Announce: Spicefly SugarCube Version 2.03 – (Automatic MusicIP DJ) for 7.x

[cparker]

** Version 4 is available on http://www.spicefly.com/ **

Spicefly SugarCube is a plugin written to achieve my desire for Squeezebox and MusicIP to just work it out between themselves and play music, nonstop with no hassle, no annoying pre-creating playlists, no multiple scanning of files and all that button fidderling!

The aim was not just to make it work with 7.x but to take the time to undertake a major restructure of how it works thus enabling additional features to be added and to break out of some previous coding constraints.

Some of the new features
+ Re-write of most sub-routines to improve the code structure and reduce memory usage.
+ Completely Client friendly, ie. all data structures are per player (device) so SugarCube can run completely independently on multiple devices, this includes the tracking of previous played tracks, type of mix/style etc.
+ Will remember played tracks between sessions, ie. if you power off and resume later.
+ Custom foreign character encoding routines, after playing around with numerous encoding methods, MIP uses one form of encoding, Squeezebox another! I couldnt get anything to work correctly, so I ended up writing my own. This seems to work ok on the test tracks I tried and hopefully will be pretty solid.
+ Restructured the player side menu items as they were becoming overly large, additional features didnt "fit" well and were confusing.
+ Added Artist based mixing, the final mix option available on MusicIP, so we now cover the full set (I think), Artist Mixing, Filter Mixing, Genre Mixing, Recipe Mixing as well as Song and Album Type Mixing.
+ Moved from server based settings to player based settings for the web configuration page and repackaged into the new interface.
+ Added Weighting, which is a feature that I've wanted for ages but the original code couldnt support it. This new feature looks at the current playing track and compares it against the recommended next track and analyses it to try and determine whether it is the "same" track or a remix version of it. (MusicIP has a habit of returning remix versions of the seed track, so this is my first attempt to combat it.) see website for additional information on this function.
+ Added experimental IR code Hold Button PAUSE to disable/enable Coming Up Next per player
+ Added Shuffle Option ignore/override
+ Fixed filter issue, in some circumstances a defined filter would not be utilised, no error was ever produced by MIP
+ MIP would sometimes return nothing when Mix by ALBUM Selected, will now fall back to SONG as Seed if this happens and than Random track as the final fallback option.
+ Lots of other tweaks and changes under the bonnet.

Version 2.0 Beta 1 - 2nd December 2009
+ Tweaked Coming Up Next sub-routine to "hibernate" if no players are active or are paused/stopped etc thus minimising CPU time when not running.
- Removed "Prefer Track Return Order" as no longer utilised and has been replaced by new Weighting Routines
= Added fix for when the music library is on a local drive
= Added default fallback position for MusicIP Port if not defined in the preferences, should only impact new installations
+ Added Technical View which is mainly for use on the SB3, it denotes whether the current playing track has cover artwork embedded or folder based and Replaygain Track/Album set. (Activate Coming Up Next first in the dropdown and then tick the Technical option, this is helpful just to keep an eye on tracks that are playing and whether this metadata is missing from the library.)

Version 2.0 Beta 2 - 10th December 2009
+ Added Jive menus back into the plugin
+ Added "Mix Type" menu for Jive based players, Squeezeplay, Duet, Touch etc, to be able to select None, Filter, Genre, Artists from the player/controller
+ Added "Mix by Song or Album" menu for Jive based players can now switch between Song or Album as the seed.
+ Added "Weighting" menu for Jive based players, so can modify the New Track Weighting value on the fly.
+ Added Mix Style and Variety menus for Jive based players so Style and Variety can be modified on the fly.

Version 2.0 Beta 3 - 21st December 2009
+ Added additional obscure 2x Char encodings
+ Initial 7.5 tweaks - player page loads intermittently but may need to be refreshed a couple of times. (This is now fixed)
= Few tweaks to the menus for better display on the Duet

Version 2.0 Beta 4 - 26th December 2009
= Tweaked http method to work with Squeezebox 7.5
+ Added trap for streaming content if found stay quiet and dont try and mix
Version 2.0 not Quite Final - 1st January 2010
= Added timer fix for Coming Up Next routine
+ Added .asx, rtmp, pandora, slacker, lastfm streaming content traps if found stay quiet and dont try and mix

Version 2.01 - 2nd January 2010
+ Added live365, mediafly and Sound Effects streaming content traps as above
+ Added tweak to Coming Up Next routine to not report on the next track if the current playing track is a streaming feed

Version 2.02 - 10th January 2010
+ Added Auto Toggle of the Squeezebox Play "Only Song / Play Directory" when SugarCube is Enabled/Disabled
= Tidied up Debug output to improve debug-ability

Version 2.03 - 12th January 2010
= Fix of ; in track names

Further Information and Installation Instructions available on the website here http://spicefly.com/index.php?option...d=75&Itemid=32

Tested on 7.4.1 and 7.5 on Windows XP and Windows 7.. and on Linux (SBC 7.4.1 & 7.5) (cheers hoiho)

[SlimChances]

I find this is the best plugin I have used and upgraded to 2.03 but now find it will not install properly. I followed the instructions on the Spicefly web site. I do not use SC 7.4 though I am still using SC 7.3.3. Will the new version be available in the extension downloader?
Thanks

I get this message in settings "404 Not Found: settings/plugins/SugarCube/settings/basic.html "

[Philip Meyer]

Great! I'll give it a go.

Some questions though:

Does it still provide support for playing as a Dynamic Playlist?
Is it possible to totally disable Now and Next (as Dynamic Playlist will add the next song in advance to the playlist, I can see it there).
Is there a way to set a filter to be used all the time, or is it necessary to configure this for every hour of the day?

