Announce: Music & Artist Information plugin

[mherger]

>>> Would you want to have this for non-local tracks only?
>
> It would be nice to have it for all tracks since the integration is very
> good and useful.

I'm not sure I understand what exactly the request is. Could you please
try again for me? :-)

[mherger]

Announce: Music & Artist Information plugin

I'm happy to announce the Music & Artist Information plugin v0.1.0. As I got increasingly frustrated with the ugly code for the AlbumReview and Biography plugins, I decided to start from scratch and create something "better". It should not only be easier to maintain, but offer new features and be open to be easily extended.





The new Music & Artist Information plugin still gives you access to almusic.com's album reviews and biographies. But it adds a whole lot to it: links to the artists' websites, blogs, news. Videos from youtube, dailymotion and others. Links to album contributors and related artists. A never-ending network of music background information.





Music & Artist Info (MAI) can display album artwork, artist pictures, pdf and html files associated with an artist. The plugin assumes the Artist/Album folder structure and will add "Local Artwork" and "Text files from music folder" menu items in the "M"ore menu when local files are found.

The "local artwork" will give you access to any artwork file stored inside the album's folder.

"Text files from music folder" will display pdf, html and txt files such as booklets provided with digital downloads that are stored inside the album's folder.

There is a bit of special treatment for the bio.html: the plugin would actually walk up a few folder levels searching for anything bio*, assuming that most users have an Artist/Album folder structure.

Artist pictures are either stored as artist.jpg/png in an album folder, or as "artist name.jpg/png" in the configurable one for all artists images folder.

Obviously not all of these goodies work on all UIs. You'd get the richest access in the web UI obviously. Some apps can deal with the web based content as well - a tablet should give you great access to most features.

Have fun!

[aubuti]

Very cool, Michael. Thanks, and I look forward to playing with it.

[garym]

Very nice idea. I've been playing with this installed on a Win7 machine running LMS 7.8. It installs, I see the options, can click on, say, Artist Information, and get the list of "biography", etc. But selecting anything simply tries to connect to something on web and never connects. Eventually times out. The only thing I've made work is clicking WEBSITES in the listing after ARTIST INFORMATION. This gives me different website options (amazon, official, etc.) and opens a different tab with the website I choose.

What am I doing wrong?

edit: I've tried this with several artists, all well known (i.e., The Beatles)

[bonze]

I'm getting similar to garym

Biography, Artist Details, Related Artists & Pictures just 'hang' - even for Adele...

In the log is:

[13-08-28 21:08:57.5361] Slim::Networking::IO::Select::__ANON__ (147) Error: Select task failed calling Slim::Web::HTTP:rocessHTTP: Can't locate object method "no_expand_entities" via package "HTML::TreeBuilder" at C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Squeezebox\Cache\InstalledPlugins/Plugins/MusicArtistInfo/AllMusic.pm line 601.
; fh=Slim::Web::HTTP::ClientConn=GLOB(0xb152e3c)

[garym]

yep, I see same log error:

[13-08-28 15:21:45.0885] Slim::Networking::IO::Select::__ANON__ (147) Error: Select task failed calling Slim::Web::HTTP:rocessHTTP: Can't locate object method "no_expand_entities" via package "HTML::TreeBuilder" at C:\ProgramData\Squeezebox\Cache\InstalledPlugins/Plugins/MusicArtistInfo/AllMusic.pm line 601.

[mherger]

Announce: Music & Artist Informationplugin

Sounds like some dependency issue. Are you seeing this problem on Windows only? I see you mention Vortexbox in your signature, but the error message is from Windows?

