Matching images for soundtracks

[Steven]

yes that is oversimplying - see redwings post earlier. Having said that, i would be using the Album for the movie title for an automated solution

[Xyzzy]

Maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but I would have assumed it was enough with the tag Genre (if the value equals "Soundtrack", that obviously means the album corresponds to the music of a film), and the tag Album (whose value is, in this case, the name of the film). Am I wrong?

I actually use genre Soundtrack, but Album name of a soundtrack is pretty often different than movie name. Not to mention different soundtracks for the movie (like OST and extended  version)

[vivadavid]

I would say that most of the time the name of the album matches the name of the film, but it's true that sometimes you get, at the end, words or expressions like "The original soundtrack", "The complete soundtrack", etc. It'd be, I suppose, a matter of discarding these expressions.

[Xyzzy]

I would say that most of the time the name of the album matches the name of the film, but it's true that sometimes you get, at the end, words or expressions like "The original soundtrack", "The complete soundtrack", etc. It'd be, I suppose, a matter of discarding these expressions.

I'd say, use whatever guessing you want, I would like just to use a tag to provide a proper value.

Some real world album titles from my collection (ie what is on the cover):
The Last of the Mohicans Original Score (The Last of the Mohicans)
The Original Soundtrack from the Motion Picture Grease (Grease)
Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Top Gun (Top Gun)
Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack Back to the Future (Back to the Future)
Complete Motion Picture Score The Hunt for Red October (The Hunt for Red October)
Forrest Gump The Soundtrack (Forrest Gump)
The Complete Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Rambo III (Rambo III)

[vivadavid]

That depends on what you type on your Album tag. Personally, I just type "The last of the Mohicans" or "Top gun": I consider the rest a sort of subtitle or pre-title. I admit, though, that there are certain scenarios which are more complicated, as it happens with anime soundracks, where there is a drama version, an image album, etc.

Having said that, if something else is necessary apart from having "soundtrack" in the genre Tag, so be it. I'll really appreciate any effort to make this feature come true.

[Zak]

MusicBee already has the capability to rotate through multiple images. Is it because people can't be bothered downloading their own pictures that it needs to be automated, or is there some other reason?

I think you're going to find too many variations on how people tag soundtracks to come up with a "one-size-fits-most" automated solution.
Using custom tags could work but still requires people to set them up correctly, and limits its usefulness to people who know about it.

[Steven]

i'm inclined to agree with zak on this - if people have to tag the name of the movie or game then many wont bother and it seems any automated solution based on the album title and Soundtrack genre might work in some cases but perhaps not very successful.
How would people feel about having a tool to assist with downloading pictures locally? It would prompt for the name of the movie when Soundtrack is tagged in the genre and wasnt able to make a match. Is there a usual way for identifying game files?
So once the files are downloaded musicbee would use them. It would also allow you to add more pictures if you wanted.
As the pictures would be named by the album and for compilations, additionally the track number. I think a new folder would be needed so it doesnt ever clash with locally stored artist pictures

[Xyzzy]

i'm inclined to agree with zak on this - if people have to tag the name of the movie or game then many wont bother and it seems any automated solution based on the album title and Soundtrack genre might work in some cases but perhaps not very successful.
How would people feel about having a tool to assist with downloading pictures locally? It would prompt for the name of the movie when Soundtrack is tagged in the genre and wasnt able to make a match. Is there a usual way for identifying game files?
So once the files are downloaded musicbee would use them. It would also allow you to add more pictures if you wanted.
As the pictures would be named by the album and for compilations, additionally the track number. I think a new folder would be needed so it doesnt ever clash with locally stored artist pictures

If you think about letting a user to learn about the feature, I think information dialog when coming across Soundtrack during import (genre or in album title), or tagging a file with such information would be enough.

There is no good way to identify game soundtrack files, fe for game Capsize the soundtrack is Artist: Solar Fields and the Album: Movements; however you usually have game name somewhere like for game Superbrothers- Sword & Sworcery, where Artist: Jim Guthrie and  Album: Sword & Sworcery LP - The Ballad of Space Babies (almost game name in this case). Both examples as originally tagged.

Maybe a good solution would be in such case allow user just to select movie/game name in displayed Album title (or accept/correct guessed value) , select checkbox movie/game and click OK (and then save information to appropriate tags)?

Regarding files - I would like to have both capabilites, fe game*.jpg/movie*.jpg files in Album folder would be used in turn for game/movie OST (you could do the preload manually or with some MB function), and dynamically downloaded screenshots/stills would be handled by MB cache. Way of using them together would be user configurable.

