Simon 's dashboard

Hi klint,

This could be a generalization of something I am working on right at the moment - which gets info and stores a link to the lyrics of classical songs ('lieder') on a site which has a huge library of them. (It has to do a lot of (very fiddly) mucking about with 'Opus numbers' and 'catalog numbers' etc. etc. so it is taking quite a while.)

The main difference would be that the link is to local copy of web page not the remote one. I think you'd need to store the whole page, as is difficult to get decent content from a page unless it has been specifically designed to allow that, that could use a bit of storage (unlikely to be a problem) but shouldn't be technically too hard. Not sure how to copy web page locally though, but I'd guess there are lots of guides to that around.

If no-one else zooms ahead with this, I'd be happy to look at it but it won't be for at least a couple weeks as I finish my lieder lyrics ... and as I am going on holiday next month (=December), and Xmas etc is on the way, it may not be this year!

What happened to 2009? Where did it go??

Simon

If the folders you want to see in playlists are under a single folder; you could make that your Songbird watch folder and set up playlists to show tracks

'Matching' - 'File Location' - 'Starts with'

and specify the folder path you want to monitor prefixed by 'file:///' e.g.:

file:///G:/Media/My%20Music/Lotte%20Lenya/

It works for me (under Windows XP). – Simon , on September 22, 2009 09:18

First release:

http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addons...

Vash: Talk about scope-creep....

1) the audio bookmarks add-on will work with all files types Songbird supports.
(The bookmarks will be kept and operate in Songbird only)

2) & 3) nice ideas for a possible future enhancement. (But would be in addition to the approach at present, which is to automatically bookmark tracks of the selected genre at the last point they are played).

4) '=show playlist(s) with this track in' (?) Should be possible, I think, and may be useful for any track - but aren't you likely to be playing such a track from its play list anyway? (There's no (play) list of bookmarked tracks to get straight to tracks with bookmarks! - =another enhancement?).

5) not sure what this means. What would you want to see - a separate node in the Service Pane with playlist/tracks with a certain genre under it? Can't that be done (manually) already? Is this part of the (larger) podcast support functionality under consideration/development as part of the core?

6) I've decided not to do speed variation as part of this add-on. It could be a separate add-on which can be used on any track. I'll have a look at it - unless someone beats me to it - but I think it would need a GStreamer plug-in so it is a whole new area for me, so will take me a while..

Happy to get feedback and good ideas; let's see how the 1st release goes. (Still on target for a few days time - family responsibilities permitting!)

I had a look at this today and have nearly finished it! (After eventually getting my head around the asynchronous playback controls!)

There's just a little more mucking around with preferences to do, and some more testing; expect a posting in a few days!

"It's August Jim, but not as we know it."

Done - 1st version posted :

http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addons...

I've still to finish off a couple of things, so I'll put up a 2nd version very soon ( I hope).

And, I'm eagerly waiting for invitations to all the parties....

I suggest version 1.3+ for testing, as that is the Songbird future! For info: I am developing on Windows XP sp3; I haven't tested on other o/s and, although I've tried to be platform independent, I am sure I will have missed some things. Let me know and I'll try to fix them.

Steven: I've just found an issue, which I am coding for the next version , when preferences are missing/not set for Music Management/Watch Folders etc. - you could try setting directories for these and/or disabling searcher looking in such locations. Otherwise try to disable all options in searcher and try again...

ethanjim: Thanks, that's surprising and not happening here, I'll look into it. Are you running on windows?

Murphy: Thanks, I'm aware of the results looking wonky, that's one of the many things I'll be fixing in the layout. (I haven't seriously considered arrow keys/scrolling etc. on the layout yet).

I'm more concerned about intermittent freezing +failure of some queries. Can you identify any common characteristic(s) on the problem queries? I suspect there is something which I need to code for which does not arise in my library. Any error messages? Does changing any of the searcher options help or give a different result?

Wyatt: I'l be adding music search history later.I think music search history will be separate from web history and have different options associated with it The URL bar icons should already be different for music library (=Songbird notes, or my colored jigsaw piece) and web (=blank page or favicon).

For info: the drop-down arrow under the 'send to queue' button changes the send to queue button between 'queue first', 'queue next', 'queue last','replace queue with' etc.
Is this useful, or over the top?

I have posted the first (alpha) release for the 'searcher' (working title) add-on:

http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addons...

I do need feedback, especially on query performance. You can post there or email me at songbird.searcher@gmail.com

There is still a lot to do on the working of the URL bar and the the layout and working of the results panel but the core querying functionality is pretty much done (although I would expect some performance tweaking).

There would be an enormous amount to do to bring my (interim) playback mechanism up to scratch, so I will try to get to a feed to the NowPlaying add-on working while I work on my new playback mechanism "in due course'.

Hi all,

Still working on this - and nearly there... Just finishing up a (temporary?) playback queue and doing some testing to make sure that the extension has a fighting chance of running on other peoples PCs!

I'll release a beta version a.s.a.p. and soon!

Well, in the great tradition of IT development, this week's release is delayed - but not by more than about another week.

However, I've made good progress on the preferences interface and getting art and stats (plus, I'm now doing asychnronous web calls when there is no local art found). I've tidied up the layouts a lot and I don't think there are any major issues outstanding.

I have a question about location of artist art. I can pick up artist work from the current preferences and I will pick up muzPhoto art (when muzPhoto is installed) but where else do people store their artist art? (Do other people keep their own artist art?)

I store mine in directories under the music library (as folder.gif, so that Windows directory displays it) but what do other people do?

There won't be any search history in the 1st release (I spent a lot of time on this this
week and couldn't get it working), similarly there will be no inter-relationship between 'my' search bar and the location bar. Those things will have to come later.

Second update- I've now got artists,albums, tracks and playlist all with drill-down (on demand) feeding a queue which plays.

Performance needs some improvement. (It is getting stats which slows things down, i.e. to get no. of albums for an artist you need to access all their tracks, so showing the atist names means accessing all their tracks. Similarly,to get length of an album you need to get all the album tracks- even though only the title and a few bits of info are displayed). No sorting yet (As I don't use ratings or playcounts - life's too short...)

I'm having some difficulty getting the textbox to start the query although a separate button does it fine.

I will push ahead then release what I've got next week sometime, as a beta release for testing/feedback.

Just so you know I have started working on this now and have already got a query box which gves artists, albums and tracks with a given set of words. You can drill down from artist to album to track.

Over the weekend I'll work on sending selected items to a queue/now playing list and/or getting art.

Even getting local art slows things down considerably (beyond what would be acceptable) so I'll look for some clever approaches for that. I'll definitely include use of muzPhoto art where it exists.

I'm fighting the temptation to mention when a 1st release of the add-on might be ready!

I'm thinking items 1, 2 4, 5 make a good 1st release. ?? (i.e :drag and drop later)

Of that, I'll look into the Now Playing playlist tomorrow; every else I'm confident about. I already have a separate queuing component with additional options
add-to -queue/add-to-head-of-queue/replace-queue/remove from queue/clear queue etc.. Are these types of things useful options or unnecessary complications? – Simon , on June 30, 2009 06:24