Messages

1

Plugins / Re: Chiptune/ tracker module support

« on: March 20, 2024, 11:24:11 PM »

@hiccup, yes I was able to extract all the tag info from the MusicBee's database file with that python script. It wasn't a lot, but I really liked how I had everything named and organized before, so I just needed some of the tag info. I ended up using the AT&RT plugin to do most of the renaming, since the folder and file names already had the album, track # and title descriptions, so thanks again for the suggestion. I could have used the output from the script and paste in onto the tracks using the AT&RT plugin, but it was just easier getting the main tag info from the folder and file names in this case. The rest of my work came down to restoring my custom sorting display, which I fortunately had a screenshot of from when I first set it up about 1.5 years ago.

2

Plugins / Re: Chiptune/ tracker module support

« on: March 20, 2024, 04:44:40 AM »

@hiccup, thanks this advanced tag tool will come in handy in the future. However, in this case I needed a way to restore the tag information from a backup. Before I re-created my library I had made a manual backup of the MusicBee files I was aware of, which included the "MusicBeeLibrary.mbl" file. This file contained my tag information. I then used this python script to extract all tag information from the backup file into a JSON file. I know a little bit of python, but am more comfortable in PowerShell, so I used that to parse the JSON file to extract all the relevant tracks and tag information.

3

Plugins / Re: Chiptune/ tracker module support

« on: March 19, 2024, 07:27:13 PM »

Anyone know where MusicBee stores the tag information for these files (ex: NSF, VGM, SPC)? Before upgrading MusicBee and re-creating my music library, I had all my game music tracks organized with tag information, which is now gone. I realize it isn't possible to store tag details for these files in the file themselves like MP3 files, etc.

4

Questions / Re: How to Sort Album List by Year and Track List by Track#

« on: October 30, 2023, 02:54:20 AM »

Thanks @tjinc, I ended up doing the same as you suggested before you responded by setting the year for this one track to be the same as the rest to indicate the album release date and putting the release date of the track in the "original year" tag. This is an album I downloaded from bandcamp in flac format and this is how the tag was originally setup with the year being different for this one track. So yes I agree with your comments and thanks for responding. 🙂

5

Questions / How to Sort Album List by Year and Track List by Track#

« on: October 28, 2023, 10:02:37 AM »

Is there any way to sort an Album List by year and Track List by track# at the same time while in "Album and Tracks" view? Correct me if I'm wrong, but currently as of the latest version of MusicBee there is no way to have separate Album and Track sorting? I played around with virtual tags, but there doesn't seem to be any way to distinguish between an album or a track by using a formula. In "Album and Tracks" view I like to sort my albums by year, and within the album itself I want it sorted by track #. The issue I have is... in one of my albums one track has a different year than the rest of the tracks on the same album. I could of course just change the year to match the other tracks, but then it wouldn't be accurate. Is there any way around this?

Currently my "Album and Tracks" view is sorted like this: Artist/ Album Artist/ Year/ Album/ Disc#/ Track#/ Title

6

Questions / Re: Disable Artwork Dimming in Now Playing Mode

« on: August 10, 2022, 08:10:27 PM »

Thanks for the suggestion for this as a feature request. I added it to the MusicBee Wishlist here: https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=37026.

7

MusicBee Wishlist / Allow Customization of 'Now Playing' Tab

« on: August 10, 2022, 08:07:46 PM »

I would specifically like to remove the reduced contrast or dimming effect on Artist Pictures while in the 'Now Playing' tab. I checked in the Panel customization and it's not there. I'm not a programmer, but am learning how to program and would be interested in trying to add this functionality via a plugin, but it doesn't appear the API current supports GUI customization yet.

8

Questions / Re: Disable Artwork Dimming in Now Playing Mode

« on: June 15, 2022, 06:58:41 PM »

@Mayibongwe thanks for responding. Yes "Artist Picture" is what I meant. I just realized I could change the view in "Now Playing" via enabling Theater Mode and changing the skin, but then I don't seem to have the same functionality like the ability to manually advance the artist pictures. Thanks for the support, I'll probably post a feature request for the changing of brightness on the artist picture, but not until I have a list of some other things I would like to see added. I'll probably first look into creating my own custom skin, since it would take too long to get some of the things I want included such as being able to customize the text at the bottom of Now Playing to include the album name and track number, etc.