[raven22]

I love this plugin, but unfortunately MIP can not be installed on my Sheevaplug.

So I was thinking, is it possible for this plugin to decode the MIP analysis of the track which has been written to the tag? If that is the case, I can run MIP on my windows desktop and write the analysis the the tags and let Sugarcube on my Sheeva do the mixing.

I realize that this is probably too easy thought of and too good to be truth.

[hoiho]

Just to report that it runs perfectly on Linux (SBC 7.4.1 & 7.5)- I've been running the closed beta for a few months, and kept meaning to comment on "Friends of SpiceFly" forum, but kept forgetting.

Anyway, thanks for all the hard work!

[cparker]

Does it still provide support for playing as a Dynamic Playlist?

Probably... but I dont guarantee it, nobody has reported it doesnt work but then I dont know how many people use this functionality. I think that Erland isnt maintaining Dynamic playlist anymore?? If so, this functionality may drop out depending on demand.

Is it possible to totally disable Now and Next (as Dynamic Playlist will add the next song in advance to the playlist, I can see it there).

Yes it can be disabled per player

Is there a way to set a filter to be used all the time, or is it necessary to configure this for every hour of the day?

Yes, the filters have been restructure for 3x "timezones" day, evening and night

[cparker]

I love this plugin, but unfortunately MIP can not be installed on my Sheevaplug.

So I was thinking, is it possible for this plugin to decode the MIP analysis of the track which has been written to the tag? If that is the case, I can run MIP on my windows desktop and write the analysis the the tags and let Sugarcube on my Sheeva do the mixing.

I realize that this is probably too easy thought of and too good to be truth.

err no, MusicIP is owned by Amplified Music Services, well now Amplifind Music Services (so you can see they have marketing people working away even if nothing else )
MusicIP Isn't open source so it would intrude on their intellectual property.

[cparker]

I find this is the best plugin I have used and upgraded to 2.03 but now find it will not install properly. I followed the instructions on the Spicefly web site. I do not use SC 7.4 though I am still using SC 7.3.3. Will the new version be available in the extension downloader?
Thanks

I get this message in settings "404 Not Found: settings/plugins/SugarCube/settings/basic.html "

Sorry there are big step changes under the bonnet of Squeezebox between 7.3 and 7.4 onwards, changes made to SC to work on 7.4 didnt then work on 7.3 and vice versa and I dont have time to maintain multiple versions.

SugarCube 1.9 Gamma was the last version for 7.3

SB Version 7.4.1 seems pretty stable and my main system runs this version without any issues.

[Blu3IcE]

It's working fine here too on Ubuntu Linux.

Just wanted to inform you that in file /usr/share/squeezeboxserver/Plugins/SugarCube/Plugin.pm in the lines 1705,1734,1763 you assume that the default database name is slimserver.
I'm using a custom sql database and had to change it. Maybe you should use a server parameter instead.

[Philip Meyer]

>> Does it still provide support for playing as a Dynamic Playlist?
>Probably... but I dont guarantee it, nobody has reported it doesnt work
>but then I dont know how many people use this functionality.
>
I can't seem to get SugarCube 2.03 to work at all.

I restarted the server, went into player settings and configured it.
Then I turned it on for my Boom.
Played a song; no sign of random songs following the seed song.

I looked in the log, and there's loads of stuff. Stopped server, cleaned log, and restarted, so I could find the first error:

[20:50:11.2754] Slim::Control::Request::execute (1942) Error: While trying to run function coderef [Slim::Control::Queries::statusQuery]: [Can't locate object method "isRemote" via package "Plugins:ynamicPlayList::ProtocolHandler" at P:/Music/SlimServer/trunk/server/Slim/Player/Song.pm line 698.

(I don't think I was getting any error before loading the latest SugarCube, but I'll check this by reverting back to previous version)


[20:50:34.1072] Slim::Control::Request::notify (2132) Error: Failed notify: Can't call method "get" on an undefined value at P:/Music/SlimServer/trunk/server/Plugins/SugarCube/Plugin.pm line 670.
[20:50:34.1502] Slim::Control::Request::notify (2132) Error: Failed notify: Can't call method "get" on an undefined value at P:/Music/SlimServer/trunk/server/Plugins/SugarCube/Plugin.pm line 670.
[20:50:34.1790] Slim::Control::Request::execute (1942) Error: While trying to run function coderef [Slim::Control::Queries::statusQuery]: [Can't locate object method "isRemote" via package "Plugins:ynamicPlayList::ProtocolHandler" at P:/Music/SlimServer/trunk/server/Slim/Player/Song.pm line 698.
]
[20:50:34.1796] Slim::Web::JSONRPC::requestMethod (358) Request failed with error: Bad dispatch!
[20:50:34.2167] Slim::Utils::Misc::msg (1165) Warning: [20:50:34.2160] Use of uninitialized value $contextType in hash element at D:\Squeezebox Server\trunk\Cache\InstalledPlugins/Plugins/DynamicPlayList/Plugin.pm line 2039.
[20:50:34.3359] Slim::Control::Request::execute (1942) Error: While trying to run function coderef [Slim::Control::Queries::statusQuery]: [Can't locate object method "isRemote" via package "Plugins:ynamicPlayList::ProtocolHandler" at P:/Music/SlimServer/trunk/server/Slim/Player/Song.pm line 698.


>> Is it possible to totally disable Now and Next (as Dynamic Playlist will
>> add the next song in advance to the playlist, I can see it there).
>Yes it can be disabled per player
>
>> Is there a way to set a filter to be used all the time, or is it
>> necessary to configure this for every hour of the day?
>
>Yes, the filters have been restructure for 3x "timezones" day, evening
>and night
>
Change in settings look good. Look forward to getting it working.