MediaPlayer Plugin/STV Import: Winamp Media Player Plugin

[deria]

Originally Posted by owilsky

Would it be possible to change the volume while WinAmp's visualization is active as I am able to do with the default media player with my rc's left/ right buttons in an upcoming release of the plugin?

It should be possible. You could actually do it yourself right now if you wanted to just by adding a listener for "Volume Up" and "Right/Volume Up" which has a child action (the little wrench) of "VolumeUp()". You would also need to add a listener for "Volume Down" and "Left/Volume Down" which has a child action of "VolumeDown()". You can look at the "MediaPlayer OSD" menu for an example.

Now that the plugin seems to be working well, I'll be improving the .stvi so in one of the next releases the above will already be done for you. For now, though, you might just want to go ahead and take care of it in your own copy since its pretty easy to do.

[mkanet]

Sorry for asking a really dumb question... I REALLY hope this plugin will address the issues we are having with the stock Music support in SageTV 4.0...

I'm having serious issues with standard SageTV 4.0 showing duplicate albums, songs with no names at all;just numbers, albums with only 1 song in them... basically a BIG MESS. Will this plug-in fix all that mess and display my albums and singles correctly?

I've been looking for an STVI which will replace the terrible UI support for music playback in SageTV 4.

Switching to a complete STV UI replacement isn't an option for me since music support is the only thing messed up in SageTV 4.


Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

[geogecko]

I don't think this will fix that problem (I could be wrong). This plugin still uses the Sage interface (STV) to display and show everything, but only used Winamp to play files, and playlists.

[mikesm]

Originally Posted by geogecko

I don't think this will fix that problem (I could be wrong). This plugin still uses the Sage interface (STV) to display and show everything, but only used Winamp to play files, and playlists.

I think Jeff said that with 4.0, all the interfaces to Sage's media database should be opened up for access, which could lead to a plugin that does a better job of managing importation of media metadata and tagging.

As geogecko said, Deria's outstanding plugin doesn't do this, buti t seems an effort that would provide better integration from winamp's database with Sage could now be successful with Studio.

Thanks,
Mike

[Keith]

Originally Posted by mkanet

I'm having serious issues with standard SageTV 4.0 showing duplicate albums, songs with no names at all;just numbers, albums with only 1 song in them... basically a BIG MESS. Will this plug-in fix all that mess and display my albums and singles correctly?

It all has to do with the way the MP3s are tagged. Use a good tagger like "Tag & Rename" (http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm). Make sure you uncheck the "unicode" font option or Sage will display "squares" in the song/album titles (this is supposed to be fixed in version 4.1 according to Sage tech support).

[deria]

Originally Posted by Keith

It all has to do with the way the MP3s are tagged. Use a good tagger like "Tag & Rename" (http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm). Make sure you uncheck the "unicode" font option or Sage will display "squares" in the song/album titles (this is supposed to be fixed in version 4.1 according to Sage tech support).

Correct -- this plugin does not affect the user interface at all. The only user interface element to this plugin is support for starting/stopping visualizations. The library component of SageTV (scanning your music collection, importing it) is completely unaffected by this plugin.

That being said, there are some things you can do to make the library work better for you.

1) change your music tags

I use a (free, open source) tool called ID3-TagIT 3. One of the (hundreds) of things that it does is allow you to create tags (both ver.1 and ver.2) for your music based on your file/folder structure (if, like me, tags are relatively unimportant to you). For example, my music is organized in a folder called music_storage into a folder for each artist, and then (beneath that) a collection of tracks. With this tool, you can automatically fill in the ID3 tags with the artist and title based on your folder structure. If you group by artist, album, and then track you could fill in the tag fields based on that structure instead. If you're music is already tagged, you can just clean up the tags using this tool.

2) make all your tags match; if your want uppercase artist names, make ALL of your artist names uppercase. The importer in SageTV is case sensetive, so "Shakira" and "SHAKIRA" are not the same thing as far as its concerned.

3) eliminate special characters and unnecessary information from your tags; if you keep things simple, you're alot less likely to have trouble

4) as mentioned, disable unicode

5) to make the library read the tags after they have been changed, you need to change the name of the file. My (ugly, but functional) method for doing this is to rename "test.mp3" to "test .mp3". Since the filename extensions are hidden in the UI anyway, you don't notice the extra space after the filename.

Thats about all the advice I really have to offer on the subject of tags.

[geogecko]

Originally Posted by deria

I use a (free, open source) tool called ID3-TagIT 3.

That's the same one I use, very nice and user friendly.

You have mail, again...

[m0ng00se30]

Deria

Thanks for all the hard work on this.. I am experiencing one issue that I can't seem to get a hand on. I've read through the thread so forgive me if I missed this somewhere.

I'm having an issue with the sleep command. It seems that when I sleep SageTV the first time I get, instead of the normal sage screensaver, a 00:00:00 clock rotating around the screen. I can return to Sage using the HOME button... , but then the sleep button won't activate again. QUIT SAGE, and Cancel still work. I'm using SageMC release 10... Anyone else seen this or do I have something installed incorrectly!

--Mike

[mlbdude]

Originally Posted by m0ng00se30

Deria

Thanks for all the hard work on this.. I am experiencing one issue that I can't seem to get a hand on. I've read through the thread so forgive me if I missed this somewhere.

