Qobuz.com streaming plugin

[slartibartfast]

I am using LMS 8.3, on Win11, all players you named and a raspi (i can also reactivate a classic)
Has Qobuz an own streaming format? if not, than the expected flac isn't transcoded.
Could it be that Qobuz streams only flac, if the first free month ends?

Setting logging for the Qobuz plugin to debug should tell you what is happening.

[mherger]

FLAC should work from day one. Can you try to remove your credentials and sign in again (in the plugin settings)?

[cne2]

FLAC should work from day one. Can you try to remove your credentials and sign in again (in the plugin settings)?

Ok, i will try today evening.
So, after not able to logoff in the plugin, i disabled and again enabled the plugin and ups, the Music is streamed with HiRes!
But now the Discs on my favorites are not shown in LMS after a rescan of onlinelibraries!
Ok, i think i delete my Qobuz account and use only spotty,

[darrell]

Would it be possible to show recent search history on the search page, like the BBC Sounds plugin?

[mherger]

Would it be possible to show recent search history on the search page, like the BBC Sounds plugin?

Certainly possible. But it's unlikely going to happen from my end any time soon. I have too many things going on right now...

But maybe SamY has enough insight by now to tackle this .

[SamY]

Certainly possible. But it's unlikely going to happen from my end any time soon. I have too many things going on right now...

But maybe SamY has enough insight by now to tackle this .

I appreciate your confidence in my abilities, mherger. As soon as I wrap up my current attempts to improve how the plugin tries to make sense of the myriad different and confusing ways that classical music releases are tagged in Qobuz, I will look into this. In the meantime, I am on a mission.

[darrell]

I appreciate your confidence in my abilities, mherger. As soon as I wrap up my current attempts to improve how the plugin tries to make sense of the myriad different and confusing ways that classical music releases are tagged in Qobuz, I will look into this. In the meantime, I am on a mission.

I've been looking at the data returned in the plugin and the native Qobuz app/web player for some new releases, and there is no consistency at all, I guess they must be relying on the labels, who would seem to all have their own tagging schemes.

Picking up on your previous suggestion, to include an option to display the work in the track title, I've found some releases where this seems to have been done at source - see example screenshot below. The upshot of this would be, I presume, the work name ending up repeated in the displayed data. One way around this might be to scan for the "work" string in the track title, so as not to add it if it's already there.

Is there a way for me to see the tags returned in plugin log? I'd like to have a look, to see if there are any patterns or consistencies within particular labels. As well as the work/title thing, I'd like to get a handle on what they're doing with the composer/performer mishmash. If I can find any patterns, I might be able to come up with some kind of routine which tries to sort out the tags in a semi-intelligent way (at least in pseudocode - Perl is a big mystery to me!)

Thanks,
Darrell

[SamY]

I've been looking at the data returned in the plugin and the native Qobuz app/web player for some new releases, and there is no consistency at all, I guess they must be relying on the labels, who would seem to all have their own tagging schemes.

Picking up on your previous suggestion, to include an option to display the work in the track title, I've found some releases where this seems to have been done at source - see example screenshot below. The upshot of this would be, I presume, the work name ending up repeated in the displayed data. One way around this might be to scan for the "work" string in the track title, so as not to add it if it's already there.

Is there a way for me to see the tags returned in plugin log? I'd like to have a look, to see if there are any patterns or consistencies within particular labels. As well as the work/title thing, I'd like to get a handle on what they're doing with the composer/performer mishmash. If I can find any patterns, I might be able to come up with some kind of routine which tries to sort out the tags in a semi-intelligent way (at least in pseudocode - Perl is a big mystery to me!)

Thanks,
Darrell

I'm seeing the same things you are, and am currently looking at trying to inject some "meta-consistency" into how the plugin presents all the varying tagging schemes regarding 'works'. There are many albums tagged as in your example, with the work already prepended to the track title. However most of those, including the one in your example, do not contain the work tag so there would be no repetition of the work name in the title. On the other hand, I have found at least one album with the work prepended to the track title AND contained in a work name tag. So yes, those would contain the work name twice in the title without some additional coding, which I am currently working on. I have also run into some albums that have non-consecutive tracks from the same work dispersed throughout the album, which is really confusing with the current track layout in the plugin. Here are the changes I am in the process of making, and I would appreciate your feedback on them:

1. Move all the 'work' playlists to the beginning of the track list for an album instead of interleaved with the tracks, labeled with the 'playlist' icon instead of the album cover image and ordered by the relative track number of the first track in the work, Note that the work playlists would still be individually playable as now, just grouped separately.
2. Classical tracks whose title contains text followed by the string ": " followed by other text would have the text up to the ": " treated as the 'work' and thus included in a playlist of that name. If a 'work' tag already exists for the track, only one of them would be used -- which one is t.b.d.
3. The work name will be prepended to all individual track names (if not already there) in the plugin's track list as well as in the play queue. I am also considering prepending the work name to the track titles imported to the library. Currently this is not done, although the full track name with the work is available in the additional track data.

