Music Improvements

[CarlosLima 150]

Wow i can reaffirm the turning CD is ugly... CD irrelevant now, and will only be more so in 5-10 years.

 

I think lyrics would need to be optional. The visualizations I think is quite dated too (makes me think of music players from 20 years ago). The other suggestions with cover art, similar to Zune's is far more modern, and just looks better.

Some of the additional file format display is interesting, though I think for many that just have flac etc probably irrelevant i.e. all the same for 99% of their content. And does it really matter anyway (do you need to see it every time when playing your music?).

 

I think super beautiful the whole layout, but, of course, personal taste issue. I like to see if flac because to see mp3, I try to find flac version to replace. The lyrics are optional in Kodi .

[cshaun 31]

Yes I understand the usefulness with a mixed flac/mp3 library, but if you're looking to replace MP3's you're better off just searching your collection with a file manager, or many other tools that are better suited.

Probably better off being consistent if that sort of info is shown for video, show for music too I guess. But I'm generally of the opinion it's not necessary (better tools for it, even Emby server reports). So almost becomes more of an aesthetics thing.

 

Points can easily be made both for and against it.

[Tremas 156]

Yeah, I really don't like the spinning CD.

 

For a "screensaver" I have always liked MediaPortal's presentation which combines artist backdrops (~20 second slide show with fade) with a minimal tabbed overlay at the bottom. This allows the display of track info, artist info, lyrics, and the current playlist with just the arrow keys on a 6 button remote. That also allows for the merging of the playlist and now playing screen you mention. It varies by skin in MediaPortal, but two examples are below:

 

 

 

I personally favor going directly to the now playing screen after music starts. From there you could select playlist and be taken to those controls. 

 

However, I think the biggest issue with the music interface in emby is playlist creation and management. There needs to be some way to either import or have a better UI to create playlists. Playlist folders or smart list/filters would also be a huge plus.

[Luke 38500]

What better UI for playlist creation would you suggest? thanks.

[Schimi 26]

i like to see a "screensaver" like in Win Media Center with random pictures from the photo library....

[Tremas 156]

In regards to UI for playlist creation, I would simply expand the good work that has already been done with multi-select, sorting, and filtering. Right now, the menus make for a difficult workflow because these functions are not available everywhere. I personally find it tedious to make a playlist based on readily available database criteria, such as "I want to play my favorites for years 1980-1989 in genre new wave."  

 

Playlist Issues (web view/android ap):

• Cannot multi-select after filtering by song
• • Example above: I want to play my Favorites for years 1980-1989 in genre new wave
  • • You cannot multi-select, play all, or add all to list after filter/sort
    • If you go into "music" and filter "songs" by year and genre, you then have to manually add each track to a new list
• If you click on a Genre/Album/Artist and then "more songs" you cannot filter, sort or multi-select
• Cannot sort, filter, or search within a playlist
• • You can re-arrange each track by hand, but you cannot set the list to a date order, or artist order
  • You cannot check for duplicate entires (either by sorting by title, artist, or by a specific "find duplicate" function)
  • You cannot restrict a search to within a playlist (helpful to check and see if a song was already included before you add a duplicate)
  • • Note: Search is not as important if you have filter or sort
• Cannot multi-select within a playlist
• • If you want to send part of a playlist to another playlist you must select each individual track
• Cannot import playlists from other sources
• • Most of the above issues are lessened if a user can import a playlist created with another specialized tool (iTunes, MediaMonkey, etc.) 
• Nice to have: save filters or searches as a "smart list" so as new content is added, the list (or filter) is automatically updated
• • Example 1 (as above): All Favorites for years 1980-1989 in genre new wave
  • Example 2: All music excluding genre "comedy"
  • Example 3: All favorites in genre "children"
• Nice to have: Playlist folders
• • All playlists (music, video, etc) appear in a flat hierarchy sorted by name
  • • Hard to distinguish between video and audio playlists
  • It would be nice to organize in some additional way (by media type, user generated folders, etc.)

Thanks for the consideration.

[PrincessClevage 173]

One of the best feature that amazed friends when entertaining was built into old WMC addin mceshoutcast

The feature was

While playing any music you had an option to " Display images from the Internet of currently playing Artist"

The program would display in full screen a rolling set of random High def images of the currently playing artist or band. It would also be great it this function was available in the Tunein plugin

It also had options for show lyrics for current playing song and and option to "check if artist is playing within xyz km " you could select the distance to check if artist has a scheduled gig

Very cool...

