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Home arrow Blogs arrow MediaPortal, My music!
MediaPortal, My music!
Written by Frodo, on 01-12-2005
Music maestro!

Now that the days are getting colder and darker, i find myself spending more time playing music, offcourse using MediaPortal

music.jpg


What i found was that although My Music is pretty stable, its not as userfriendly as i would like it to be.
Some observations i have:
- I spend too much time searching for songs
- I never use playlists since its too much work to create one
- Even if i got some playlists, its too much work to load them
- I use the favorites view a lot
- I'm switching constantly between genre, artists views


Things i'm searching for
- easy creation of playlists containing songs i like
- much better way of finding songs, even ones which are not 100% correctly tagged
- good overview of songs and playlists

Now how can MP help in this i asked my self.
Some idea's i have:

Classify songs
Basicly you should be able to add extra metadata to a song.
Suppose you are playing a song, or playlist.
I think it would be great if you where able to classify the song while playing
Classification could be:
  - assigning (extra) genres to the song
  - assigning own keywords to the song
  - linking a song to another artist, album or song.
  - changing existing tag info

Favorites
Tivo has its thumbs up/down system, a bit like our favorites view.
 I found that one single favorties view is not enough. Sometimes i want to play hiphop, so listen to all my hiphop favorites while at other times i want to play quiet , easy listening songs. A single 'favorites' view wont help much here. Offcourse you can create playlists, but the way its done at the moment is not very userfriendly.

So in short, you should be able to create playlist very easy, userfriendly and also important. You should be able to browse & start a playlist with minimal action.

Playlists can come in 2 forms: dynamic and static
Static playlists we already know.
You compose a list of songs and save it as a playlist. A lot can be done to make this much more easier, but once you created the list it wont change anymore.

Dynamic playlists
Now this is something which interests me, can i tell MP to create playlists for me? Instead of searching and looking for songs,maybe MP can do this based on search criteria  
These playlists are auto-generated and new songs are placed or removed from these lists automaticly.

Example:
- A playlists of all love songs from 1980-now
- A playlist of all top 1 hits of the last 5 years 
- A playlist of all songs featuring madonna, anastacia and britney spears

When new love songs are added/removed from your music library the playlist will be adjusted automaticly. Also if you re-classify a song this could mean that the playlist will be changed


Frodo


Users' Comments (10) RSS feed comment
Posted by devo, on 02-12-2005, , Guest
1. ...
I think the dynamic playlists is a great idea.  
 
It sounds very similar to what you can do in ITunes with their playlists and might be a good reference point in implementing this functionality in MP.
 
» Reply to this comment...

Posted by rtv, on 19-12-2005, , Guest
2. ...
Hi Frodo! 
This exactly are the missing features which I suggested already a year ago - If you want to "learn" something about usability and how it could be done in MP get some inspirations from amarok! 
http://amaroklive.com/ index.php?page_id=113&language=en 
 
I highly recommend the "last.fm" support as it dynamically creates playlists to your liking using an open database.
 
» Reply to this comment...

Posted by Funky, on 21-12-2005, , Guest
3. ...
Hi Frodo, 
 
I like your ideas a lot. I personally like the idea of partyshuffle but I've been lacking a filtering function. Eg I only want to listen to random songs from the year 2005 or within a certain genre. 
 
Keep up the extremely good work.
 
» Reply to this comment...

Posted by Rind, on 30-12-2005, , Guest
4. ...
 
hmm 
 
musik browsing would be smoother when: 
 
when pressing 1-9 in my musik 
you jump to the entrys. thats very usefull BUT 
when jumped.. you are locked @ the letter you choose. 
and that is not good! 
 
the second thing is. 
 
when i have choosen an artist (after browsing long time trough my artists) and i pres escape before entering an album of that artist the artist is highlighted again. that is good ! 
 
but if i have choosen an artist and pressed enter @an album 
then i return to the top of the artist list again when pressing escape twice !! 
thats very annoying x) 
 
greets rind =) 
 
p.s. hope my englisch is not that bad :p
 
» Reply to this comment...

Posted by JayBro, on 02-01-2006, , Guest
5. ...
check also the pandora.com project, they masterly create a playlist on just one favourite song... it's delicious! 
But then you need a database with references I guess...
 
» Reply to this comment...

Posted by matt, on 16-01-2006, , Guest
6. ...
i think being able to rate music on the fly is a great idea. 
 
I'd like to see fickresque tagging too, much more so than the use of Genres which are often misleading.
 
» Reply to this comment...

Posted by SpaceProtector, on 19-01-2006, , Guest
7. ...
Creating dynamic playlists would be the best thing which could happen to MyMusic. There are several projects around with different approaches.  
 
www.moodlogic.com (assigns moods to the MP3 files) 
www.pandora.com (uses experts labeled data) 
music.predixis.com/  
 
The Terratec CAR4000 stand alone MP3 player features a search in the internal database. I think this would be the easiest thing for MediaPortal to adapt. What you need would be a search mask with all different criteria listed. Default is always all files. The you can formulate searches like 
 
GENRE = Rock & HipHop 
YEAR = >2001 
RATING = >3 
 
or 
 
ARTIST includes (Spears,madonna,Anastacia) 
 
This could be saved as a dynamic playlist or it could be a one time search in your database as well.
 
» Reply to this comment...

Posted by ramy, on 06-06-2006, , Guest
8. ...
Hi , 
 
i am new to this. 
i have a questions. i usually connect my laptop to my TV(Svideo) and play the movie in my laptop and watch the movie on the big screen Tv. with the mediacenter software and remote can i control the media player. what else do i need ? 
 
thanks
 
» Reply to this comment...

Posted by m0deth, on 10-01-2007, , Guest
9. ...
Have you guys considered maybe a plugin to use the open source project MediaMonkey's tag and rating system? I find it's pretty easy to setup your initial database of songs, no matter the file extension. It has a 5 star rating system(maybe more than 5...), and also sorts by genre and others. It can also autogenerate playlists based on things you like to listen to alot. Over time they want it to learn more about interests for audio/mp3 cd playlist generation for burn and other nifty ideas. Seems like at least the ideas if not their open source code may help tighten up MP's handling of tunes abit.....for me, a nice manual search box for tunes...and movies for that matter would be a godsend. Even if it's off by default, and has a tickbox to enable in cfg. I know they are ugly, but in this case, usefulness with limited input types should take precedent over other features. Favorites does rock tho! As does MP in general....I'm a newb with it, but learning fast. Cheers guys!
 
» Reply to this comment...

Posted by tangmonster, on 13-08-2007, , Registered
10. ...
I love the way the plugin the globalsearch do things . I ONLY use that plugin to work my music playlists.
 
» Reply to this comment...

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Last Updated ( Monday, 19 December 2005 )
 






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