I would appreciate feedback on these changes and any other suggestions you (or anyone else) might have regarding this issue. Below is an example of how the new layout would look in the plugin and player queue. The first 'work' playlist, "24 Preludes, Op. 28", containing five tracks dispersed throughout the album, has been added to the playback queue. As you can see, the work name is currently displayed in the queue titles but not in the plugin track listing. That was going to be my next change. Let me know whether you have any feeling about it one way or the other. I'm actually ambivalent about it due to the additional screen real estate it would consume. The only real reason to do it would be to clarify which tracks are part of which works but that can easily be determined by expanding each playlist. I must say that I was fairly clueless about the difficulties and wide variations in tagging methodologies that exist in the classical music world until now. While maybe 5% of my library contains classical titles, I never paid much attention to how it was tagged as long as I could find my one copy of Beethoven's 9th Symphony and hit 'play'.

As far as examining the tagging data returned from the Qobuz API, the place to start would be turning logging on for the plugin and use the minimum level that lets you see what you are looking for, i.e. "Info" or "Warning". "Debug" would probably be overkill but experiment and see. Thanks again for your help in this effort.

[d6jg]

I'm seeing the same things you are, and am currently looking at trying to inject some "meta-consistency" into how the plugin presents all the varying tagging schemes regarding 'works'. There are many albums tagged as in your example, with the work already prepended to the track title. However most of those, including the one in your example, do not contain the work tag so there would be no repetition of the work name in the title. On the other hand, I have found at least one album with the work prepended to the track title AND contained in a work name tag. So yes, those would contain the work name twice in the title without some additional coding, which I am currently working on. I have also run into some albums that have non-consecutive tracks from the same work dispersed throughout the album, which is really confusing with the current track layout in the plugin. Here are the changes I am in the process of making, and I would appreciate your feedback on them:

1. Move all the 'work' playlists to the beginning of the track list for an album instead of interleaved with the tracks, labeled with the 'playlist' icon instead of the album cover image and ordered by the relative track number of the first track in the work, Note that the work playlists would still be individually playable as now, just grouped separately.
2. Classical tracks whose title contains text followed by the string ": " followed by other text would have the text up to the ": " treated as the 'work' and thus included in a playlist of that name. If a 'work' tag already exists for the track, only one of them would be used -- which one is t.b.d.
3. The work name will be prepended to all individual track names (if not already there) in the plugin's track list as well as in the play queue. I am also considering prepending the work name to the track titles imported to the library. Currently this is not done, although the full track name with the work is available in the additional track data.

I would appreciate feedback on these changes and any other suggestions you (or anyone else) might have regarding this issue. Below is an example of how the new layout would look in the plugin and player queue. The first 'work' playlist, "24 Preludes, Op. 28", containing five tracks dispersed throughout the album, has been added to the playback queue. As you can see, the work name is currently displayed in the queue titles but not in the plugin track listing. That was going to be my next change. Let me know whether you have any feeling about it one way or the other. I'm actually ambivalent about it due to the additional screen real estate it would consume. The only real reason to do it would be to clarify which tracks are part of which works but that can easily be determined by expanding each playlist. I must say that I was fairly clueless about the difficulties and wide variations in tagging methodologies that exist in the classical music world until now. While maybe 5% of my library contains classical titles, I never paid much attention to how it was tagged as long as I could find my one copy of Beethoven's 9th Symphony and hit 'play'.

As far as examining the tagging data returned from the Qobuz API, the place to start would be turning logging on for the plugin and use the minimum level that lets you see what you are looking for, i.e. "Info" or "Warning". "Debug" would probably be overkill but experiment and see. Thanks again for your help in this effort.

SamY great work but I have a plea for us non Classico’s. Please make sure these changes don’t balls things up for us. If you have a Dev repo I’d be happy to test as a non Classico

[mherger]

I think the assumption number three (colon) is "dangerous". Making assumptions about titles is risky business. Take eg. removing prefixes like "the" from band names like "the Beatles". Now do the same for the band "The The". Or any title must have a letter in it. And then came Ed Sheeran with +, ×, ÷, =...

