Re: Re: xPLMediaNet - How to deal with Various Artist Albums

["Malcolm Lansell" <mlansell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Tofts" <tony@xxxxxxx>
To: <ukha_xpl@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2005 6:41 AM
Subject: RE: [ukha_xpl] Re: xPLMediaNet - How to deal with Various Artist
Albums


>
> Hi Mal,
>
>> I think that will work best.
>
> Have done a brief test, and seems ok.
>
> Am going to add an extra field of AlbumArtist, where this will be set
to
> 'Various' for various artist albums. This allows functions that are
album
> based to display 'Various' without needing any special code or
checking.
>
> Am also going to change the way the tags helper works. It currently
> returns
> 'unknown' for missing album/artist tags (tags can be tags or from
folder
> layout). I think this is fair enough for artists, but I think for
tracks
> where an album is missing it should be treated as a 'no album'
situation,
> rather than 'unknown'?
>

What's the practical difference between "unknown" and "no
album"?  Are
unknown items dropped from the database?

> Next issue is play statistics. Have changed the statistics, as someone
> requested, on the main media module to only add the track if it has
played
> completely.
>
> However, only the media module records stats (as these key directly to
> it's
> database)
>
> The downside is that if you opt to play tracks via
browse/playlist/query
> it
> currently records no statistics...
>
> What I'm thinking is that statistics should be a separate 'helper'
module
> that can work with any source?
>
> Providing the module can provide the necessary track information to
> provide
> a track hash this should work ok, but I think the stats helper should
only
> add the track stats if it can make a match to the media module
database.
> The
> reason being that the stats cannot be matched back to a particular
track
> unless the hash can be matched to a track record?
>

Sounds reasonable.  I don't know how your modules communicate, but if it's
anything like xPL where all devices receive all messages, it should be
fairly straighforward to snoop the play commands.

Mal



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