[Steven]

as the first iteration for this, 2 things have been added:
- in the Tags(1) preferences you can specify a folder for locally stored images for a soundtrack. The files need to be named as or start with the name of the album (i realise this wont help with compilations, for which i will add support for track numbers)
- for files tagged with a "Soundtrack" genre, the modern compact player and playing track panel will look in the soundtrack images folder. If nothing is found, MB will do a web search. If nothing is found it reverts to the usual artist search behavior
- at the moment it doesnt try to guess the movie name
- it includes posters which are vertically oriented - if people dont like that i can easily remove them from the results

http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V2_2/MusicBee_Exe_Patched.zip

any comments on the proposal a couple of posts ago would be welcome

[Steven]

link updated to fix an unrelated bug which causes failure to open the system preferences in localised versions:
http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V2_2/MusicBee_Exe_Patched.zip

[vivadavid]

Thanks, Steven, I’ve tried the feature a little while and it looks promising. Here are some comments:

1. You said that “at the moment it doesnt try to guess the movie name”. I think we could make a list of expressions that should be discarded, such as “the original soundtrack”, etc. In addition to this, I was wondering if you could also discard the text between square brackets. I could give you two examples where this could be useful. The first example would be for those anime films that have several soundtrack versions (“Castle in the sky [drama version]”, “Castle in the sky [image album]”, etc.). As for the second example, I have both the Spanish and English soundtracks of The aristocats and, in order to differentiate between them, I’ve written, in their corresponding album tags, “The Aristocats [English]” and “The aristocats [Spanish”]. The square brackets are useful when you want to add something to the title of the album that isn’t really part of the title of the album. In fact, if people want to add things like “the complete soundtrack” to the Album tag, they could use square brackets to help MB discard irrelevant information when it comes to displaying the captions of a film.

2. If no captions of the film are found because there aren’t any or because there are certain words in the title that haven’t been properly discarded, I think MB should at least display pictures of the artist. I don’t know if this has been fully implemented. I’ve tried a couple of cases, and I can see pictures of the artist, but only one or two: I’d need to check more.

3. Personally, I don’t like vertically oriented pictures, because they don’t look very nice in the Playing Track area where they are displayed, since this area has a portrait format. If I could choose, I’d even only have horizontally oriented images for the artist pictures.

4. For soundtracks, there are sometimes when I use, in the Genre tag, the word “Musical”, because I simply want to make a distinction between a soundtrack with basically songs and a soundtrack with basically orchestrated music. I could easily change the genre back into “soundtrack”, but you may want to consider accepting “Musical” as a genre to display captions of films.

5. About the Soundtrack Pictures folder, nothing has been created as far as I can see. If I go to the Tags (1) options, it’s pointing to a folder in my library folder that doesn’t exist. I would have thought a folder would be created in the AppData folder.

I’ll wait for your comments and those from other people before I do some more checking, but so far so good.
 

[Steven]

2 - if no pictures are found it should already be reverting to searching for artist pictures
4 - you can tag files with multiple genres and include "Soundtrack" in addition to the primary genre of "Musical"
5 - I will change it to create an empty folder on saving the preferences. The default folder in in the MusicBee library area (as is the artist pictures) because AppData would be too obscure for most users

Just to set expectations around what is being and will be done, I feel i should add that I dont want to spend too much time on this as its getting a bit too far away from the core purpose of musicbee

[vivadavid]

2. I’ve checked that out more thoroughly and it seems to be working OK.

3. I had never used multiple genres, but I’ve just learned how to do it. I have a question, though, as I only started to use filters yesterday. If one filter says “Genre is not musical” and “Genre is not Soundtrack” and “Genre is not Classical” (with “Match all” enabled), shouldn’t MB display an album with “soundtrack;musical” as Genre?

5. You said the artist pictures are stored in the library folder, but I have them in AppData\Artwork\ArtistCache. I can’t remember having changed this folder, and I would have thought it was the default folder.

I understand you’ve been working really hard on other features and I’ll try not to expect too much. I just hope something can be done, at some point, about the brackets and these expressions appearing in the album names. Thanks for this great feature!

[Xyzzy]

Thanks, Steven, I’ve tried the feature a little while and it looks promising. Here are some comments:

One thing, why making so much mess with existing tags, when one additional tag solves all the problems? Guessing, putting additional trash into album name or on the other hand removing things - I don't get it.

If you have filled MOVIESOUNDTRACK field, you know immediately that it is a movie (not game) soundtrack, and its name.

What is the problem with filling this field even manually?

If you are considered about feature usage, rest assure that even now 70% of users uses 30% of MB capabilities or so.

[vivadavid]

Hello,

1. It makes more sense to me to use the existing Genre tag, but it'd be quite easy anyway to add this new tag you talk about. In this case, though, users would need to be informed about it and they would need to know how to add this tag.

2. Guessing the name of the film is, in my opinion, unavoidable, unless another tag is created, such as FILMTITLE, but then adding it to your albums individually would take considerable time. The way I see it, it'd be easier to just remove certain elements from the Album tag before searching on the internet, so that MB understands that "Braveheart the original soundtrack" corresponds to "Braveheart" and "Spirited away [image album]" corresponds to "Spirited away". A combination between removing the text between square brackets and discarding certain fixed expressions like "the complete soundtrack" seems to me a sensible option, but of course, it's Steven who must decide what makes more sense to him and is less time-consuming.