works. I add WORK and WORKSORT tags to my classical music and have written a plugin that puts them in a new tracks table. I would like the Composer, Conductor and Performer menus to go to a list of works rather than albums. It would be nice if Works displayed in a similar fashion to albums on the controller and radios with the Work and the Performer. I have looked at code in custom browse and SLIM::MENU::BrowseLibrary but cannot get my head round how to create menus with my own tags. The second thing I would like to do is add a new album sort option. It would use two of my own tags, DATE rather than YEAR and COMP. This way I could display the albums of an artist with the best of albums coming at the end and displayed in the correct date order. I seem to have quite a few artists that produce more than one album in a year. This second change is I suspect rather harder to do and in any case is really only due to my obsessive nature as it doesn't actually stop me finding things. Any suggestions as to what to read or how to go about coding to add the works menu would be gratefully received. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark D's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=63061 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=109045 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
