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Music improvements


willo123

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willo123
Quite possibly the most hyped thing related to anything audio playback at the moment is Roon (https://roonlabs.com/,         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1LvfgOQ3JY).

 

What it does is essentially:

- make all sorts of trivia prominently central in the UI

- build all sorts of connections based metadata so that it works as a mind map of sorts so that when playing a song from artist b, it would be possible for the user to find, for instance things like

   - any instances of the same song (such as when the track is included in live albums, best of, cover versions etc)

   - any tracks produced by the same producer

 

All other solutions I’ve come across are far cry from the functionality of Roon. Particularly frustrating the situation is in products like Emby, as Emby already has the basic featureset required for such a functionality (Same features that are used to handle cast for movies and TV), but the existing features are not used to anywhere near their full potential when it comes to handling music. At least the following areas could be improved without the need for major all new functionality having to be added:

 

1) UI for music in Web client is weird for music related items.

- Description is put at the very bottom, so it isn’t readily available. I fail to see the reason for this, it is similar kind of information as Description of Movies and TV, so there’s no good reason to display it at completely different locations.

- Description is retrieved from The Music dB (or MusicBrainz)? In either case, many releases have no such information available. However, it is relatively common to include such details in tag field Comment, yet there’s no way of making Emby read that, or any other tag, into field Description.

- Also things like website and tags should be shows at the top of the page, not at the very bottom.

- Track listing on the artist page takes huge amount of space if the artist has even halfway sizeable back catalog. One might argue that tracks should not be displayed at all. However, if they are, they should definitely have “More” –functionality (show say, then 10 most played tracks, complete list would have to be opened separately)

- release listing is a huge mess in case the artist has lot of releases.

   - most important improvement would be to separate proper releases (artist is album artist) from featured on releases (artist != album artist).

   - using proper release type (separate at least, albums, anthologies, singles, live recordings etc) would be next step into same direction but significantly more complicated to pull off, as there’s lack of standardized handling of such a thing between various taggers (most don’t handle that information at all)

 

2) properly manage any involved artists of music (partially in use even today), but

- person read from tags like Composer are not connected to artists in any way

- more person roles (such lyricist) would be useful

- For example Music Brainz Picard can retrieve far more credits than what is used by Emby atm.

 

3) handle band members largely in a similar fashion than cast is handled (you actually can even add band members right now as actors, however Web client refuses to show them unless you tinker with CSS). To properly handle that, you would probably need a new person type “Musician” which would have properties like:

- instrument (multiple values can exist)

- period (needed for artists, as lineups may change)

 

4)Allow addition of links to external resources, such as Wikipedia page, Last.fm page etc or external reviews. For this, ability to add arbitrary number of hyperlinks would be needed. For that purpose, the link would have top have at leas the following properties

- url

- title

- Description

 

To tailor it more specifically for specific information types like reviews some additional fields like:

- reviewed by

- date

- review (stars or something similar)

would be needed.

 

5) Pretty much no solution (including Roon) seem to actually utilize any other cover art except for RFront cover. Yet cycling through all of the album art images much like you browse liner booklet) would be blatantly obvious use case

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