Messages

16

General Discussions / Re: So how big is your music library?

« on: September 10, 2019, 07:21:49 PM »

I'm up to 35,160 now, 808GB, 89days 19hours and 39 minutes according to MB.

39,288, 826GB 98 days 9 hours and 53 minutes now...


...and I've just bought a new load of vinyl that needs ripping.

17

Questions / Re: Can we sync playlists and library with windows media player?

« on: June 26, 2019, 07:02:07 AM »

That's not it's only problem. It is, by default, set to "correct" tags from the Internet, and turning it off doesn't work. Many of these "corrections" are actually wrong. While I was still using it, I went to Miscrosoft's own help site and loads of people were reporting the same problem and none of the solutions put forward my Microsoft staff worked.

It also routinely messes up capitalisation, and changes it back to what it wants if you try to change it manually. Useless piece of software.

It's not only tags it has problems with. My old laptop suddenly stopped working unless in safe mode. Basically on startup it froze after being on for about 5 minutes. I decided to to a full reinstall of windows so started manually backing up files so I could. Two of my music files were corrupted. When I researched the issue, WMP re-indexes music files on startup (whether you want it to or not) and it was hanging on the corrupted files. Once I'd deleted those two files the laptop worked fine again.

18

Bug Reports / Re: Getting persistent error message when editing album art

« on: June 26, 2019, 06:49:58 AM »

Hi I'm guessing Steven hasn't seen your latest post. He says he is working on this plugin here. The new version may help.

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=28953.0

19

Questions / Re: Can we sync playlists and library with windows media player?

« on: June 26, 2019, 06:45:59 AM »

I'm not sure if you can, but if you do, be aware that WMP has a tendency to really mess up your tags.

Quite, that's why I dumped WMP all those years ago.

20

Questions / Re: Absolute beginner - installed, now completely confused!

« on: June 26, 2019, 06:44:03 AM »

Problems like this are nearly always to do with bad tags. MusicBee is excellent at working with tags, but it's only as good as the tags themselves!

There are two tags you need to look at:

Artist: This is the artist for that track
Album Artist: This is the main artist you want the album sorted as.

For many albums they are the same, but for a compilation you want Various Artists as the Album Artist tag and the artist that did the track on the Artist tag.

MusicBee has the facility to be very flexible with the Artist tag to make organising better. If an artist goes by two similar names, you can still link them by using this feature, you can also have multiple artists in the field. When in edit mode (right click the track and click edit) you can click on the dots at the side of the artist tag. A new menu will open up. The top field is where you enter the artist as you want it to be shown, and the lower fields are where you can actually put the artists you want the program to know are actually on the track. This enables theatre modes to show the correct images etc etc.

Eg. A track by Eminem featuring Dr. Dre, you might want that in the top field, but then have "Eminem" and "Dr. Dre" in the other fields. The pictures will then cycle between the artists in Aritst Images mode.

You can also do this with bands that keep slightly changing their name. For example Fuzzbox called themselves We've Got A Fuzzbox & We're Gonna Use It!!! early in their career. In the top field I have whatever they're calling themselves on that particular album, in the lower field I have Fuzzbox. That way MusicBee sorts them as one artist, but it displays the correct name for the era.

21

Questions / Re: Musicbee deletes Folder.jpg files

« on: May 31, 2019, 04:55:21 AM »

Do you really think people that are NOT experiencing the problem - ARE reading about the problem
1200 VIEWS of the problem... those are unique, not repeat views.

I've viewed this thread, but don't have the problem, does that make it 1199 people?

Oh hang, on I saw someone else in this thread say they've never experienced it either, 1198...

...do you see the flaw in your logic yet?

People view threads here out of interest, or to see if they can help, unique thread views do not equate to the number of people who have that problem.

So, let's look at MusicBee itself. MusicBee is developed by ONE person and it's totally free. That ONE person puts a huge amount of effort into improving it constantly, answering questions, acting swiftly on people's reports and adding requested features.

I've been using MusicBee for three years now, and in that time Stephen has looked into and fixed minor errors I was having, added one or two things to the app that I requested and been helpful and courteous in every dealing I've had with him.