Edited October 6, 2016 by PrincessClevage

[Guest asrequested]

OK! This is a biggy! The music player needs it's own filters. I'm just now realizing that there is ZERO control of music playback if ET is set to bitstreaming. All music just comes straight out, with no change. If you have surround sound, you choose your speaker layout so those speakers get used. Not even that works when playing music. So when we set to bitstreaming, not only is the volume control disabled, also LAV can't apply the sound to all speakers AND the volume is much louder than everything else you play. So, "delightfully", if you watch a movie in the evening, then feel like listening to some quiet music to wind down to, prepare to wake everyone in the house and possibly the neighbors while being startled into fumbling for the volume control. Relaxation over! I love emby, but this is really bad!  

Edited October 25, 2016 by Doofus

[swhitmore 781]

I haven't tried music in awhile, but have some of these suggestions been implemented?

[skuuup 24]

I haven't seen any improvements.

 

I got tired of waiting moved on to Subsonic/Libresonic as my music server of choice. Using Beets to organize my music, and DSub for phone streaming, and MusicBee/Foobar200 for desktop. I am really loving the results.!

 

..And use Emby for everything else that isn't music..

[Guest asrequested]

I haven't seen any improvements.

 

I got tired of waiting moved on to Subsonic/Libresonic as my music server of choice. Using Beets to organize my music, and DSub for phone streaming, and MusicBee/Foobar200 for desktop. I am really loving the results.!

 

..And use Emby for everything else that isn't music..

 

I use MuiscBee, too. It's got really great options for playback. 

 

[swhitmore 781]

Any screenshots of the player. Does it look nice on the TV?

[skuuup 24]

I use MuiscBee, too. It's got really great options for playback.

 

Yup. Try spinning up an instance of Subsonic at some point later if you get some time. The web interface isn't much, but you can stream to MusicBee and other clients quite easily

 

Sent from my XT1575 using Tapatalk

[Guest asrequested]

Any screenshots of the player. Does it look nice on the TV?

The UI is very configurable. I haven't really looked at all the options. I usually have something else on the screen while I'm listening to music.

[aspdend 174]

I like the look of musicbee - I will be investigating this for my htpc !

[BloodyIron 24]

Chiming in on the emby music topic.

 

I care mostly about functionality, and there's a tonne of great ideas here for graphical ideas, so I can only really say so much useful there.

 

Firstly, I think the Music functions and graphics should take into consideration:

1. Phones (even lower resolution like 1280x720 or so)
2. Tablets
3. Computers
4. Chromecasts

Lower resolution stuff can drastically impact how much is displayed, and I want to use emby on my phone for music (some day), in similar fashion to how I've used dsub with subsonic.

 

Secondly, there's a lot of music-centric features/functions/controls missing in emby.

 

1. When playing music, I can't manage the queue. I'm not talking about playlists, I'm talking about what is going to be played in-order. I rarely use playlists (even though I know a lot of people still do), so I like to queue up entire albums, but being able to queue lots of different things, as well as move/add/remove stuff from the queue is SORELY NEEDED here. Queue management needs to be completely overhauled (not talking about playlists).
2. Controls need to be modernised, as well as taking mobile into account. Things like swipe functions for changing tracks, maybe tap to pause, and buttons laid out better for music-centric would be apprecaited. Right now the controls are awkwardly laid out, and swipe isn't even a thing.
3. Volume keys on devices should adjust volume playback. Tablet, phone, etc. This should also include chromecast. This functionality is not in emby last I checked.
4. cross-fading would be awesome! As well as some small controls to refine what settings are preferred (how long of a fade, how long of a buffer, etc). If you want an example of how things could be done, look at winamp.

 

These are mostly my thoughts. There's a lot of awesome stuff emby already does (like art work) relevant to music. I think it could be so much more awesome, and I'd love to see that!

 

Hope this helps

[Tremas 156]

Chiming in on the emby music topic.

 

I care mostly about functionality, and there's a tonne of great ideas here for graphical ideas, so I can only really say so much useful there.

