announcing jukebox - an mp3 player for pyhme

[lrhorer]

Originally Posted by windracer

Yeah, that would be nice. Here's my list, for example (please don't judge me by my playlist names ):

Too late.

[jbernardis]

I know I've been preoccupied with other projects recently, but I have a couple of jukebox enhancements in the works:

1) a virtual DJ that would allow you to specify artists and/or genre to include and/or exclude in the selection of a random playlist. You will also have control over how many tracks to add.

2) a new feature that silences sound effects if music is playing

3) support for the slide remote when navigating menus - use the 'n' key, for example, to jump to the first artist that starts with 'n'

4) as an offshoot of this, I am thinking of adding an option to be case insensitive in sorting.

5) one last thing I am thinking of - a few months ago I added logic to ignore leading 'the', 'a', and 'an' at the beginning of artist names. I am thinking of extending that logic to include album and track names

Give me some feedback on the last two items. Does anybody have and argument for or against either of them?

[lrhorer]

Originally Posted by jbernardis

1) a virtual DJ that would allow you to specify artists and/or genre to include and/or exclude in the selection of a random playlist. You will also have control over how many tracks to add.

'Sounds like a nice feature for the way some folks like to listen to music. I don't think I would be likely to make use of it myself, but I can see its value for others.

Originally Posted by jbernardis

2) a new feature that silences sound effects if music is playing

Oh, definitely!

Originally Posted by jbernardis

3) support for the slide remote when navigating menus - use the 'n' key, for example, to jump to the first artist that starts with 'n'

Well... I don't have a slide remote. It sounds like a nice feature for those who do.

Originally Posted by jbernardis

4) as an offshoot of this, I am thinking of adding an option to be case insensitive in sorting.

Hmm. That one sounds a lot less important, to me.

Originally Posted by jbernardis

5) one last thing I am thinking of - a few months ago I added logic to ignore leading 'the', 'a', and 'an' at the beginning of artist names. I am thinking of extending that logic to include album and track names

Um, what about "The"?

Originally Posted by jbernardis

Give me some feedback on the last two items. Does anybody have and argument for or against either of them?

Well, eliminating "The" seems a requirement for (5), and if so, I would say it is more important than (4). Being perfectly self-centered about it, I would say the order of importance is 2 - 5 - 1 - 3 - 4.

[jcthorne]

Originally Posted by jbernardis

I know I've been preoccupied with other projects recently, but I have a couple of jukebox enhancements in the works:

1) a virtual DJ that would allow you to specify artists and/or genre to include and/or exclude in the selection of a random playlist. You will also have control over how many tracks to add.

2) a new feature that silences sound effects if music is playing

3) support for the slide remote when navigating menus - use the 'n' key, for example, to jump to the first artist that starts with 'n'

4) as an offshoot of this, I am thinking of adding an option to be case insensitive in sorting.

5) one last thing I am thinking of - a few months ago I added logic to ignore leading 'the', 'a', and 'an' at the beginning of artist names. I am thinking of extending that logic to include album and track names

Give me some feedback on the last two items. Does anybody have and argument for or against either of them?

The virtual DJ and slide remote functions would be very useful to me. As far as leading a an and THE, I agree they should be ignored in sorts for albums and track names as well.

A quick question, Is there any way to have Jukebox appear under the Music and Photos menu item rather than Showcases? Its very counter intuitive for the spousal unit.....:-)

Thanks!

[jbernardis]

I will be posting these changes in the next few days - just a bit more testing.

Regarding the placement within the menu - I have no control over that (that I am aware of). I just present myself as an HME app and TiVo takes over from there. I guess you have a premiere though - because on my series 3, it shows up under "Music, Photos, & Showcases"

[lrhorer]

Originally Posted by jcthorne

Its very counter intuitive for the spousal unit.....:-)

Ho boy. That's never a good thing. It is, of course, your fault, too. Right?