Try and get that level of service from ANY paid software. In this case, he's looked at the problem, can't reproduce it and therefore can't spend any more time on it, perfectly reasonable. What do you want him to do, spend ALL his time on a problem he can't reproduce?

Now, as to this problem, I've never experienced it with MusicBee either, but I DID experience it, and many other problems with files being moved or deleted, tags being altered no matter how many times I turned that setting off etc etc etc when I was using Windows Media Player (WMP). Unless you deactivate it WMP works in the background ALL the time moving everything to where Microsoft programmers want it, rather than where you want it. My advice would be to look in WMP settings and make sure that the folder it uses for it's library is one where you don't actually store any of your music files. That alone may solve the problem.

22

General Discussions / Re: Artist pictures

« on: May 24, 2019, 04:58:55 AM »

BTW, Steven and Redwing, thanks for looking at this. The huge level of support, from both creator and community, is one of the big things that makes MusicBee better than any other player.

23

General Discussions / Re: Artist pictures

« on: May 24, 2019, 04:53:43 AM »

There's a better way. MusicBrainz Artist query returns artist type.

e.g.

<artist id="d73596bb-a8f8-4aae-a323-d881f5245149" type="Group" type-id="e431f5f6-b5d2-343d-8b36-72607fffb74b" ns2:score="100">
<name>Black Box</name>
<sort-name>Black Box</sort-name>
<country>IT</country>

Add the returned artist type to the Google search term.

It has six kinds of types (https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Artist)

- Person: just "Music"
- Group: "Band"
- Orchestra: "Orchestra"
- Choir: "Choir"
- Character: "Music"
- Other: "Music"

Nice one, that would work for a lot more artists.

24

General Discussions / Re: Artist pictures

« on: May 24, 2019, 04:52:51 AM »

The only change Steven made was this:

i have added "Music" into the search terms for google artist searches

You won't see much differences with your example artists as you could imagine what Google image search would show with "A House + music".

@Steven;

As I suggested before, if artist name starts with an article, try adding "band", which would produce better (more music-related) results at least for those artists.

That would make sense. Just been in Google images with some of the artists causing problems.

"wire music" gives mainly pictures of piano wire.
"wire band" gives images of the band "Wire"

"Whistle music" is also not an improvement, but "whistle band" gives one picture of the band, but the rest are still garbage.

Rapeman was improved with both searches. (Btw, research shows the odd picture was a screenshot from a Japanese film called "Rapeman 2").

Nothing's going to work for every band though, Loop (80s indie band), give rubbish results in all 3 scenarios. (Loop band gives pictures of some wierd excercise device)

It's a difficult one.

25

General Discussions / Re: Artist pictures

« on: May 23, 2019, 04:14:53 AM »

Thanks, Steven. I've downloaded it, I'll install it when I get in from work this evening.

26

General Discussions / Artist pictures

« on: May 22, 2019, 05:26:34 PM »

With the new update, google is activated by default. After getting a picture of an actual whistle, while rap band "Whistle" were playing, and loops of wire when indie band "Wire" were playing, I turned it off.

However, it seemed to be finding less bands than it used to before the update so I turned it back on again.

"A House" unsuprisingly gave me a picture of a house, and "Black Box" a black box.

Things got a bit surreal when I was playing a late 80s Blast First compilation and one of Steve Albini's side projects, "Rapeman" came on and it gave me a picture of two Japanese schoolgirls...

The above aside, it would be nice if it looked elsewhere first and used Google as a last resort...

27

Questions / Re: Disabling Google from image search.

« on: May 19, 2019, 10:19:29 AM »

Thanks,

28

Questions / Re: Disabling Google from image search.

« on: May 19, 2019, 10:08:23 AM »

Just found this in the menu,

Tools>Advanced>Reset artwork cache

Will that do it?

29

Questions / Re: Disabling Google from image search.

« on: May 19, 2019, 09:59:22 AM »

I can't find that folder. Where should it be?

30

Questions / Disabling Google from image search.

« on: May 19, 2019, 09:29:33 AM »

Google has been added to the search for artist pictures, and as Stephen says in the apdate thread it does throw up some unrelated images (like showing pictures of actual whistles, then playing "Nothing Serious" by Whistle).

I disabled it in Now Playing, but this doesn't seem to disable it from theater views. Is there currently any way to do this?