I'm having an issue with the sleep command. It seems that when I sleep SageTV the first time I get, instead of the normal sage screensaver, a 00:00:00 clock rotating around the screen. I can return to Sage using the HOME button... , but then the sleep button won't activate again. QUIT SAGE, and Cancel still work. I'm using SageMC release 10... Anyone else seen this or do I have something installed incorrectly!

--Mike

Sounds like somthing I did in the last release. Post this over in the SageMC forum so I don't forget to fix it.

[deria]

Originally Posted by m0ng00se30

Deria

Thanks for all the hard work on this.. I am experiencing one issue that I can't seem to get a hand on. I've read through the thread so forgive me if I missed this somewhere.

I'm having an issue with the sleep command. It seems that when I sleep SageTV the first time I get, instead of the normal sage screensaver, a 00:00:00 clock rotating around the screen. I can return to Sage using the HOME button... , but then the sleep button won't activate again. QUIT SAGE, and Cancel still work. I'm using SageMC release 10... Anyone else seen this or do I have something installed incorrectly!

--Mike

Hi,

You should refer this to mlbdude. He was making a modification to SageMC to allow visualization when the screensaver was running, if I recall correctly. It sounds like this is a problem with that. The plugin as released does not include any user interface elements other than the replacement visualization screen (which doesn't refer to any other menus or have anything to do with the screensaver).

[mkanet]

I tried both this tool and and the other free one. After running them through my music collection, it looks just a little bit better than before in SageTV. I still have a big mess.

Why does SageTV select incorrect random (mostly duplicate album pics) for for several of my folders? I have the same darn picture used in about 8 different albums!

Is there a way to at least tell SageTV to NOT use a picture to represent a folder if it's not sure what to use?

LOL's it funny to see a Rapper's picture on folders for Misc easy listening songs.

Anyway, sorry for being sort of off topic here, but I figure that this kind of behavior is by design in SageTV 4's default STV.

Originally Posted by Keith

It all has to do with the way the MP3s are tagged. Use a good tagger like "Tag & Rename" (http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm). Make sure you uncheck the "unicode" font option or Sage will display "squares" in the song/album titles (this is supposed to be fixed in version 4.1 according to Sage tech support).

[deria]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Why does SageTV select incorrect random (mostly duplicate album pics) for for several of my folders? I have the same darn picture used in about 8 different albums!

That is a good question. I have the same issue. I posted about it in one of the support forums, but didn't really make any headway. Basically I'm told SageTV expects the picture to be in the .mp3 file itself. It is obviously looking at folder.jpg sometimes, because I see some art, but in general its a total mismatch for me as well.

Originally Posted by mkanet

Is there a way to at least tell SageTV to NOT use a picture to represent a folder if it's not sure what to use?

LOL's it funny to see a Rapper's picture on folders for Misc easy listening songs.

Hehe. You must be pretty hardcore if thats what comes up in your easy listening section.

[geogecko]

I use some other free software called "Album Cover Art Downloader." It (I believe) stores the jpg in the MP3 file, but can do several other things depending on what settings you have it use.

[Keith]

Knock on wood - the cover art works for me.

My issue is when a CD is a complilation such as the "American Blues" CD someone gave me. Tha artists are listed as "various" for the CD itself and that causes all kinds of problems in Sage. Because I have several "greatest hits" type CDs, all commercial, I end up with an album called "Single" that shows up in my album view that has hundreds of songs in it.

The concept of the Sage Music Player is good, but the implementation is totally broken.

About the only good way to play stuff is to make playlists manually. I hope they're committed to improving/fixing this...

At least now we have Deria's awesome plugin for visualizations!

[mkanet]

I got it all to work. Thank you!

I am having a weird problem though. My .m4a and .mp4 files can only be found in the Imported Videos section, not in my audio section. What am I doing wrong?

[deria]

Originally Posted by mkanet

I got it all to work. Thank you!

I am having a weird problem though. My .m4a and .mp4 files can only be found in the Imported Videos section, not in my audio section. What am I doing wrong?

Well, mp4 is not a file-type that Winamp registers itself for. If you're sure that your version of Winamp can play it, you can add the following line to your sage.properties/sageclient.properties file:

media_player_plugin_class/mp4=WinampPlugin

The m4a extension is already registered, but I seem to recall reading a few pages back in this thread that SageTV was putting m4a files into the imported videos folder when it shouldn't be, so there might not be much you can do about that.

I don't have any files of either type to test with.

[mkanet]

Yes, I had to manually add support for .mp4 files. After I did that, SageTV puts them in the video's section along with the .m4a files. Music support for SageTV is sure screwy!

[deria]

Updated the documentation in the first post to reflect that the "auto execute visualization plug-in on playback" toggle in the "plug-ins" section of the Winamp preferences needs to be DISABLED. If this toggle is enabled, the visualization will start automatically when you start playing a track, but SageTV will be unaware of this and you will have no (reasonable) way to stop the visualization.

[mkanet]

Is is possible to show the visualization in the background of the Sagetv UI (like the builtin one SageTV)? You really cant do anything at all while the Winamp full screen visualization is active.

[deria]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Is is possible to show the visualization in the background of the Sagetv UI (like the builtin one SageTV)? You really cant do anything at all while the Winamp full screen visualization is active.

No, the Winamp visualization cannot be embedded directly into SageTV.

That being said, the next version of the plugin will allow you do change the volume, fast forward, rewind, pause, etc. while the visualization is running.