nmirza Wrote:4- even thioughin my xbmc settings I've told it to play the next song, when I'm in a playlist and play a song, the next song does not play automatically.

AlfredJKwack Wrote:Hi nmirza

Glad to see you're exited. As I'm not a developer I'm probably going to have to disappoint you. My skills extend to the ability to understand the structure of the code and the ability to interpret what some of the things are meant to do. I'm not in a position however to write code. All I've done is take a look at what was done for the iPhoto plugin and apply that to the iTunes plugin. It took a few hours of comparing files back and forth but it required no real coding experience.

Nevertheless here goes my feedback.



At the moment, yes. The iPhoto plugin has a neat "autoupdate" feature which I haven't implemented in the iTunes version - I didn't want to overextend myself first time around.

If anyone's a little adventurous, they're always welcome to submit a patch by taking example on what jingai's been doing with the iPhoto plugin.



There should be no link between the Visualization and the plugin. Does the visualization work in other circumstances (ie with other audio plugins)? Also, if you're able to reproduce it I'd appreciate a debug log (pastebin).



Feel free to replace the default png icons by your own. The path to the files (on a mac) is:
~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/addons/plugin.audio.itunes/resources/icons.



Does this behaviour occur when you're in the artist, album or other folders as well? Does the behavriour occur with other plugins as well? If not please let me know which ones you tested against and I'll try to take a look at it.



The source file from which the plugin works (ie. iTunes Music Library.xml) does not contain a path to the artwork.

I believe that iTunes stores the artwork in a proprietary format as well which makes it unlikely someone will write code to access it. The other possibilities to get the artwork are: scrape it from the internet or scraping it from the mp3 files themselves. In both these cases I believe the community would be better served if these were separate plugins that one could call and rely upon.



This should be feasible. I'll add it to the todo list.



Ideally for all of the above what you'd want is for XBMC to display a listing with a couple of colums (say: track, album, artist, rating) and have the columns be sortable. I don't have a good example on hand where this has been implemented. If you do, please let me know which plugin has this and I'll take a look.

I'm not a python developer remember. Perhaps someone more experienced can submit a patch to achieve these features.

nmirza Wrote:Also, maybe you want to start a new thread for the itunes plugin release rather than adding it to the end here. it'll get mor exposure if its a new thread that mentions its a working new plugin.

nmirza Wrote:3-icons: if i replace them, and subsequently update the plugin, will it replace my icons? also, any plans to release this on add-on section of xbmc? that way autoupdates are taken care of.

nmirza Wrote:4-album art. album art works in song list in playlist, but doesn't work in album view. would be nice to have a random album show up in the artist section for the artist, but i can understand why there are no icons there. for albums though i think should def have cover art, unlesss its a limitation of the xml file, then nothing that can be done about it. all my artwork though is embedded into the tags of the song. how do i scrape it from the songs?

nmirza Wrote:5-colums/sorting. i don't think such a function for columns exists in xbmc. i have never seen any window, skin, plugin, etc that has columns. i hope im wrong, but i think this possibly wont work. i think the simpler thing to do would be to atleast just see if in the list view, whatever view you're in, album or song(playlist), if theres a way for the tag to be shows such that in album view its "Album - Artist" (right now its just album), and in the playlist view of songs, its "song - artist" (right now its just song). so without cover art in album view, and without artist name in playlists that might have hundreds of songs by different artists, you can see how it can be difficult identifying the song'album you want to play. hopefully this is easier to implement.

AlfredJKwack Wrote:Hi,



Yes they will be replaced when the update is installed.

I think I'd like to see some further feedback from others before this plugin is released through the official XBMC addons repo.




I've been giving this some thought myself but have yet to find a suitable solution.

I know that XBMC can get the artwork from the id3 tags of the files but I think that the files are not 'scraped' for this information when it's run through a plugin, at least not by default. I'm surprised you're even getting artwork to show up at all.

Using iTunes' own cover art is also a dead end. iTunes stores album art separately from the music files. The file path structure is obfuscated and the files containing the art are mpeg (itc) containers from which the art must be extracted. (see: http://www.cocoalab.com/?q=itunes_artwork and http://uneasysilence.com/archive/2007/07/11441/comment-page-1/#comment-393150).

