I started writing a reply to the original reply, but never got round to
finishing it - never mind.
On 22 Oct 2001, Mayhem & Chaos Coordinator wrote:
> > 4. A way to show an album based on it's name, eg. I select an antist
> > which shows me an album but only with the selected artists track... I
> > would like to be able to "expand" the album, to see all tracks (a link).
I think this ties in with my compilation disc e-mail.
> > 5. Maybe change the way the "Alpha-bar" works, by only selecting
> > artists starting with A... (Would make it a lot faster at my place since
> > I have a lot of artists)
On a similar note, how scaleable is Obsequieum in general. I can easily
picture an installation in a largish office, where the current playlist
gets fairly large (maybe everybody adds there favourite artist to the
list), and then all those workstations refresh the list every 30 seconds.
> > 5b. Make the "Alpha-bar" permanent, all across and so that it doesn't
> > scroll together with the artists...
Well, it would require yet another frame, which given the current 7(?) I
think maybe taking it a bit to far. IMHO the 'seperator' frames suck big
time.
Has anyone tried to use obsequieum in lynx? It's really not much worse to
use.
> > 6. Maybe introduce Genres ?
> I think Genres need to be done right with lots of flexibility and
> customizability. I haven't addressed genres in Obs or MusicBrainz,
> because a good solution is hard to come by. But this is a function that
> I really want MusicBrainz to fill, so I will work something out.
I think the ID3 tag idea of genres is probably about the worst example of
the sort of very badly thought out 'standards' that we somehow seem to
end-up with. It's just too difficult to come up with a universal all
encompassing list of genres. The CDDB system is much better just because
I know what all of the genres are.
What I would like is a sort of 'tick all that apply' system. The way I
imagine it, is that any track can have an arbitrary number of arbitrarily
defined genres. In order to have some common ground, tracks should be
assigned at least one genre from the CDDB, and ID3 system.
e.g. For "Flash Gordon" (by Queen) I would assign,
[Rock][Soundtrack] from CDDB
[Classic Rock][[Rock][Soundtrack] from ID3
and [Cheesy][Seventies] as well.
I guess that there is no point in having duplicates. So I would assign
[Rock][Soundtrack][Seventies][Classic Rock][Cheesy]. I could then ask
DJrandom to play cheesy music, and it would just do it. Because of the
overlap with CDDB, I can still use the first CDDB genre as a way of
sorting tracks.
I also think that any track that nobody has bothered to assign a genre,
should appear as such, and not show up as "Rock" or "Pop" like most
rippers/taggers seem to assume.
> > 10. A gizmo that shows how far you are in the song that is currently
> > playing... (maybe this can calculate by (FileSize - BytesStreamed)
> This one is a pain the butt...
When we added Track Lengths to Obs, I had hoped we could get the playlist
refresh to sync with track boundaries, but there is the problem of
skipping of tracks, the database being wrong, the possibility of the obsd
restarting, the possibility that the obsd, the web server, and the
database are all on different servers, etc.
> > 12. Make it skinable (not that I don't like it as it is) :-) >
> I think Robert Hart is well underway to making this happen.
I think I have proved the concept, although there is a suprisingly large
amount of cgi scripts, that all work slightly differently, so it has taken
abit more time than I expected. To be honest, it is only slightly more
flexible than vanilla Obs, in that you can choose colours and icons more
easily. Fonts should be easy (although personally I overide fonts in
Mozilla anyway), but changing the layout of frames, and the way they
interact (e.g. if you wanted to make a 3 frame obs, with say menubar at
the top, playlist on the right and everything else on the left) would be
more complex.
> > 13. The ability to fairly easy "rank" a track as garbage thereby
> > preventing this track from beeing played by DJ Random
Well there is two sides to this. The first (preventing a particular track
from ever being played) could easily be achieved with the genre system I
suggested above. You simply tell DJRandom not to play any track with a
[Garbage] tag or [Noise] (the closest ID3 equivalent (or is that some
type of music I don't know about???)
> > 11. Make the WebPage option "clickable" (What is the AuxPage used for?)
> > 14. How about the ability to add pictures to each artist and covers to
> > the albums, and maybe even lyrics for each track ?
Yeah, and when the music companies start distributing music in MP3 format,
they can put the lyrics in just like they do with the inlay card in the
CD. I just can't see who would ever bother typing in the lyrics for more
than a handful of songs. (although, I suppose there are some web-sites
around that do have a fairly extensive database)
However, the idea of having a scan of the album cover is not all that
bad. There are many people (my wife for example) that can't get used to
the idea of a computerised music collection, and would much prefer to
browse through a stack of jewel cases.
> > 8. An option to download a track and an album (zip/tar it together as
> > one file)
The idea of allowing a download of an album/track/playlist is trivial
when all the tracks involved are on fixed discs on the web-server. However
it gets more complex if a large number of tracks need to be pulled in from
a variety of CDs on a jukebox, or if the webpages are being served from a
different server (I assume this is a possibility)
> > 15. A stats page, that shows how many track are on each volume, how many
> > megs have been pulled from each volume, how many minutes in total,
> > etc...
I have a stats page that just runs a couple of SQL queries through the
database. Everytime I think of an interesting statistic that I can add to
it I do. Although there are some statistics suggested above that aren't
currently in the database, so would require some more work.
I am assuming that we want to restrict all communication between the cgi's
and obsd through the database? Alternatively the port 4420 approach could
be used.
Rob
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