[jbernardis]

I finally posted the changes up on git - follow the link in my signature. This is for version 1.1. Here is a quick summary of the changes:

- logic to skip articles (a, an, the) has been extended to ALL titles - songs, albums, and artists
- added an option to ignore letter case when sorting and searching
- added virtual DJ to allow selection of random playlists based on artist an/or genre
- suppress sound effects during music playback
- added support for the slider remote control - letters can be used when searching through the menu structure

[elenaran]

Hi, I just installed jukebox and am having trouble - no audio plays.

pyHME and jukebox open up fine, and I can see all my music and the tags & album art show up fine, but it's completely silent (no sound effects, music, nothing). When I play a song, it looks like it's playing, but no audio comes out.

This is on a Tivo Premiere, with HME/jukebox/pytivo running on a Win7 machine & Python 2.7.

The audio works fine when I stream the music files to the Tivo directly from pyTivo, just not in jukebox.

Any thoughts?

[jbernardis]

Not offhand. The fact that the progress bar is moving indicates that the TiVo thinks it is playing. Jukebox only reports the status that the TiVo reports. Could it be some audio setting in either the TiVo or in your sound system?

[elenaran]

I doubt it's Tivo or the sound system, as streaming the same music files from pyTivo or TivoDesktop works fine. I even tried Harmonium and it worked fine too.

[elenaran]

It might be pyhme - none of the test apps that came installed with it make any sounds either

[elenaran]

nevermind - a Tivo restart fixed it

[jbernardis]

Originally Posted by elenaran

nevermind - a Tivo restart fixed it

I'm glad that solved it. I should have thought of it myself. It's always a good first thing to try.

I was baffled. All jukebox does is provide tivo the URL of the stream source (pytivo in this case). Thereafter, the tivo interacts directly with the stream server for playing the music, and it reports the status of that playback back to jukebox. The fact that jukebox was receiving "progress" reports indicated that the tivo thought it was playing music.

I was going to suggest looking at the pytivo log files, but you solved it first

[Noircogi]

I just started using pytivo/phme and jukebox. Thanks for the great work!

Background:
I have a dedicated Linux server for my content. That's where I'm running the tools.

I am using it with a Premiere XL4. I also have the "playing with no sound" problem. If I run the Premiere in SD mode it works perfectly.

If I use the HD interface on the tivo, I generally don't get audio from jukebox. I can play the songs directly from the pytivo share and that works every time. If I play a song in pytivo, then go over to jukebox it will sometimes work. If I restart the Tivo it may also sometimes work, but just changing the UI mode seems to be as likely to resolve the problem.

I'm using HDMI audio output FYI.

Now for my question:
My audio library is set up sorted by artist and album with a "Folder.jpg" file in each album's directory. This works fine with minidlna and directly sharing the library with Windows Media Player or Media Center.

My music is all stored as .mp3 files with full meta-data.

How do I get my "Folder.jpg" album artwork to show up in jukebox? I'd hate to have to duplicate it into the ID3 tags of every song.

Thanks!

[jbernardis]

It's not possible right now. I only use the ID3 tags. I will look at the code to see if it would be difficult to do.

How should this work? Should I use the folder file only if there is no id3? Should it be based on an option?

[Noircogi]

Thanks for the quick response!

I would think using the folder image as the default for the directory with an imbedded ID3 image as an override would be perfect.

In minidlna, it's specified like this:

# this should be a list of file names to check for when searching for album art
# note: names should be delimited with a forward slash ("/")
album_art_names=Cover.jpg/cover.jpg/Folder.jpg/folder.jpg/AlbumArtSmall.jpg/albumartsmall.jpg/AlbumArt.jpg/albumart.jpg/Album.jpg/album.jpg/Thumb.jpg/thumb.jpg

[jbernardis]

It actually was very simple - here is what I have:

a new ini file option: usefolderimage - set to True or False, default is False
if this is False, behavior as today (I have to protect my current users)
if this is True, then it looks for a file named folder.jpg in the same directory as the mp3 file. If it finds such a file, it uses it, otherwise it uses the ID3 value, if present.

I could allow a list of potential file names, but I don't want to get crazy here.

BTW all of this happens at cache building time. The run-time jukebox hasn't changed at all.

If this is acceptable, I will put the modifications up on git after I do a bit of testing - no later than tomorrow.

