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Topics - ochosi

1
ok, i managed to push the code for using the "similar-artists autofill" queuemode before the weekend but since the forums were down then and i was away, here comes the kinda late call for testing.

this is how the current implementation works:
* it pulls a list of similar artists from lastfm's database (no lastfm login/account needed for that)
* it respects the "similar artists"-settings of the artistinfo plugin (limited results, limit to similarity above n%) and it always only uses locally available artists
* this means that you can check the list of similar artists that your queue will be composed of in the "similar"-tab of the artistinfo plugin (with filter set to show local library results only)
* the queue will also contain songs from the "master"-artist him/herself, meaning: if you want to play artists similar to bob dylan you'll also find bob dylan himself in the queue (this is partly due to the fact that with some artists you won't get *many* useful results and therefor a very shortlisted queue)

to test the current implementation you have to check out the "testing"-branch of my github-repo (https://github.com/shimmerproject/gmusicbrowser).
here's how to do it with git (meaning: you gotta have git installed):
1) git clone git://github.com/shimmerproject/gmusicbrowser.git (this will clone the whole git tree into your working directory)
2) git checkout testing (this will switch to the testing branch)
3) perl gmusicbrowser.pl (possibly you need to switch directories first for that into the "gmusicbrowser"-folder; also: you should close all running instances of gmusicbrowser first)
4) happy testing!

so that's it.

what results am i interested in?
the code basically works and i know that already, so what i'm interested in is whether this works in a real-life situation where you'd like to listen to a certain kind of music and then use the queue-mode for that. obviously much depends on 1) lastfm's database and 2) your similarity settings, but i'd be very eager to know what works (best) for you. (maybe i can even set better default values then.)

disclaimer: obviously i cannot promise anything, so if this breaks your local library you might have to use a backup (in ~/.config/gmusicbrowser/gmbrc.bak.$date) to restore it.
2
Questions / songtree treeview-style
June 19, 2011, 15:53:51
hey,
i have a very specific question about the (song)treeview-implementation in gmusicbrowser. when i style the normal treeview-rows to look flat (in murrine it's setting gradient_shadows = {1.0,1.0,1.0,1.0}) the normal songlist (which is a standard treeview as far as i understand) works as expected, but songtree's selected color has a gradient.
i'll attach two screenshots to illustrate the problem.
feel free to test it with my theme in https://github.com/shimmerproject/Greybird

i also tried to specifically apply the treeview-style to songtree, but didn't really succeed.
anyhow, maybe this is something that could be fixed in gmb, so that i don't even have to work around it in gtkrc ;)


ps: the treeview-headers look normal/as expected.
3
Suggestions / comprehensive lastfm plugin
March 31, 2011, 10:39:42
hi everyone,
as some of you might know i did a lastfm plugin that fetches information about artists from lastfm, it's called artistinfo and it has made its way upstream into gmusicbrowser.

i've been thinking about creating a more comprehensive lastfm plugin but before i start with that, i want to decide on what's interesting to have from lastfm for other people/users. obviously there's a difference between what you can easily render in a music-app and what a webbrowser can do for you, but basically all that's supported by lastfm's api is somewhat feasible. feel free to browser the api methods to get an idea of what can be done.

up to now i've received a request to import the tags from lastfm (which are a mess imo), but if you have any other idea this is the time and place to let me know.
i'm also considering support for "similar songs" (options for only local and "all" results) to help with creating playlists, but not sure how useful you find that idea.
be aware that some features require the user to be logged in (which doesn't mean it's impossible to do it though).

there are different ways of implementing a plugin like that on the basis of what we already have, i see three variants atm:
1) extend the artistinfo plugin
2) merge the artistinfo plugin and the lastfm scrobbler into a new big lastfm plugin (obviously with options to de/activate certain functions of the plugin)
3) create a new and separate plugin

i haven't really decided on what way to go here but suggestions and thoughts are welcome.

i'll try to keep a list of the features you people suggest here and update it from time to time.



list of suggestions
 * similar songs (ochosi)
 * separate 'tags' - field for last.fm tags, which would work similarly like labels (laite)
 * see artist images as a separate panel (preferably with customizable amount of autodownload, for example 1/5/10 pictures) (laite)
 * show song, artist, album playcount from lastfm (laite)
  * expanding the Context widget to also include top tracks and top albums by the current artist. (trasdahl)
  * popularity (either as total listeners or total playcount) available as a songlist/sontree column, perhaps displayed as rating stars, a progress bar or something like the column that Spotify uses. (trasdahl)
  * option "Find songs by similar artists" in the right-click popup menu in songlists. (trasdahl)
  * option to fill/autocorrect (selected) tags in the song properties dialog. (trasdahl)
4
Questions / Trayicon transparency in shimmer ppa
March 07, 2011, 10:29:27
Hi folks,
this is actually not a question but an announcement: due to the fact that gmusicbrowser will be shipped in Xubuntu Natty by default and my involvement there I decided to switch the supported panels from
* xfce<=4.6, lxpanel, fluxbox

to
* xfce>=4.7, gnome-panel

This means that currently in all panels from the first list (and maybe others that I haven't tested personally) the trayicon will not have a transparent background. I have discussed this issue with Quentin and in the long run there will (most likely) be a switch in the trayicon-preferences (which will at that point most likely be a separate plugin) for the user to easily decide which panels to support.
Unfortunately it's practically impossible to determine what panel is in use or whether the panel supports real alpha-transparency (which is - in my understanding - the reason for this issue).

