I would be interested in testing it out.

awesome. I will create a new subscription called "Beta tests" for you right away, for Joomla 1.6, 1.7, 2.5 (you can test it on 2.5 which is the most logical thing)

- you will have access to the new beta of the component, which is what needs to be tested.
- I also include a couple plugins, the jwplayer and a new simple core plugin

how to test ID3 tag reading:

- on global config there's a new option to enable ID3 tag reading. it must be ON, of course.

ways to test (things to test):

1) [adding songs into a new album] on the frontend (also on backend) create a new album (manually), and "add new song" (as many as you want)
in this song, do NOT put the name or the duration, just upload a file, the info should be readed automatically

2) [adding songs into an existing album] same as before, but on an already existing album

3) [adding a new song from scratch] there is a new MENU ITEM TYPE which is a "simple form layout" for song, which is JUST an upload field. upload a file in there. things should be created automatically (artist if necessary, album if necessary, including picture, song of course). is artist created ok? and album?

4) same as before, but you can use the normal "form" for song. if you type a name, for instance, it will be used. if you don't, it will be retrieved from ID3 tags, etc.

5) same as 3, but please use the SAME file, or a file from the same album and artist. this is just to test that the song is created and added to the album and artist, that ALREADY exist (not created again!)

6) [backend folder reading] on SCAN A FOLDER, there is a new option "Process ID3 tags". simply upload a few files manually to a folder, then scan it, and process it. every song should be added. and of course, if artists and albums needs to be created, they will be

let me know...

try to use good-constructed files (like files created by iTunes or whatever)

although it would not be a bad idea to test the system also with a "badly tagged" file, or simply a file with NO ID3 tags, just to see what the system acts like in this case.

remember this is a BETA TESTING so it should NOT be used on any live site whatsoever. only on testing environments!

THANKS A LOT!

i'd like to join the test, too!

(well, you might have guessed already :-)

Im in

@radioMG I have enabled it for you

@Chris17 I have to prepare the normal version yet. you will have to wait a little bit

Installed and tested on J2.5 with jomsocial.
I still have problem with å ä ö. The filenamne looks like this Dannys - Det Börjar Växa Kärlek.mp3

In back-end its right

http://www.allttillbarnen.se/index.php?option=com_muscol&view=album&id=3&Itemid=151

For back-end access, please send me an email.

ok! well, that's what beta testing is for to fix these things.

question: even if the filename is not recognized correctly, does it IMPORT correctly?
what about the other things? any luck using the ID3 tag recognizion?

as i am still in a testing phase and not in a production environment, i wouldn't mind to use the beta... you know i'm impatient.

for those who want to test the ID3 tags of their files, this might be handy:

https://github.com/downloads/judwhite/idsharp/idsharp1100-examples.zip

edit: oh, i see... you mean that the beta is for the joomsocial version...

yes I know Chris, the thing is that I haven't the "non-community" package ready yet which is what the other guys are trying.

I'll keep you posted! thanks!!!

Everything else works just great for me
I like the Artist/album upload on one page..

It only one thing i miss and thats when you upload a album, it should create an director of the album. That should be great, for now its only a lots of mp3 file in the same director.

This is going to be great Germi

To something else..
How doese the "song servers" work? I have write my settings but i only search the /song folders, and if i remove /songs it search the /root ..

It should be great for an exapel if i can use ftp://usernameassword@my-song-server:21 to add album beacurse i have a webradio. My music and radio is on my windows, the webpage is on linux..

Hello @RadioMG:

i'm curious... do you have a streaming solution working together with MusCol and which software do you use on Windows for streaming?

btw, i also did not understand how to use "song servers" yet.

regards

chris

Hi germi,

I'm interested by your project

regards,
rudy

Do you have a solution for Swedish characters yet? I feel like I can not continue to evaluate it properly until it is ready.
I do not know what you have done with discdog, but now it works great. Fast searching and finding the album.

well as I understand the problem is not on IMPORTING, but on PLAYING the songs, right?

if that's the case, can you try this? please replace this file for
/components/com_muscol/helpers/xspf.php (unzip first) [file name=xspf.zip size=983]http://www.joomlamusicsolutions.com/images/fbfiles/files/xspf.zip[/file]

That was a little bit of help
It can play some of the songs, but not all.

