Creating menus for additional tags

[Mark D]

Before getting to my problem I think it is best to describe what I have done so far. In the past I have used both custom browse and custom scan but I am now using 7.9.1 and the virtual library functionality which is not supported by these plugins. I have written a variation of the LibraryDemo plugin that gets me a long way towards what I want. It removes unwanted top level menus and creates three libraries classical music, audio books and music (could not think of a better name sorry). The classical music and audio books are each in their own directories and music is defined as not being on either of those directories. The three libraries have a menu structure appropriate to them.

Music:
Album Artists
All Artists uses artists but limited to BAND, I put normalised versions of the ARTIST tag separated into the individual artists in BAND, this allows a display of x feat. y on song info but to navigate by individual artists. Normalisation helps bring the variant spellings/names together in the navigation whilst preserving the display of the variants in the album/song info. It does mess up the use of musicbrainz artist ids though. I can also put cross references into BAND so for example I have Sandy Denny in BAND in those tracks she sang with Fairport Convention. I set Filter Contributor Roles at the Album & Track Level to Show all albums and tracks.
Album
Genre

Audiobooks
Author uses artist limited to COMPOSER
Series uses artist limited to ALBUMARTIST
Read/Performed By uses artist limited to ARTIST
Book uses album
Genre

Classical Music
Composer uses artist limited to COMPOSER
Conductor uses artist limited to CONDUCTOR
Performer uses artist limited to BAND as with music library, rather than follow the recommendations for tagging classical music I put soloists, orchestras and choirs in BAND
Era/Form uses genre rather than put classical music I fill the GENRE tag with something useful
Album


So far so good. This meets most of my family's needs but I would like to add a couple of menu options and change how one works. I add WORK and WORKSORT tags to my classical music and have written a plugin that puts them in a new tracks table. I would like the Composer, Conductor and Performer menus to go to a list of works rather than albums. It would be nice if Works displayed in a similar fashion to albums on the controller and radios with the Work and the Performer. I have looked at code in custom browse and SLIM::MENU::BrowseLibrary but cannot get my head round how to create menus with my own tags.

The second thing I would like to do is add a new album sort option. It would use two of my own tags, DATE rather than YEAR and COMP. This way I could display the albums of an artist with the best of albums coming at the end and displayed in the correct date order. I seem to have quite a few artists that produce more than one album in a year. This second change is I suspect rather harder to do and in any case is really only due to my obsessive nature as it doesn't actually stop me finding things.

Any suggestions as to what to read or how to go about coding to add the works menu would be gratefully received.

[squeezebox_Fan]

Hello Mark,

you do exactly, what I was thinking of.

Could you please provide your work? I think, many people are looking for that.

Greetings

[Mark D]

Here is my version of the LibraryDemo Plugin in case it is of any use to others. It mostly does what I need. You should read the original post to see the tagging logic used as it is not standard. You will have to edit Plugin.pm and change the sql that creates the libraries to what you would need. Eg

WHERE tracks.url not like 'file:///C:/Test/Media/Classical%' and tracks.url not like 'file:///C:/Test/Media/Audiobooks%'

is not likely to be true for your case (it is not true for my live system either). If you want to keep some of the top level indexes that go across libraries then you will need to edit the filterForMyMusic at the bottom of Plugin.pm just remove the entry for any index you want to appear. Most likely would be myMusicNewMusic => 0 as I haven't added new music for each library as I originally intended. I haven't missed it but you might.

You may want to change the images used. My additional images are in HTML\EN\plugins\MidifiedLibraries\html\images. I had planned on doing more but being lazy and a poor artist use the same image for all the indexes for a given library.

You will need to edit strings.txt if your language is not English. You will also have to go through the Plugin.pm and edit the names given to each of the menu items for each library. If there is much interest in this I will go back and do the names properly so that you would just edit the strings.txt.

Browsing through the uploaded code I noticed that this is not the same as my live copy as it still uses the name genre for the classical music genre index rather than Era/Form as my live version does, you may or may not want to change that. If you label all your classical music as classical and nothing else then you may just want to delete the menu item, just remove the 'push @items', {... };' for Genres in the classical music section.