If someone has an idea of how to go about it, I'm all ears.

If your files are properly tagged I'd wonder why you'd be using this plugin in the first place. Why not add the ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music (or wherever you files are actually stored) as a source to XBMC?
The only thing you'd be missing out on are your own ratings and playlists. There are solutions out there to get a 3mu playlist out of itunes. Once you have that you just drop them into the ~//Library/Application Support/XBMC/userdata/playlists/music folder.



I'm working on both the sorting issue and the display issue and will try to take into account your proposals. I do have a question: What would you expect to be displayed in an album list when an album has multiple artists (eg. a "Best of Rock Classics" album)

Btw. Could you tell me what skin you're using as well as the OS and iTunes version. This may be useful for a "tested on" statement.

AlfredJKwack Wrote:Hi,

The plugin's been updated:
- Added ability to sort songs by rating, genre, artist, album, track number.

Notes:
- Sort availability may be constrained the skin

nmirza Wrote:Alfred, I just tried the plugin and have an issue with the sorting. I go into the top menu and by default everything is ssorted by genre,

dallasnights Wrote:how do you make this plugin look at the itunes on my pc accross the network so I can see my itunes library and playlists on XBMC

• the 'iTunes Music Library.xml' file needs to be accessible from within XBMC
  
• the files themselves need to be accessible from the XBMC box
  
• the paths to the files as stated in your 'iTunes Music Library.xml' file need to be rewritten so that they make sense for your XBMC box. (eg. from C:\myMusic\GreatArtist\Album\song.mp3 to SMB:\\myiTunesBox\MyShare\GreatArtist\Album\song.mp3 )
  

AlfredJKwack Wrote:The sorting has been fixed somewhat. The default sort should now be nothing/unsorted when viewing tracks. If you set it differently set it back to default/nothing/unsorted, go up a level, then back down it should give you what you expect.

jingai Wrote:... possibly related to either of these two tickets:

AlfredJKwack Wrote:If I follow the logic correctly in ticket 10519, this would mean that adding items like so:

Code:

item.setInfo( type="music", infoLabels=labels )
        plugin.addDirectoryItem(handle = int(sys.argv[1]),
                                url=track['filename'],
                                listitem = item,
                                isFolder = False)

would prevent XBMC from leveraging any id3 tag information contained within the file being added.

Whereas adding an item without calling setInfo would allow XBMC to retrieve the information from the file.

Quote:I'll have to test this out a bit to see if XBMC scrapes the files, and somehow stores the information somewhere.

Quote:Scraping the files every time would be a non-starter as far as I'm concerned due to performance...

Quote:That being said, the only useful thing that's missing from my plugin at this point seems to be the artwork.

Quote:Now with regards to ticket 10505. This seems to be a lot like ticked 10252. Is this a duplicate?

Quote:Nice work on the iPhoto plugin btw. I'm still trying to understand how I could leverage the path substitution that you integrated so nicely.

jingai Wrote:It doesn't, if you set any information yourself.

jingai Wrote:The path substitution stuff should be much the same though, no?

• set the iTunes Media Folder as he chooses (network share, removable drive you name it).
  
• choose not to have music copied into the iTunes Media Folder when adding music but have iTunes reference the files at their original location instead.
  
• have internet based streams as content
  

nmirza Wrote:Sort by date: it makes more sense in itunes plugin to sort by file date (i.e. wehn you downloaded) rather than release of the song/album.

• Date added
  
• Date modified
  
• Date released
  

nmirza Wrote:additional info: along with cover art, i also think its important to have info on the artist/album. as it is right now, in any playlist, i can see the song name but not the artist which makes it difficult to identify songs.

• Check that you're running the latest release (v0.2.5). If that's not the case you may have to rescan your database after upgrading.
  
• To verify this is not a skin related issue, please switch over to the default skin (Confluence)
  
• pull up a set of tracks from a playlist and set the view to "media info". You should see the artist, album, track number, year and track name in the left hand side.
  

nmirza Wrote:auto play next song: i have installed the svn build from jan 2nd, which is above the build number you mentioned from the thread which should have had auto play next fixed. as of now, my playlist will still not auto play the next song. i made a post regarding this in the thread (http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=85692&page=2) and spiff said it works for him. maybe its a plugin setting?