It cant play this: http://allttillbarnen.se/index.php?option=com_muscol&view=song&id=60&Itemid=151

If you go here: http://allttillbarnen.se/index.php?option=com_muscol&view=album&id=4&Itemid=151 - The last song you can play here, but when you press the name and come here http://allttillbarnen.se/index.php?option=com_muscol&view=song&id=68&Itemid=151 the song dont work.

If you try to download the songs, its correct with å ä ö så it is the player.

I can play the songs in both pages, no problem.

also you are using the HTML5 player. I though you were testing Flash.

in CHROME (which I'm using) all the songs play GOOD anywhere.

Im going to change, i want to use flash..
Im using the latest firefox..

Can you play this? i cant..
http://allttillbarnen.se/index.php?option=com_muscol&view=song&id=60&Itemid=151

I am still working on testing this. My biggest problem is that I will not let a web app move my music library. I have everything extremely well organized and tagged. Everything is named very specific and the folders are laid out in a very specific structure. The last thing I want is to have anything move, edit, rename, delete or copy stuff within my music library. I am a firm believer that a web app should only read ones media files. As such, whenever I have media that needs to be accessed via the website, I only give the web service read rights.

It would be really nice if MC would work like other programs where it could just read the tags and then point to the files instead of moving and renaming the files. For example, I could have my web server and htdocs directory running on my local C: drive and my music on my local D: drive.

It would be really nice if you add the ability to read files on the computer outside of the songs folder and web path. This would add greater security and ease of use and add massive value to this product! Doing so would put it in league with other streaming software. Currently with these security flaws, I am only able to host music that that the artists are giving away for free, or 30 sec clips of paid music. None of my artist friends want their music placed openly within directories on the website.

For now, I will copy a bunch of test songs over to my desktop so I can test out the move and read feature and report on my findings shortly.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE add the feature to read music files on one's server that are not published to the web. :cheer:

hello greengeek

I understand what you say, you have asked for this before, I know and I remember (by the way MC does not move files...!)

but.... this beta testing was for checking the ID3 tag reading, that was the idea...! you haven't told me nothing about this, which was the thing to test...!

also, remember that adding the non-url path option would indeed allow to read from a non-web folder, but that thing per-se would not make a difference on security right away (golden rule: if you can LISTEN, you can DOWNLOAD)

I have a bunch of thoughts on that, but I will save it for a different topic as not to derail this one.

As far as beta testing the new update:

On individual albums the id3 tag reading works great! It was able to create the artist and albums and even grab all the data and artwork. These were with id3 2.4 tagged files located on a windows 7 box.

I tried adding albums from the top level, where it listed all the folder / album names. I could not seem to find a way to add more than 1 album at a time if the album was in another folder off of the songs folder.

For example a setup like this:

songs\\queen\\greatest hits\\
songs\\celine dion\\greatest hits\\
songs\\matchbox twenty\\greatest hits\\

I could not get it to read all of them in just 1 go. I had to go into individual album folders first. Is it possible to have it read and create artist, albums, and songs, from all folders and sub folders that are within the songs folder?

All my files use utf-8 charset for the tagging. For the file system's charset it is windows, so I believe it is limited to cp1252 but I remove any special characters out of the file names that might conflict with either the cp1252, iso-8859-1, or utf-8 character sets. So any non latin characters or any accents or what not, i remove from the file names. This helps avoid conflicts with most programs.

I tried adding special characters into the folder names just to see how MC would handle it. For example, if the artist name folder is called Accu§er then MC could not read it.

It appears that MC will read all main tag information. Could we get it to also read the information that is listed under the MC Edition details? Like country, catalog number, label? Maybe even add an option to read the comments id3 field to be placed in the MC review box?

