Parental Control

[PaulR]

Hello Folks,

I'm a few weeks into receiving my squeezebox2 and I have to say I'm truly impressed. It's got me listening to music again after years of having my CDs stashed in the basement away from the kids.

I've been enjoying the use of the shuffle modes and random play plugin but I have a small problem which is not down to a fault with SB2 or slimserver but due to some of my music collection from my younger years containing slightly colourful language that I'd rather the kids didn't hear! Right now the solution is to dive for the remote control at the first f*** or c*** (you get the picture?!) and hit the fast forward button.

Ideally I'd like the SB2 or slimserver to have 2 modes - a normal mode where all the music is playable and a 'controlled' mode where it simply doesn't see all the songs that are tagged with some kind of 'X' rated tag.

If there's anybody clever reading(I know there's plenty of you there!) how about writing a plugin for this? - or alternatively is there a simple solution that I've not thought of?

Thanks

Paul.

[WeedMonkey]

How about creating a playlist with all of your music library in it, then going in and deleting those songs with "colorful" language? Then, when you want to go into "parental control" mode, just play your playlist, instead of your entire library.

[Bruce Hartley]

not a bad idea, but loading large playlists can take an age.

Also everytime you got new music, you would have to add it.

what about a modification to the random plugin?

[Robin Bowes]

Bruce Hartley wrote:
> not a bad idea, but loading large playlists can take an age.
>
> Also everytime you got new music, you would have to add it.
>
> what about a modification to the random plugin?

Sounds like we need filters that can be (optionally) applied anywhere
that returns a list of tracks.

It should be possible to turn on/off filters for each "type" of track
list separately.

This would probably tie in with "smart" playlists, i.e. a smart playlist
is just a list of tracks defined by a filter.

R.
--
http://robinbowes.com

If a man speaks in a forest,
and his wife's not there,
is he still wrong?

[MeSue]

Ideally I'd like the SB2 or slimserver to have 2 modes - a normal mode where all the music is playable and a 'controlled' mode where it simply doesn't see all the songs that are tagged with some kind of 'X' rated tag.
Paul.

Have you explored the MusicMagic Mixer yet? You could create your family-safe mixes in there, which will give you a chance to review them before passing them to SlimServer. If you buy the Premium version it has options for refining the mix, like… replace this artist, replace this song, more like this, less like this. Or, if you have all the colorful language songs tagged a certain way, you can create an exclusion filter in MMM and mix into this filter. I've been beta testing MMM version 1.1.6 which is supposed to be released this week, I think. It has a new feature where you can mark certain songs excluded where they won't be used in any mix.

All this requires the paid version of MMM, though, so I don't know if that would work for you. If not, maybe you could figure out a way to do it with Genres and only shuffle on certain Genres.

[bishopdonmiguel]

A long-ago requested feature but no solution yet. I understand there probably isn't a standard tag that we can use (why not is a good question as a "rating" or "explicit" tag seems a very good idea given those big warning labels we see on CDs these days). As an alternative, couldn't we use a special playlist as the source for explicit songs? The scan engine could look to this during a library build and mark a database field for the matched tracks. This would effectively create a "virutal" tag that could be used for a plugin or standard feature.

[bishopdonmiguel]

The ER for reference...

http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=143

[WeedMonkey]

not a bad idea, but loading large playlists can take an age.

Also everytime you got new music, you would have to add it.

I realize everyone doesn't use iTunes, but if you do, you could create a "smart" playlist in iTunes that consists of everything except songs whose genre includes "explicit" and then set it to automatically update. That would solve your problem of having to add to the playlist everytime you get new music.

Maybe my playlists just aren't big enough ... I've never experienced the problems you referred to about taking a long time to load.

[Jim]

Does this really call for a technical solution? Of course kids never hear bad language when you are doing DIY repairs or in the school playground so as long as the DVD player and Squeezebox parental controls are working you're parental repsonsibility rating has just gone up one notch! :roll

The irony is these songs will appeal more to your kids if they cannot accesss them, and being kids will no doubt soon circumvent any restrictions.

Yet if occassionally they got to hear their father listening to these songs there will be no attraction to them as sharing musical tastes with your parents is definitely not cool!

However on a similar note I'd be extremely receptive if someone very smart could write some sort of algorithm that automatically analyses music and discards the type of music most teenage kids are listening too based on it being crap as a whole rather than any specific content. If I could afford to put a Squeezebox in my kids bedroom I want to be damn sure some classic Public Enemy is feeding them a staple diet of F-words as well as a political message rather than the modern 50 Cent (c)rap version!

[bishopdonmiguel]

> Does this really call for a technical solution? Of course kids
> never hear bad language when you are doing DIY repairs or in
> the school

For me it's a matter of convenience and courtesy. I do not censor the kid's musical interests and to be honest my preference is usually for the explicit versions. However, I do have outdoor speakers that I engage frequently and it isn't very neighborly to have f*** this and f*** that blasting in the backyard. It would be convenient to have a switch to eliminate questionable material for short periods of time. Maintaining separate playlists for such isn't really an option, so yes, a technical solution is desirable.