 

Firstly, I think the Music functions and graphics should take into consideration:

1. Phones (even lower resolution like 1280x720 or so)
2. Tablets
3. Computers
4. Chromecasts

Lower resolution stuff can drastically impact how much is displayed, and I want to use emby on my phone for music (some day), in similar fashion to how I've used dsub with subsonic.

 

Secondly, there's a lot of music-centric features/functions/controls missing in emby.

 

1. When playing music, I can't manage the queue. I'm not talking about playlists, I'm talking about what is going to be played in-order. I rarely use playlists (even though I know a lot of people still do), so I like to queue up entire albums, but being able to queue lots of different things, as well as move/add/remove stuff from the queue is SORELY NEEDED here. Queue management needs to be completely overhauled (not talking about playlists).
2. Controls need to be modernised, as well as taking mobile into account. Things like swipe functions for changing tracks, maybe tap to pause, and buttons laid out better for music-centric would be apprecaited. Right now the controls are awkwardly laid out, and swipe isn't even a thing.
3. Volume keys on devices should adjust volume playback. Tablet, phone, etc. This should also include chromecast. This functionality is not in emby last I checked.
4. cross-fading would be awesome! As well as some small controls to refine what settings are preferred (how long of a fade, how long of a buffer, etc). If you want an example of how things could be done, look at winamp.

 

These are mostly my thoughts. There's a lot of awesome stuff emby already does (like art work) relevant to music. I think it could be so much more awesome, and I'd love to see that!

 

Hope this helps

 

I completely agree. I believe it is key for modern media software to elegantly handle both queue and playlist management. Software like Media Monkey and MediaPortal treat everything as a queue and just push tracks, playlists, etc. to an instanced list (queue). You can even save that queue as a playlist. As I've said before, having the interface optimized for filtering/sorting/mulit-selecting is incredibly important for identifying what you want to play. Then sending a selection or group to "Play Next," "Add to Queue," or "Add to Playlist," would be idea. Playing any music (even a playlist) should just go to a queue. Once in the queue management screen you should be able to filter, sort, and multi-select as well as "Remove (Item/Selection) From Queue," "Play (Item/Selection) Next," "Send (Item/Selection) to Top (of queue)". These same controls should be in a playlist management screen.

 

It seems like most of the UI is so close because most of the features are there, but are not uniform across all sections. Multi-select from Playlist would be awesome, but it only seems to be available with poster view which you cannot access when showing playlist content. Same with the Genres screen. If I choose "Christmas" music from "Genres" and then more, I see a list of tracks but no poster view so I can't multi-select and add them to a playlist or queue. Neither can I sort them by year or artist to quickly find the ones I want (after narrowing down thousands of tracks to just the Christmas ones). The power of having a database organizing media by artist, year, album, and genre, is somewhat lost if you can't access things in certain screens.

[BloodyIron 24]

Any thoughts from the devs? D:

[ginjaninja 569]

having just matched 150 artists to music brainz, the identify interface and match algorithms would benefit from a functional uplift.

 

identification.

>interface>prepopulate fields with known data point allowing the user to select / unselect as part of the search (rather than eg having to retype all the known data points like 'name')

>inter face> search results > show images , show synopsis, show albums (belonging to the match), in the tile summary, perhaps with scrolling text..make it much easier to identify the required result

 

match

>use all known data points to auto match eg if multiple artists exist with name....use albums of artist to confirm match...

>periodically update (missing) metadata, unmatched artists

 

library

>export all manually corrected database entries/matches for future reimport if ever rebuilding (not neccessary once the automatching improves, although potentially still neccessary for those who dont correct their tags)

>filter by unmatched, to help quickly tidy the library/fully populate the metadata

[BloodyIron 24]

Is there any way we could have the identifying process segue into music video options?

 

Similar to trailers, kinda.

 

 

 

having just matched 150 artists to music brainz, the identify interface and match algorithms would benefit from a functional uplift.

 

identification.

>interface>prepopulate fields with known data point allowing the user to select / unselect as part of the search (rather than eg having to retype all the known data points like 'name')

>inter face> search results > show images , show synopsis, show albums (belonging to the match), in the tile summary, perhaps with scrolling text..make it much easier to identify the required result

 

match

>use all known data points to auto match eg if multiple artists exist with name....use albums of artist to confirm match...

