Music Service Integration

[erland]

> Should definitely only include favorite albums, I’d prefer if it
> integrated with my favorite list in the online service rather than
> manually have to re-add all my online favorites in LMS.

I believe this would be ok for people with small libraries. But once you
have a few hundred or thousands of albums added to your collection, the
Favorites mechanism wouldn't really be useful any more.

The way I've implemented it for now is to import them like local tracks

Not sure if we are misunderstanding each other, what I’m suggesting is that you should look at which albums I’ve set up as favorites in the online service (Spotify, Qubuz, ...) and import the tracks from these albums into LMS.

[mherger]

> As this music service integration will be for an 8.0 release, what about
> going 1 step further and adding user support throughout LMS?

Feel free to submit a pull request - and make sure you're willing and
able to maintain the feature for the foreseeable future.

Seriously: I'm open for new features. But as long as I'm the only one
working on this we'll have to live with what my little sparetime allows.
And as I don't really see a need for user management beyond music
services (my kids will never buy music), this feature hasn't even made
it on my already long bucket list.

BTW: I believe you should already be able to use per control-point
libraries etc. as you're not using SlimBrowse anyway. You could just
send the library_id with every request, couldn't you?

--

Michael

[mherger]

> Not sure if we are misunderstanding each other, what I’m suggesting is
> that you should look at which albums I’ve set up as favorites in the
> online service (Spotify, Qubuz, ...) and import the tracks from these
> albums into LMS.

Ok, we're on the same page then. That's pretty much what I'm doing in
the Spotty plugin: get the user's albums and store its tracks in the
library. I would NOT import followed artists.

--

Michael

[cpd73]

> As this music service integration will be for an 8.0 release, what about
> going 1 step further and adding user support throughout LMS?

Feel free to submit a pull request - and make sure you're willing and
able to maintain the feature for the foreseeable future.

Whilst I'm more than willing to support any features I implement (been supporting 'Cantata' for 9 years, but stopped using it more then 2 years ago) - I'm afraid this is probably well beyond my perl skills.

Seriously: I'm open for new features. But as long as I'm the only one
working on this we'll have to live with what my little sparetime allows.
And as I don't really see a need for user management beyond music
services (my kids will never buy music), this feature hasn't even made
it on my already long bucket list.

Very reasonable response.

BTW: I believe you should already be able to use per control-point
libraries etc. as you're not using SlimBrowse anyway. You could just
send the library_id with every request, couldn't you?

By library_id is not used by 'Apps'. The idea was just a way to handle multiple user-accounts with services. So, an LMS 'user' would configure the plugins with their account details. The brows-modes, and favourites, ideas were just an extension of that.

Anyhow, I'll stop discussion of this (user profiles), as its also not a feature I have much use for right now.

[cpd73]

I would NOT import followed artists.

Ah! So, would this only affect albums listed under an Artist? Would these albums also appear in the 'albums' list? i.e. the list of all albums? It it is just the albums under an artist then this would not affect Material's cache. (Not that you should have to care about that, but I do...)

As for handling duplicates, is this really required? The local version and the version on the music service could be different - different release, encoding quality, etc. Instead of removing duplicates, why not add a flag stating where the album is from? That way a control point could add a small icon over the album cover indicating that its from (e.g.) Spotify.

[mherger]

>> I would NOT import followed artists.
>
> Ah! So, would this *only* affect albums listed under an Artist? Would

Ha! I didn't even think about the regular albums list... but yes, it's
only shown for an artist's album list (because it's basically "show me
more of this artist").

That said, it's all still in a state of flux. I'm toying around, trying
to figure out how to do things best. Eg. the current implementation I
have would only show that link if the artist had an album from a music
service, but not if it was all local albums. That should be improved etc.

> As for handling duplicates, is this really required? The local version

Not sure. It's certainly not on top of my priority list. Most people
likely won't have more than one streaming service anyway. And why
Spotify is showing me two different albums for one album which you'd
only find once if you searched for it, I don't know.

> and the version on the music service could be different - different
> release, encoding quality, etc. Instead of removing duplicates, why not
> add a flag stating where the album is from? That way a control point
> could add a small icon over the album cover indicating that its from
> (e.g.) Spotify.

That's an idea I wanted to explore indeed. Squeezeplay won't be
feasible, but anything recent.

--

Michael

[d6jg]

Ah! So, would this only affect albums listed under an Artist? Would these albums also appear in the 'albums' list? i.e. the list of all albums? It it is just the albums under an artist then this would not affect Material's cache. (Not that you should have to care about that, but I do...)

As for handling duplicates, is this really required? The local version and the version on the music service could be different - different release, encoding quality, etc. Instead of removing duplicates, why not add a flag stating where the album is from? That way a control point could add a small icon over the album cover indicating that its from (e.g.) Spotify.

Re Duplicates. I agree with Craig. I have loads of apparent duplicates in my own library.
A miniature icon at top right of the album cover depicting the provider is a sensible idea.
If they really are unwanted duplicates then it will be up to the user to delete one.

[mherger]

Are there any Spotty users who wanted to give this a try? It's all early days, but basic functionality is working (for me :-)). As it's really early it would be great if you could deal with git clones... If there was interest I'd start a new thread to cover the details.

[schoeppi]

On Sat, 4 Jan 2020 11:07:30 +0000, mherger wrote:
> Are there any Spotty users who wanted to give this a try? It's all early
> days, but basic functionality is working (for me :-)). As it's really
> early it would be great if you could deal with git clones... If there
> was interest I'd start a new thread to cover the details.

I can test with Spotty if you like, but I do not have a multiuser
setup. Working with git is no problem. Just let me know where to clone
and how to install the new plugin / environment / LMS version :-).

Ciao,

Schoepp

[d6jg]

Ah! So, would this only affect albums listed under an Artist? Would these albums also appear in the 'albums' list? i.e. the list of all albums? It it is just the albums under an artist then this would not affect Material's cache. (Not that you should have to care about that, but I do...)

As for handling duplicates, is this really required? The local version and the version on the music service could be different - different release, encoding quality, etc. Instead of removing duplicates, why not add a flag stating where the album is from? That way a control point could add a small icon over the album cover indicating that its from (e.g.) Spotify.

Are there any Spotty users who wanted to give this a try? It's all early days, but basic functionality is working (for me :-)). As it's really early it would be great if you could deal with git clones... If there was interest I'd start a new thread to cover the details.

I can spin up a dev install with piCorePlayer on a Pi4 and add Spotty plus a few other key plugins eg Material, LastMix