Users of Xubuntu Maverick will experience a non-transparent background in their systray-icon, I apologize for the inconvenience. If you want to fix the problem yourself edit the file "/usr/bin/gmusicbrowser" (you'll need superuser rights for that) and comment this line by adding a leading "#":
Layout::Window::make_transparent($TrayIcon) if $CairoOK;
5
the subject of this thread already says it: i'd like to suggest something like a gmusicbrowser-icons package (or even a simple tarball could be ok as a start). this would make it easier to make more community icon themes available while keeping the gmusicbrowser package itself slim.

the second thing i wanted to mention is doing a page similar to the themes page of claws-mail to get a quick overview of the themes (meaning: standardized screenshots/previews).

i'd like to have some feedback on both ideas, if you think this is a good idea we could start to implement it in the wiki (or even in the static html-version if quentin approves).
6
Suggestions / order the layouts
December 30, 2010, 10:37:30
i recently thought about how to order or categorize the layouts, so that the drop-down menu doesn't simply get longer and longer the more layouts gmb has by default.
the only category i could think of that makes sense to me and that would be understandable by anyone - meaning also people that don't know what a "browser" or a "simplesearch" or anything like that is - is "used screen estate", meaning size.

maybe we could start by adding those categories (small, medium, large) as headers in the layouts-dropdown like in the simplesearch-suggestions and sort them accordingly?
7
Suggestions / mosaic mode overlays?
December 12, 2010, 16:38:49
hi,
i just wanted to suggest an additional mode for displaying album/artist-information in the mosaic-mode, basically a semi-transparent (or just dark background) overlay showing the artist name, album title and maybe year.
you can see what i'm suggesting as an example on the website of this austrian newspaper: http://express.derstandard.at/
8
Customization / gmusicbrowser plugins > wiki
October 03, 2010, 14:36:02
hey everyone,
i just quickly wanted to post that i added a "plugins" page in the gmusicbrowser wiki. i thought this could be used to gather information about all the plugins for gmusicbrowser, even those just whirring around somewhere out there in the interwebs.
so i started by documenting my own plugin (artistinfo), i'd like to encourage you all to add new pages to make gmb's doc more comprehensive.
thanks in advance,
simon

ps: if you need help with editing the wiki, feel free to ask me (or squentin? :) ) on #gmusicbrowser on freenode.
9
Suggestions / picture-finder plugin
September 01, 2010, 08:55:27
hey, i just wanted to mention a few things i noticed about the picture finder plugin.
i think it would be cool to be able to distinguish between artist and album pictures regarding their save-to location.

in my current folder structure ($artist/$year - $album/$track - $title) it would make sense to have album-pics in the "$year - $album/" folders and the artist-pics in the $artist-folder.

the other thing is that google's image search only displays one item on the second page (this is not a huge issue, but i think it occurs from time to time that they change their syntax a little).
10
Suggestions / album properties
August 23, 2010, 12:02:21
i think i have mentioned this on irc before, but i thought i'd post it here to keep it in mind.
something like "album properties" would be nice, i know it partly exists already (when editing the properties of multiple songs), but what would be nice would be an album-contextmenu for songtree-headers. (meaning: ability to set albumart etc.)
11
hey everyone,
i've started to use docky a bit and even though i love gmb's trayicon implementation a simple helper script for docky would be cool.
there's already a script for banshee, rhythmbox and mpd so maybe the code there can be recycled (haven't had a very thorough look at that though).
so this is just an idea for now. i would do it myself if i had time (and knew python), but currently all my programming-leisure-time goes into the artistinfo-plugin.
12
Customization / artist-info plugin
July 26, 2010, 22:56:08
hey everyone,
i've been working on a plugin lately, it's supposed to display information on the currently playing artist.
the info is being grabbed from last.fm for now, it seemed to have to most consistent way of displaying e.g. artist-bio. (in comparison wikipedia is a mess...)
feel free to suggest alternative sources, i don't claim to have looked very thoroughly into all the choices out there.

right now the plugin can display information on the artist and upcoming events, feel free to give it a try (with gmb_1.1.x). you can grab it from http://github.com/ochosi/gmusicbrowser.
for adding it to a layout you basically follow the same routine as with the lyrics-plugin (most of my code stems from that plugin anyways):
* either add the tab (right-click on a tab -> add context page -> ArtistInfo)
* or add it directly to the layout (e.g. "VBAbout      = (tabtitle="Info") ArtistBox _PluginArtistinfo")

of course you also have to activate the plugin in gmb's settings dialog (and if you just grab the raw file from github you also have to save the plugin to gmb's plugin folder, usually /usr/share/gmusicbrowser/plugins).