>periodically update (missing) metadata, unmatched artists

 

library

>export all manually corrected database entries/matches for future reimport if ever rebuilding (not neccessary once the automatching improves, although potentially still neccessary for those who dont correct their tags)

>filter by unmatched, to help quickly tidy the library/fully populate the metadata

[ginjaninja 569]

Is there any way we could have the identifying process segue into music video options?

 

Similar to trailers, kinda.

I think a local fetching agent which used an agreed file naming scheme (to extract the two key pieces of metadata) would be a good place to start eg %artist1 [¡artists2]%_%title%.ext ..i dont know if there are repositories of further metadata on internet for music videos to add a need for further identification..any track level music brainz association might be less informative than a more simple artist (in artists) / title (eq title) match...to associate a music video to a track (or set of tracks)... (is there a logical join of music video to something other than track.?)

 

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk

[denz 450]

Just few screenshots from wmc it is nice and easy interface. When you play something you are taken to now playing screen similar to what theatre has only you have to find it first.

 

When you go to another album it has an option to add to now playing. Theater has got queue t but you don't know did you press it as it goes back to default colour it should stay green to indicate that it is being queued,

 

In WMC it gives you a list of all the songs that are being queued to be played as can be seen on the second last last screenshot.

 

The last screenshot is wmc has a now playing so if you ever get lost in menus you click the green button and scroll to now playing.  

 

WMC was designed for simplicity because it was meant to be used solely by the remote and that is what I hope theatre has that design in mind so far it does.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited January 6, 2017 by denz

[BloodyIron 24]

@@denz

 

That's pretty neat stuff. I haven't looked at Windows' Media Center stuff for years! The first versions were pretty good, and it looks like they've continued that.

 

 

@@ginjaninja

 

I'm thinking perhaps I didn't quite effectively convey my idea. My understanding of how the "trailers" feature works is before you watch a movie some trailers for other movies are downloaded and played just before your movie.

 

My thoughts about music videos is making it so we could do similar and/or dissimilar interesting things with music videos. So, perhaps we could have our own MTV where music videos are downloaded, played, and some info about what's playing is shown. Or maybe we could have it so some of our albums, when played on a tv/monitor/display, sometimes include music videos in-place of songs (as an option, not as a default action). I'm thinking very abstractly here as this could go in all sorts of directions.

 

A bit more fleshing out:

 

"MTV". Perhaps it's our own local channel, we pick a genre, and/or year and other parameters, it fetches music videos based on the parameters from the internet, and starts playing them as your own MTV (Music Television, it was a 90's and earlier era tv channel). Maybe also interleave this with interviews of bands and/or band members from the same parameters. So, let's say you want to listen to 90's industrial and alternative rock. You could see some NIN, some Nirvana, some other bands from the era, and occasionally maybe cut to some interviews of them talking about a show coming up (from that time).

 

"Music video interleaving". Perhaps have an option that you toggle on "interleave music videos". You play an album from a band, and Emby has discovered there's a music video for one of the songs on the album, and you're playing this on a TV say at a party. The music video is for song #3. Song #2 finishes, Song #3 comes on, except instead of just playing static images and the song audio, this time you get a music video for Song #3, then when it goes to Song #4 it goes back to static images and just audio.

 

I dunno, just some weird thoughts I've had. Emby seems like a very open to ideas community.  There's probably even other ideas I'm not thinking about yet where this could be done!

Edited January 6, 2017 by BloodyIron

[Koleckai Silvestri 1150]

WMC was designed for simplicity because it was meant to be used solely by the remote and that is what I hope theatre has that design in mind so far it does.

This is almost like the same boring and unusable interface we have now. Remote playback is nice but this interface provides no usable way to create and manage playlists. The developers need to be looking at dedicated music players to bring an interface that is usable with music. We shouldn't be using the same interface for music that we use for videos or live television.

Edited January 6, 2017 by Koleckai Silvestri

[Guest asrequested]

This is almost like the same boring and unusable interface we have now. Remote playback is nice but this interface provides no usable way to create and manage playlists. The developers need to be looking at dedicated music players to bring an interface that is usable with music. We shouldn't be using the same interface for music that we use for videos or live television.

Agreed!