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[RELEASE] iTunes and iPhoto integration plugins for XBMC
Yep I have the latest .2.5. I also switched to default skin but same issue. When I am in album view I can see that it says xx album (by artist name). When I am in a playlist though I only see song name. Nothing in front of it to specify artist. When I press info yes I can see the artist song album etc. But in the list itself I can't see artist.

When you say rescan my library he do you mean? This time when I ran the plugin it updated automatically. Not sure how to rescan manually. I know I can rescan videos files etc not sure ho to do it with a plugin.



AlfredJKwack Wrote:That's odd.
  • 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.

As far as cover art is concerned there's little I can do. The iTunes art is simply not accessible as far as I can tell

-Alfred.
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nmirza Wrote:When I am in album view I can see that it says xx album (by artist name).

Which is really an unnecessary hack that I put in which can cause redundancy in certain view types that skins provide. The skin receives the artist information separately as well and should fully control whether it displays it or not. I've essentially abused a the 'album' field in this situation which is not the intent of XBMC's design.

nmirza Wrote:When I am in a playlist though I only see song name. Nothing in front of it to specify artist. When I press info yes I can see the artist song album etc. But in the list itself I can't see artist.
As I said earlier. It is, and should, be up to the skin to decide which information is displayed or not. There should be no difference between how a list of music tracks is displayed from within this plugin and from within a regular xbmc music source pointing to your local files.

The problem in your case is that Rapier (which is the skin you use as I recall) simply doesn't do a good job of informing you regarding music. Other skins do display artist information and ratings in a track listing as the screenshot below demonstrates - and please don't ask how that album art got there, I don't know myself.

Image

If you really want to have it your way, then I suggest you patch the code yourself. The relevant line in this case is in the default.py file in the plugin.audio.itunes folder

Code:
item = gui.ListItem( track['name'] )

Alternatively you could ask the Rapier guys to change their skin to display more information.

nmirza Wrote:rescan my library he do you mean? This time when I ran the plugin it updated automatically.
See the configuration page on the plugin's wiki. Sounds to me like you have "auto-update" set to yes and "Hide Import Library item in main menu" set to yes. Manually updating is not required in this case.

- Alfred
AlfredJKwack
"Less is only more when more is no good." - Frank Lloyd Wright.
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Hi Alfred,
I was actually using confluence as you'd suggested to test out the plugin. Its very odd because in my playlists i actually see only song names in confluence and not song name with artist below it. i will give it another try and also try figuring out how to patch it myself. Im guessing if i patch it, every time i update i'd have to mkae file edits again?

As for album art, again its odd because in my playlist i actually see album art. Like i said before, my album art is embedded into the id3 tag, or however those 3rd party programs work that name your files and get album art. Whats odd for me is that in the playlist i do infact see the coverart since its in the tags, i don't see album art in the artist/album view.
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Looks exceptionally useful. However, everytime I try to install from zip file "AlfredJKwack-plugin.audio.itunes-384b6e0.zip" it simply says installation failed. Is that not how I am supposed to install this?
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haenchensd Wrote:Looks exceptionally useful. However, everytime I try to install from zip file "AlfredJKwack-plugin.audio.itunes-384b6e0.zip" it simply says installation failed. Is that not how I am supposed to install this?

Sorry about that. Please rename the zip to plugin.audio.itunes.zip and then try to install it again. It should work.

I've updated the wiki to reflect this information and added a new package download to the project which is properly named this time.
AlfredJKwack
"Less is only more when more is no good." - Frank Lloyd Wright.
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nmirza Wrote:I was actually using confluence as you'd suggested to test out the plugin. Its very odd because in my playlists i actually see only song names in confluence and not song name with artist below it.
Confluence, to my knowledge does not have a view where the title and artist are right below each other. The only view where artist information is being displayed is, as I mentioned earlier, the "media info" view. In that view the artist information is displayed on the left half of the screen.

Again, I suggest that you test out views on regular (local) XBMC music sources and compare them to the same views in the plugin before posting. Then let me know what the differences are, if any. I'd be surprised you find any except:

- album rating (since this concept does not exist in iTunes)
- album art (since this is a known problem)
- lyrics (I don't know of a skin that displays these but they're not in the iTunes data source)


nmirza Wrote:Whats odd for me is that in the playlist i do infact see the coverart since its in the tags, i don't see album art in the artist/album view.
Yep, that's odd indeed.
AlfredJKwack
"Less is only more when more is no good." - Frank Lloyd Wright.
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AlfredJKwack Wrote:Again, I suggest that you test out views on regular (local) XBMC music sources and compare them to the same views in the plugin before posting. Then let me know what the differences are, if any. I'd be surprised you find any except:

- album rating (since this concept does not exist in iTunes)
- album art (since this is a known problem)
- lyrics (I don't know of a skin that displays these but they're not in the iTunes data source)

It would seem then im the only one having this issue. I just went into the music sources i had added in xbmc (non itunes plugin), and when i go into a directory it does indeed show me the artist and song (albeit it shows me tracknumber if available, then artist name, then song name, and i can't choose if i want to sort by song or by artist. I also checked and its not just showing me the file name, its actually showing it as track number.artist - Song). in the itunes plugin though like i said its different and i can only see song name, with no artist even though the artist is there when i go to info.
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Hi,
I have downloaded now the alfredjquack.addon, but - sorry, I'm a newbie.... - I need some support. I've tried about 2 hrs. to get it running without success. Can someone please explain me in brief words what are the steps I have to do for getting the iTunes-Plugin running on my System?