[SamY]

SamY great work but I have a plea for us non Classico’s. Please make sure these changes don’t balls things up for us. If you have a Dev repo I’d be happy to test as a non Classico

Lol! Thanks, Jim. I like how you get right to the point. As a fellow "non Classico", I promise not to "balls anything up". I am only doing this as an act of mercy after discovering what the Classicos have to deal with when it comes to metadata. I can't help it. I guess I'm just an empathetic non Classico. I will keep your beta testing offer in mind though.

[d6jg]

Lol! Thanks, Jim. I like how you get right to the point. As a fellow "non Classico", I promise not to "balls anything up". I am only doing this as an act of mercy after discovering what the Classicos have to deal with when it comes to metadata. I can't help it. I guess I'm just an empathetic non Classico. I will keep your beta testing offer in mind though.

What is really needed are more agreed tags, an RFC or two and a restructuring of the database but none are ever going to happen.

I am surprised for example that no one has ever mentioned ARTISTSORT in connection with Qobuz etc and the “David Bowie” vs “Bowie, David” implications of OMLI.

[darrell]

On the non-consecutive track issue:

In the release you refer to, this is an example of a classical "programme" or "recital". It's a bit like a compilation or live release in the pop/rock world, where various tracks from various albums will appear in an artistically-defined sequence (with the difference that in the pop/rock world, the track name usually makes sense on its own, which is not the case in the classical world). In this case, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a playlist for the work, which does not contain the whole work, but only those tracks chosen for the release. It would be a bit like having playlists for each album represented in a live rock performance, for example.

In the Qobuz native interface, they get around this by showing the work as a non-playable subheading before the track(s) in question, both in the track listing and the current playback queue.

In the plugin track listing, I would suggest *not* amalgamating repeated works into playlists and possibly making them not playable, so they function purely as subheadings, same as in the native Qobuz interface. This would obviate the need add the work to the track name in the track listing, as long as the work (subheading) is included for works where there is only one track, which is not the case at present, but is in your changes.

This is only my feeling on this - others may differ, I can see the existing functionality might already be used by some as a shortcut to playing only a single work from a release that is not of this "compilation" type. One option would be to make this user-configurable, but it might be difficult to explain the option without writing a help essay - and there is a danger of having too many choices for users who expect these things to *just work* in a reasonable way.

In the playback queue, as you explained before, the "subheading" idea is problematic, so prepending the work to every track name is the way to go.

On to another issue - the "composer" question.

With so many multi-composer releases, it is very important to foreground "Composer" in the listing and the queue. Sometimes it is vital - see below for a Beethoven/Brahms release with 2 works, both Symphony No. 2 in D Major! Even the most dedicated classical fan would struggle to know "oh, it's opus 73, so it must be the Brahms". As it stands, in this case it is otherwise impossible to distinguish the two works in the listing (Qobuz native clients do no better). At least in the queue, the composer name is there, though not especially prominent.

That second line in the queue listing seems to be Orchestrra (or MainArtist) + Composer. The generally accepted artist information is Orchestra/MainArtist (possibly multiple) + Conductor. This could possibly be prepended with Composer, or (my preference, because composer is an attribute of the work, not of the performance) prepend Composer to the track name, so we end up with Composer,Work,Track as the main title. This might get a bit much for mobile devices, so it could be an option. At least that one would be relatively easy to explain!

Finally, you are the one who deserves the thanks. This is shaping up to be a *very* useful enhancement to the plugin. When you're ready, do let me have a development version of the plugin, so I can test it to death

Darrell

[SamY]

I think the assumption number three (colon) is "dangerous". Making assumptions about titles is risky business. Take eg. removing prefixes like "the" from band names like "the Beatles". Now do the same for the band "The The". Or any title must have a letter in it. And then came Ed Sheeran with +, ×, ÷, =...

Did you mean #2? If so, I agree and have decided for now not to proceed with trying to extract a work name from a track title containing ": ", even with the extra check for the "Classical" genre.

Regarding #3, i e. using the title with the prepended work name when importing favorites to the library, I think that is a must-do in order to maintain consistency with all of the classical album tracks which are pre-tagged that way already by Qobuz with nothing in the 'work' tag.

[mherger]

What is really needed are more agreed tags, an RFC or two and a restructuring of the database but none are ever going to happen.

I am surprised for example that no one has ever mentioned ARTISTSORT in connection with Qobuz etc and the “David Bowie” vs “Bowie, David” implications of OMLI.

Can you elaborate? What's the Bowie issue? The more agreed tags?