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Topics - MountainX

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A screenshot is attached. Hopefully you all can see it inline. If not, here is the URL: https://ibb.co/1rR2SyQ
2
Hello. I have a large music library. I'm currently using the Playlist layout in GMB (it has the two panes on the right, and I generally keep the rightmost pane on the folder view).

Scrolling with the mouse in the various panels (artists, albums or folders) is not the most efficient way to jump to the location I would like when I'm navigating through thousands of albums, folders, etc. I would like to be able to use keyboard navigation (i.e., start typing the name and jump to the matching entry that way). What is the right way to do that?

I notice that sometimes I can in fact start typing an artist name and I will get a small text box showing what I am typing and it allows me to navigate this way. Generally that only happens after GMB first jumps to an artist I did not intend to select, however.

Most of the time, as soon as I type the first letter, GMB jumps to the first artist with that starting letter and begins playing. That's usually not what I want. I assume there is a way to navigate better with the keyboard, but I haven't found it.

Furthermore, I can't navigate with the keyboard at all in the folder pane. Is that possible?

I'm only scratching the surface of the power of GMB. I look forward to exploring all its features over time.

Thank you.
3
Questions / How to start customizing a layout?
September 24, 2021, 04:00:16
I just started using GMB recently. I love the customization options for layouts, but it will take a while to learn how to change or create layouts myself.

I guess the first step is to copy an existing layout to my user folder, right?

cp /usr/share/gmusicbrowser/layouts/main.layout ~/.config/gmusicbrowser/layouts
My current Layout = with browser & queue

I like this layout, but I would like to try a few changes:

1. add a horizontal volume scroll to the right of the seek bar (I think you call it the TimeSlider)

2. change the fonts and colors everywhere. I want to use a slightly larger font and make it less gray (more white).

I don't want to make too many changes to start with. I just want to start learning how layouts work.

Can anyone help me with tips for making some of those changes?

Thanks.

4
I want to say thanks to Quentin for continuing to work on this great music player. I spent the last few days trying every different Linux music player that looked promising. After a lot of testing, the only new apps I kept installed are gmusicbrowser and quod libet. I've been using deadbeef, and it is a great player. I'm keeping it installed too. But I anticipate that gmusicbrowser is going to become my main music app now. I'm very impressed with it so far.

I particularly like the ease with which I can set or change ratings on tracks and the straight-forward way GMB saves ratings metadata compared to many other players.

Other features I like are regular expression searches, support for multiple genres for a song (because I have a lot of music that doesn't fit neatly into the usual genres), the customizable window layouts (which I plan to explore in great detail as I learn more), and the ongoing development by Quentin.

I am also very interested in options to read/write custom fields from/to tags.

Another thing I like about GMB is its support for large music libraries. I currently have 61629 flac files and another 13283 MP3 files and a few .wav, .ogg, and other formats. I estimate my total music library could be over 80,000 songs because some of my flac files are not split into tracks. I guess GMB might tell me the exact size once I load up my entire library.

The only suggestion I have at this moment is in regard to ratings metadata. My own ratings are a very important part of how I manage my music. It would be really awesome if GMB could offer users some advanced and configurable options for saving ratings metadata.

For example, I have been thinking that it might be helpful to save my song ratings into multiple metadata fields simultaneously. For example, on flac files, GMB uses FMPS_RATING, but deadbeef uses "RATING". I believe I can solve a lot of compatibility issues if I save my ratings to multiple fields.

One concern I currently have is that when GMB saves a rating to FMPS_RATING, it deletes the data that was already saved in the RATING field of the file's metadata. I'd probably like an option to not do this.

Then there is the issue of rating scales. As you know, different apps use anything from 0 to 5, 0 to 100, 0 to 255 or even 0.0 to 1.0 (like GMB). (However, for FLAC / Vorbis, the two dominant informal standards seem to be "0.0 to 1.0" and "0 to 100".)

I might like to be able to:

1. define more than one rating field to be used simultaneously (I am mainly focused on flac files. I don't know if this will be needed for others such as MP3 where POPM seems to be universal.)

2. define my rating scale, and potentially use a different scale for the different rating fields I define. For example, I could use 0.0 to 1.0 in FMPS_RATING (as GMB does by default) while also saving 0 to 100 in RATING.

This is one post I looked in for reference on ratings:

Songs ratings and playcount as POPM fields · Issue #1143 · DeaDBeeF-Player/deadbeef

I think it would be great if GMB becomes the one music player that can satisfy anyone's needs for ratings metadata configs :)

This seems to fit the overall philosophy of GMB to be highly configurable. In a similar way to how a user can choose Layout > Make it look like > [pick one], maybe you could do something similar for ratings. For example, "Ratings > Save metadata like > [choose one].

However,for me it does not need to be that sophisticated. I'd be happy to write some values into the GMB config file to meet my needs.

What are your thoughts about this rating metadata idea?

Thanks again for your work on GMB! I'm happy to be a user now.