System: HTPC Zotac ION with Win7/32 and iTunes10, XBMC10 (both newest versions). ITunes library XML on local machine.
  • Where to copy the plugin? "C:\program files\xbmc\addons" or "%APPDATA%\XBMC\addons"?
  • What to edit exactly in which PY or XML?
  • After starting XBMC, have I to load the plugin or loads it automatically?
  • Where must the plugin appear? SYSTEM -> ADD-ONs? SYSTEM anywhere else? MUSIC -> ADD-ONs? MUSIC -> ADD Source?

Thanks a lot to all!! :-)

Monty
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nmirza Wrote:It would seem then im the only one having this issue. I just went into the music sources i had added in xbmc (non itunes plugin), and when i go into a directory it does indeed show me the artist and song (albeit it shows me tracknumber if available, then artist name, then song name, and i can't choose if i want to sort by song or by artist. I also checked and its not just showing me the file name, its actually showing it as track number.artist - Song). in the itunes plugin though like i said its different and i can only see song name, with no artist even though the artist is there when i go to info.

It seems that not all skins treat information provided equally as well. Below a comparison between the various skins that I have available to me. Looks like there are a couple of things that could be done better by some of the skins.
  • Confluence: should apply the same formatting to a plugin as it does to the main library. Other skins tested do this just fine. It's lacking information
  • reFocus: could benefit from having track numbers displayed in the list itself and album, year, genre, filetype dispayed elsewhere if fitting with the skin's overall style.
  • Transparency: Could benefit from having ratings displayed
  • Rapier: Could benefit from having album, genre and year information displayed.

Since the Confluence skin seems to be the only one to treat a plugin differently I've put in a request for them to amend their code. For the other skins there's no apparent issue in plugin treatment and I will therefore not pursue changes there.

Image
AlfredJKwack
"Less is only more when more is no good." - Frank Lloyd Wright.
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Hi Monty,

Sorry for the delay in responding. Life got the better of me for a couple of days.

MontyPython Wrote:System: HTPC Zotac ION with Win7/32 and iTunes10, XBMC10 (both newest versions). ITunes library XML on local machine.

I haven't tested the plugin with Win7. If it works then I'd be grateful if you let me know.

MontyPython Wrote:Can someone please explain me in brief words what are the steps I have to do for getting the iTunes-Plugin running on my System?

Now for your question. The short answer is:
If you have any further trouble, do let me know.
AlfredJKwack
"Less is only more when more is no good." - Frank Lloyd Wright.
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AlfredJKwack Wrote:Hi Monty,

Sorry for the delay in responding. Life got the better of me for a couple of days.



I haven't tested the plugin with Win7. If it works then I'd be grateful if you let me know.



Now for your question. The short answer is:
If you have any further trouble, do let me know.
I've got multiple itunes library's..2 flatmates..

Is it possible to import them all using this plugin? I've synced all the libraries to my server which is ubuntu 10.10..

I've also noticed in the addon.xml it has osx platform.. i had to change it to all for it to show.
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Also, because im using rsync i think i need to do path substitution..

I get

ERROR: Open - failed to open source </C:/Users/Steve/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/somemp3.mp3>

My music is actually on /home/media/Music/Steve

2 Options..

Run sed and replace the path in the xml OR have a path substitution option in the plugin..


Ill attempt to rewrite AddMediaNew... AlfredJKwack you are not working on this are you?
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AlfredJKwack Wrote:Hi Monty,

Sorry for the delay in responding. Life got the better of me for a couple of days.



I haven't tested the plugin with Win7. If it works then I'd be grateful if you let me know.



Now for your question. The short answer is:
If you have any further trouble, do let me know.

Hi AlfredJKwack,

I am trying to install your plugin under Ubuntu 10.04 but with no luck: always getting "installation failed".
Installation procedure is really easy, thus I don't think I am doing some error: could you please provide some help?
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AlfredJKwack Wrote:Sorry about that. Please rename the zip to plugin.audio.itunes.zip and then try to install it again. It should work.

I've updated the wiki to reflect this information and added a new package download to the project which is properly named this time.

This is the same problem I have, even if I rename it to plugin.audio.itunes.zip
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I have the same issue on W7 x64, plugin installer says "Installation failed". The debug log shows an error related to not being able to read the addon description, I highlighted the line here..

Could this be related to the name? It says "AlfredJKwack-plugin.audio.itunes-384b6e0" in the log instead of "plugin.audio.itunes", but I don't get where XBMC is getting the longer name from, it's nowhere in the plugin files, i checked them all and the zip is named correctly.

Any ideas?
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[RELEASE] iTunes and iPhoto integration plugins for XBMC3