9

Questions / Disable Artwork Dimming in Now Playing Mode

« on: June 14, 2022, 12:41:01 AM »

Does anyone know if there is a way to disable the dim effect of the Artist Artwork while in Now Playing mode in the main panel or does it have to be done via a custom skin? I went though the panel customization and couldn't find a way to disable it or change the value.

10

Questions / Re: New User, Weird Glitch

« on: May 31, 2022, 09:03:25 AM »

Just needs a catch-all "No Biography Found. Click to add one." to the bio section, which is displayed when nothing is returned from the scrape...

Ok I think I understand what you want. When that code is displayed in place of a missing biography it doesn't say something like "No biography found" and then give you an option to type one in manually, so it's more obvious, if that's what you mean? It sounded like you wanted to do this for many artists when you mentioned the "19.8k library". If it's just for a few missing biographies, you can either right-click where the error code is and select "Edit Biography", "Paste Biography" or edit the bio file directly in c:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\MusicBee\InternalCache\ArtistData\<artist name>.bio.dat.

11

Questions / Re: New User, Weird Glitch

« on: May 31, 2022, 03:23:04 AM »

I started getting the same in the bio for one of my artists in the "NOW PLAYING" section after I changed the artist name by editing all the tags from "Namco" to "Namco Bandai". My artist images were also no longer loading, since I setup custom images to display rather than relying on the ones automatically found via the internet. I managed to fix the issue with the custom images, so they are working again by fixing the file names, but I'm still digging into why the artist bio is sill showing the "NewPP limit report" code.

There is a work around you can do to fix it by just manually entering whatever you want in the artist bio file [c:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\MusicBee\InternalCache\ArtistData\Namco Bandai.bio.dat], then close and re-open MusicBee. If you want nothing to display for just this bio then you can put one blank space inside the file, since leaving the file completely empty will still bring back the "NewPP limit report" code. Alternatively you can also just rename the artist for each track inside the "tags" by changing a letter or adding an extra character, etc. I guess it's holding onto some cached file somewhere, but no idea where or what that is. Out of curiosity, what is the name of the artist in your MusicBee that has this problem? I wonder if it has to do with the way it's searching online rather than something locally on the computer.

Some troubleshooting I've done so far was completely deleting the "%LocalAppData%\MusicBee\" and "%AppData%\MusicBee\" folders, closing and re-opening MusicBee. I also searched through all the files in my %AppData% and %LocalAppData% folders along with my registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_CURRENT_USER hives for reference to "Bandai", but found nothing useful for a proper fix. I guess next I can do a complete uninstall, make sure no old files for MusicBee are hanging around and reboot then re-install, but it would be nice to know what specifically is causing the "NewPP limit report" code to return.

Here is what I see in my artist bio:

Code

<!-- 
NewPP limit report
Parsed by mw1444
Cached time: 20220526223813
Cache expiry: 1814400
Reduced expiry: false
Complications: []
CPU time usage: 0.001 seconds
Real time usage: 0.001 seconds
Preprocessor visited node count: 0/1000000
Post‐expand include size: 0/2097152 bytes
Template argument size: 0/2097152 bytes
Highest expansion depth: 0/100
Expensive parser function count: 0/500
Unstrip recursion depth: 0/20
Unstrip post‐expand size: 0/5000000 bytes
Number of Wikibase entities loaded: 0/400
-->
<!--
Transclusion expansion time report (%,ms,calls,template)
100.00%    0.000      1 -total
-->"

UPDATE: Ok I see now where the biographies are coming from as per this release note via https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=27074.0:

as a fallback wikipedia is used if last.fm artist biography fails - however wikipedia is not ideal as its not specifically focused on music/  artists and i am expecting there will be some cases of rubbish results

So yeah this is why "Namco Bandai" isn't found and it gives this "NewPP limit report" code error. When I updated the artist name in the "tags" to "Bandai Namco Entertainment" the info from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandai_Namco_Entertainment) is displayed in the "NOW PLAYING" bio section. Of course you can also just turn off the panel where the biography appears from within "Arrange Panels..." if you don't want it to show.

Maybe you knew all this I stated here already or maybe I completely didn't understand the issue. How many artists are displaying this "NewPP limit report" code rather than a proper biography? If the text in the "artist" field within the "tags" isn't found on last.fm or Wikipedia, what would you propose as an alternative source of artists biographies? If needing a custom solution, I know it should be possible to at minimum to write a script that connects into some other source's API to grab an artists biography and use that to generate a custom biography for each artist you specify from an input file, or perhaps there is a way via a plugin that I'm not currently aware of as I'm also new to using MusicBee.