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[fugitillo]

Hello everybody. I'm a completely newbie so please forgive me it this problem is too obvious. I'd like to store for every album a review from a magazine or a newsletter. I can do it for every song, but I can't figure out how can I do it for an album, and display the album art, the reviews..., etc. while playing any of the songs.

Thanks in advance from sunny Spain.

[Alex B]

You can import many kinds of files to MC.

If the additional album files are image files you can make an album playlist that contains these images besides the music files. When you play this playlist MC shows the images in a slideshow. A slideshow in the Playing Now display has several controls like: previous, next, pause, zoom, slide change interval, transition effects etc. Some of the controls are available in a right-click menu. The zoom feature can be used with the + and - keys and the mouse wheel.

In general, if you have a music file playing you can just select a bunch of image files and play them. They will automatically appear in a new slideshow.

If the additional files are in a document format (e.g. txt, doc, xls, pdf, htm etc) MC uses external applications for displaying them. You can open a document file by double-clicking it.

In this thread I explained how to create an "All Media" view scheme that can be used for displaying all media types simultaneously: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=31061.0

[pank2002]

You can also create a new library field, e.g. Album Review, and put the review into this field. It will be faster if you don't store the info within the file.

When playing back the file you can have track info show it. I would probably be easy to edit the MultiInfo track info...

[hit_ny]

You can also create a new library field, e.g. Album Review, and put the review into this field. It will be faster if you don't store the info within the file.

I'm not clear on this one...i was under the impression if its a large library, storing reviews in the library would be the bottle neck. Regardless of whether its stored in the file or not, the text review will always be stored in the library.

Since the same review will be stored (redundantly) in each file of an album and its corresponding library counterpart, library gets bloated and becomes slower to load.

The only way i can see is not to store it in the library at all if its a large library, otherwise, about 50k files seems about as much as it can handle withough getting sluggish.

[Alex B]

I like the separate document approach. Quite often I save complete web pages in mht format. Mht is a web archive file format that includes also the images in a single file. At least IE6 and Opera 9 can create mht documents from individual web pages.

[modelmaker]

I find it easier to use the Artist Info for seeking reviews.
It's a direct link to the All Music Guide, which has both artist bios and album reviews 2 to 3 clicks away and you don't need to use up your own memory to store the stuff and of course there's no performance hit either. I have added the Artist Info button to the top & bottom tool bars for my convience.

[fugitillo]

Thanks for your kind answers. The music I love is not allways reviewed in just one place. I use funprox.com, sea of tranquility, progarchives, etc., so the solution of placing a button link is not complete, but I'll try it as it seems easy and elegant. Thank you, modelmaker. I like also to save the review pages as .mht, to have it as a separate document and to invoke it as needed. Some time ago I built an MS Acces database that worked that way, but was hard to maintain so I turned out to MC and I like it a lot. Thank you.

[hit_ny]

Quite often I save complete web pages in mht format. Mht is a web archive file format that includes also the images in a single file. At least IE6 and Opera 9 can create mht documents from individual web pages.

Is there any way to get MC to show those mht's as part of a Track info in the viz area.

...Instead of opening another app.

[Alex B]

Is there any way to get MC to show those mht's as part of a Track info in the viz area.

...Instead of opening another app.

I suppose so. An mht file contains browser code that IE can show. Probably someone would just need to write the Track Info Viz code. However, it would be rather unpractical since a complete webpage is too big for the PN display.

[hit_ny]

No not necessary to fit, if you had scroll bars, the viz area becomes like a browser.

That way there isn't the alt+tab to IE and back. Not like that's a problem but was thinking it would give a more integrated feel. If you felt it was too small, just dbl click the horizontal grabber and u have the whole web page, click again and its back to PN.

Not sure how well this plays in practice, but just a thought. Can get a bit tedious to save everything in mht format for each album. So much easier if it would also be able to go to the net,  and display Artist  Info in the viz space.

but..i think, i vaguely recall the reason this was shot down was that since IE is the easiest to integrate here, it could possibly be a security risk. Embedding any other browser brings its own headaches.

*ACK*

[Alex B]

My main reasons for saving certain album or artist related web pages in mht format are:

- A web link may be gone tomorrow.
- After finding an interesting article I may want to read it later during listening to the music.
- The mht format saves the complete web page permantly in a single file.
- I can use an archived document anywhere also without an internet connection.
- Earlier I printed some web pages to pdf format or just copied the good parts of the text to a text document, but mht is easier if the page layout and design is usable. It may also simply look good if the web designer has done good job. I still copy things like AMG reviews to a txt file. Some sites use code that doesn't work in an archived file or the page may contain stuff that I don't want to include.