[Noircogi]

That would work great for me. Thanks again.

[elenaran]

Well, looks like I spoke too soon - seems to be a recurring problem. It'll work fine, but then sound will cut out and nothing will fix it until I restart it.

[Noircogi]

Originally Posted by elenaran

Well, looks like I spoke too soon - seems to be a recurring problem. It'll work fine, but then sound will cut out and nothing will fix it until I restart it.

Try switching your TIVO to use the old-style UI. That seems to fix it.

[jbernardis]

I posted version 1.1a up on git just now. I added support for album artwork in external files. It works a little differently than I mentioned above.

A new option - usefolderart - turns the feature on or off. The default value is False (off). Set to True if you want to enable it.

A second option - folderartfiles - is a comma separated list of files that jukebox will look for - in the same directory as the mp3 file - containing the artwork. This list defaults to a single entry: folder.jpg. If you have multiple file names, just put them in a comma separated list. spaces within file names are not a problem (as long as the OS supports it).

[Noircogi]

I think you left a debugging exit(0) in the latest BuildCache.py.

After removing that it worked great for me. Thanks a lot.

[jbernardis]

Originally Posted by Noircogi

I think you left a debugging exit(0) in the latest BuildCache.py.

After removing that it worked great for me. Thanks a lot.

Yes - thank you - git has been updated.

[elenaran]

Originally Posted by Noircogi

Try switching your TIVO to use the old-style UI. That seems to fix it.

Thanks - that seems to work, but it's really annoying to have to do this every time it breaks

[jcthorne]

I am wondering if my trouble with no sound via HDMI is the same trouble elenaran is experiencing.

Jukebox seems to play fine via audio outputs but no sound via HDMI. Have not tried the SD menus as going back to them for everything is a non-starter. I could eliminate the HDMI connections from the mix but sure seems odd...

Ideas on where to go to troubleshoot / fix this?

[jbernardis]

I really don't have any idea what to do about the sound issue. Jukebox has nothing to do with the actual song playback. All it does is give the TiVo a URL of where to get the file. The file itself is actually served by pytivo, so I'm not even involved in that.

I don't think there's anything to do in pytivo either. All it does is provide a stream.

I believe that the problem lies in the TiVo itself. I'm still using series 3 OLED tivos, and they are working fine for me, but then again they only have the SD interface.

[jcthorne]

As part of my troubleshooting, figured I should upgrade to the latest version 1.1a. Added lines to the jukebox.ini file for new folder art options:

usefolderimage = True
folderartfiles = folder.jpg

Launching PythonHME now gives the following error:

Ignoring invalid option (%s) in ini file usefolderimage

Any idea what I did wrong?

[jbernardis]

You caught two mistakes. One - obviously the print statement is using a comma instead of a % operator - but that's minor - I'll fix that with the next build.

The other is a typo - despite the jukebox.ini.dist file stating 'usefolderimage' as the option name, the option name is really 'usefolderart'. Make that change in your ini file and you should be OK. I'll also update the dist file with the next release.

Thanks

[jcthorne]

Originally Posted by jbernardis

You caught two mistakes. One - obviously the print statement is using a comma instead of a % operator - but that's minor - I'll fix that with the next build.

The other is a typo - despite the jukebox.ini.dist file stating 'usefolderimage' as the option name, the option name is really 'usefolderart'. Make that change in your ini file and you should be OK. I'll also update the dist file with the next release.

Thanks

Thanks! See what I get for reading instructions?

[jcthorne]

I am back to trying to figure out the sound problem with jukebox. Pytivo plays music fine, jukebox does not, at least using HDMI. I have tinkered with it for months. I can get it to work once in a while with a fresh reboot of both the tivo and jukebox but any time both have been running for some time and I go to play music, no sound.

At wits end with this. Really like jukebox but if the HME app cannot play music do to some internal tivo problem, I guess its back to pytivo's text interface. Not as pretty but it does work. Really too bad tivo breaks things in the api and there is no real way to even ask that it be fixed as they really don't support the SDK any more.

Anyone have any ideas what else to try?