Possibly another consideration would be to rework the genres in MC to be more free form. That way you could pull all the genre tag information out of the id3 tags. If it was free form, it could even pull out multiple genre tags for files that are tagged with more than 1 genre in the id3 tags.

Sorry, edited the above post to add more info.

thanks for the feedback!

the system cannot read all teh subfolders in 1 go... it's just the "current" folder. but if you have many files in that folder, from different artists and albums, it will create them anyway.

about the extra data information: well, I believe "Country" is for instance NOT stored in the ID3 tags... same for catalog number. I guess comments, however, yes they could be placed in the review box (I don't know if you have tried, but actually if the song has LYRICS, it does import them as well)

about genres: yes that is something we coudl look at, but maybe the first release will focus only on ID3 tag, and when this has been out for a while and working for everyone, we can make the genres "more free", as you say

I'll take a look at that special characters issue in folder names.

Thanks!

Hmm, I may have found an issue. MC doesn't seem to like various artists or compilation albums. I tried to have it create an album for Now That's What I Call Music! 38.

Instead of just 1 album with all the different artists on it, it created an album for each artist. So 20 different albums. The track numbers, and the song names, and even the album names were correct. But instead of showing just 1 album under various artists, it broke them all apart and put them under all the individual artists in the compilation.

You can see it at: http://threechimps.com/test/index.php/mc-test

Maybe there should be a group by folder option, or maybe a check box one can click that will tell MC to treat the folder at a multiple artist or compilation album. So when MC reads the next group of files it doesn't break them apart into multiple albums?

hmmm I see what you say, but this is how actually it works. I mean:
i checks if there's already an album with the SAME NAME, and belonging to the SAME ARTIST. if not, then it will create the album..

so, that's the NORMAL behavior.. although I see it's a pity in these cases... but honestly I don't see how can Music Collection identify if these files actuall belong to a compilation... :S

Sorry, I must of edited my reply when you were typing yours. Basically a simple check box that would allow the user to specify if the album they are importing will be one.

How a lot of other programs do it, is they group them together automatically if the album has the same name and same year. Though that can also be problematic at times. A few others go the extra mile and check to see if the files have musicbrainz IDs and then will separate them after they group them by album name and year if they have different MBIDs.

Most tagging programs also support the Compilation field. Where if it is marked as true, then you would know its a compilation. The other option is most tagging programs also have not only artist, but album artist. You could group by album artist, then list the songs by artists.

yes, but the thing is that you can ALREADY achieve this using the scan folder function, but clickin on "create album" instead of "process id3 tags"... but it's true it will put everything unders the same artist...

I see. I tried that way originally, but then decided to try the other way as it appeared broken. When I clicked on the Create a new album using these files, it showed the loading spinning icon going constantly.

It also did not set an artist, but instead gave me a red box that "Could not find artist matching Now Thats What I Call Music 38 (2011) (US). Please select artist from list."

It appears to have pulled the song info. However it left the Album name, Year, artwork, and all the rest of the fields under the Details category blank.

Maybe a simple fix could be if one clicks on "Create a new album using these files" and there are more than 1 artist, to default to "Various Artists" or what ever name could be predefined or in the language files. As well as still pull the Album name, Year, and artwork if its all the same.

So I created a Various Artists artist and used the "Create a new album using these files". I then assigned the artist to the "Various Artist" artist that I had made. I noticed one bug using the "Create a new album using these files" Instead of just listing the song names, it added the track name to the song name. So it would show track "1" then the song "01 Born This Way" I brought up my tagging software and verified the song names were correct and did not have the track number within the song name field. It should not be including the track number within the song name. Please see http://threechimps.com/test/index.php/mc-test/v/26-various-artists/25-now-thats-what-i-call-music-38


Also it would be nice when using this option if it would still show the artists next to each track so one knows who the artist is. Currently it appears to be just dropping the artist names. It would be nice if it would look like this instead http://www.joomlamusicsolutions.com/en/music-collection-demo/g/george-harrison/concert-for-george.html