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

["Tony Tofts" <tony@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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'?

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?

Just to re-iterate the hash approach was taken so that stats can survive
music being moved etc

Another advantage of splitting the stats off into a separate module is that
if someone wants to wrtie a new stats module, it'll just work with existing
client modules as is. Also the module could support media types, so it
would
be possible to record stats of movies/pictures (any any future supported
media types) too in a single uniform way?

Any thoughts please?

Thanks
Tony



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