if you have questions and/or suggestions to the way it looks now feel free to comment!
(also see the screenshot attached if you're too lazy to try it ;) )
13
Suggestions / svg logo/s
May 03, 2010, 14:12:48
hey,
just wanted to say that at some point svg-logos for gmusicbrowser would be great.
docks and window-switchers use pretty high-resolution images nowadays and vector would be good anyways for editing...
do you have any svg version of the current icon? (i don't assume you want a new logo)
14
Suggestions / fpane artist "show info"
April 28, 2010, 11:23:21
right now it's possible to show additional information e.g. on artists in an fpane by switching on the "show info" option.
this produces the following output:
Artist (Year - Year)
$n songs, $totaltime

to be honest the total playtime is not the most useful information i can imagine there. but if people like it, it's ok i guess.
i would add the album-count to the second line like this:
$n albums, $n songs, $totaltime

the smaller the number, the easier to grasp how much i have of an artist. also: in my current layout i don't display the number of albums anywhere so it would be extra useful information.
(i assumed the "info" column is hardcoded, or is there a way to customize this in a layout?)
15
Customization / disc grouping
April 28, 2010, 11:15:16
i ran into the problem of grouping discs in my songtree layout (previously used simple title for that), so i quickly edited the existing songtree groupings to get this (see screenshot):

{Group discleft}
title=disc on the left side
left=width
title:   text(markup='<b><big>'.pesc($title).'</big></b>',pad=2,w=left)
width:   OptionNumber(default=15,min=10,max=100,step=1)

enjoy!
16
Suggestions / queue widget
April 26, 2010, 14:32:53
just a quick suggestion: wouldn't it be nice to have the number of songs displayed instead of a simple boolean-ish icon when using Queue in a layout?
maybe it could be something like Queue(with_text=1)?
17
Questions / simplesearch widget bug?
April 12, 2010, 10:39:06
hey there,
i just realized that the simplesearch-widget has a small white border around it when using the murrine engine.
it's a bit weird, but with other engines (aurora, pixmap) there's no such problem.

(screenshot attached to explain what i mean, comparison between gmb's simplesearch and thunar's location-dialog)

so is that a bug in murrine?
(using version 0.90.3+git20100323-0ubuntu1-karmic1)
18
Suggestions / liquid layouts
March 27, 2010, 16:42:42
i thought about creating new layouts for gmb again today and i have to say i would love to see a standard layout where i can easily switch between different sub-layouts (something like: list view, mosaic view, songtree-view).
i know that it's generally possible to have all that in different tabs, but a more "integrated" experience would be nice. something like three toggle-icons for the different views. of course i'm aware of the fact that this is nothing new in musicplayerland (e.g. itunes: coverflow, list-view etc.), but for me that's rather a pro than a con.

another thing: something like a scale-bar (or a plus-minus button for zooming) for the mosaic-size would be nice. right now too many useful settings are hidden in right-click menus. i personally don't have much problem with that because i got used to it, but with new users and less-techy-people it might be different.

i have worked on gmb-layouts before and generally i'm happy with what the one i'm using can do, but i guess this is a bit over my head.
just thought i'd add my 2 cents to making a nice standard-gmb theme.
19
Suggestions / standard album-cover
February 22, 2010, 18:55:20
hey there,
i realized that many other players out there display something like an empty cd-case when no album-cover is available.
basically implementing this would be my suggestion for gmusicbrowser.
(on the other hand this feature would come with some drawbacks/problems like the missing album-name in mosaic mode which would make it hard/impossible to identify an album without clicking/hovering. maybe there's a way to have both - empty cd-case with albumtitle on it?)

so what do you guys think - useless bloat or nice eyecandy?
20
Customization / layout
January 28, 2010, 00:26:05
here's a layout i created (well, more or less i modified queue-library-context) and have been using for quite a while.
(screenshot attached)

[ochosi]
Type=G
Default      = Window fullscreen=1 FPane0 page=artist FPane1 page=album,albumpsize=64, artistpsize=64,albuminfo=1 QueueList cols=13_25_3_21_22
MBmenu      = MainMenuItem PSortItem PFilterItem QueueItem
HBmenu      = _MBmenu -SimpleSearch
HBButtons   = Prev Play Next -5Pos -5Queue -5Filter -5Sort
HBTime      = LabelTime Length _Scale
HBTitle      = Filler0 _Title
HBArtist   = LockArtist _Artist
HBAlbum      = LockAlbum _Album
VBText      = HBButtons HBTitle HBArtist HBAlbum HBTime
VBplayer   = VBText
VBLeft      = VBplayer 5_QueueList(group=1) Cover HBQueueButtons
HBQueueButtons   = Total
HBSongtree   = _SongTree
HBfp1      = _FPane1(nb=2,hide=1)
VPfp1      = HBfp1 HBSongtree
HPRight      = _FPane0(nb=1,hide=1) VPfp1
HPBottom   = VBLeft _HPRight
VBmain      = HBmenu 5_HPBottom
HSize0      = Filler0 LockArtist LockAlbum
VolumeScroll   = VBplayer
Window = borderwidth=0