> Am 28.08.2013 um 22:50 schrieb garym <garym.60swcn (AT) no-mx (DOT) forums.slimdevices.com>:
>
>
> yep, I see same log error:
>
> [13-08-28 15:21:45.0885] Slim::Networking::IO::Select::__ANON__ (147)
> Error: Select task failed calling Slim::Web::HTTP:rocessHTTP: Can't
> locate object method "no_expand_entities" via package
> "HTML::TreeBuilder" at
> C:\ProgramData\Squeezebox\Cache\InstalledPlugins/Plugins/MusicArtistInfo/AllMusic.pm
> line 601.
>
>
>
> *Location 1:* VortexBox Appliance 4TB (2.2) > LMS 7.7.2 > Transporter,
> Touch, Boom, Radio w/Battery (all ethernet)
> *Location 2:* VBA 3TB (2.2) > LMS 7.7.2 > Touch > Benchmark DAC I, Boom,
> Radio w/Battery (all ethernet except Radio)
> *Office:* Win7(64) > LMS 7.8 > SqueezePlay
> *Spares:* VBA 4TB, SB3, Touch (3), Radio (3), CONTROLLER
> *Controllers:* iPhone4S (iPeng), iPad2 (iPengHD & SqueezePad),
> CONTROLLER, or SqueezePlay 7.7 on Win7(64) laptop
> Ripping (FLAC) - dbpoweramp, Tagging - mp3tag, Spotify
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> garym's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17325
> View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=99537
>
>

[garym]

Sounds like some dependency issue. Are you seeing this problem on Windows only? I see you mention Vortexbox in your signature, but the error message is from Windows?

OK. Now i've installed on my vortexbox (fedora linux) machine at home. LMS 7.7.2. Works fine with immediate response. So the problem I had earlier with the LMS 7.8 on win7 does NOT happen with my vortexbox LMS 7.7.2.

[mherger]

Announce: Music &amp; Artist Informationplugin

>> Sounds like some dependency issue.

Figured out LMS already comes with the HTML::TreeBuilder module which I
included in the plugin as well. But I was using an option which is not
available in the (rather outdated) version shipped with LMS.

v0.2.0 should fix this issue.

--

Michael

[Mnyb]

A stupid Q : Are we to uninstall biography and album review ? Do they conflict in the UI's ?

[mherger]

Announce: Music &amp; Artist Informationplugin

> A stupid Q : Are we to uninstall biography and album review ? Do they
> conflict in the UI's ?

No, they can be installed in parallel - if you don't mind the clutter in
some menus :-)

--

Michael

[bonze]

>> Sounds like some dependency issue.

Figured out LMS already comes with the HTML::TreeBuilder module which I
included in the plugin as well. But I was using an option which is not
available in the (rather outdated) version shipped with LMS.

v0.2.0 should fix this issue.

--

Michael

Works OK now - thankyou

[Roland0]

Interesting. Back when I implemented something similar for extGUI4LMS, I also had a look at AllMusic in comparison to discogs.
In the end, I decided to use discogs as it has
- more albums available
- some info available AllMusic doesn't (eg. videos, artist links)
- an officially free-to-use API to access the data (I'm still a bit confused by rovi's eval licence, but it seems not to cover free/oss SW - your plugin also uses screen-scraping and not rovi's API...)

otoh, AllMusic has some advantages as well
- some info available discogs doesn't (eg. album reviews (actually available on the website, but doesn't seem to be exposed in the API), related artists/albums)
- sometimes more in-depth/professional biographical information about artists
- sometimes more in-depth/professional album reviews

Why did you chose AllMusic?

[mherger]

Announce: Music &amp; Artist Informationplugin

> Why did you chose AllMusic?

It's the service I knew would give me good results. I didn't do any
further research. While I did consider Last.fm (because it has localized
content), I think AllMusic has better quality content. And when I saw your
implementation I did a quick check on discogs as well, but didn't do any
serious research.

That said I might add Last.fm (and/or others like discogs) support in the
future, as an option for those who prefer non-English content. The new
code should be much simpler to extend and adjust than the old one.

Some of the current implementation is already using the.echonest.com
(blogs, news, websites, videos) as an alternative resource for data.

--

Michael

[Stig Nygaard]

Dead link

FYI, following the "More info" link on the LMS Plugins tab in Server Settings gives you a 404 Not Found for http://www.herger.net/MusicArtistInfo/

But it is probably on your to-do. I see the plugin ain't listed on http://www.herger.net/slim-plugins/ either...