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[psam]

The online media slide show feature in Theater Mode is a very attractive option, when we are listening to music.

I was wondering , if this feature could be a little more versatile.

I am not sure exactly which parameters in the ID3 tags are being used to find relevant images, but I presume they are artist name, album , track name etc.

In some cases, this works like a charm. For example, when I play Eric Dolphy, pictures of the artist or relevant album covers are fine.

When I play Greek music (I am Greek by the way), all sorts of irrelevant pictures are being retrieved. Either because the ID3 tag is in Greek characters, or because a word in the ID3 tag means something else in English.

For example when I play songs by a great lady singer called "Marinella", I am getting mostly pictures of a village in Italy called Marinella, which is kind of distracting on my TV. The same with another singer called Arleta. There seems to be a city called Arlete in the US, so photos of various Arleta citizens pop-up in my living room.

So, my suggestion is, can we users have some control over the media slideshow?

Maybe we can override the automatic correlation based on the ID3 tags? Like having a free text field we can use to enter the search parameters?

This could be very interesting in other ways too.

When I listen to classical music by Charpentier for example, the search could be based on "Renaissance Paintings".

Whan I listen to spanish guitar, use  "Pablo Picasso"

Think about if if you find the time!!!

Thanks,
Pete

[MrHaugen]

This is a problem for users with much of the non US pop music, as well as some TV Show and movie titles. It's been suggested that we need manual overrides for such occasions. There's already in place art folders for lots of other things. Why not add a folder for music, show and movie backgrounds so we can manually override the slide shows? This would also help very much with better responses when navigating items. So the backgrounds are updated immediately on selection changes, instead of downloading images and getting the updated image long after you've navigated to other items.

[wig]

The online media slide show feature in Theater Mode is a very attractive option, when we are listening to music.

I was wondering , if this feature could be a little more versatile.

I am not sure exactly which parameters in the ID3 tags are being used to find relevant images, but I presume they are artist name, album , track name etc.

In some cases, this works like a charm. For example, when I play Eric Dolphy, pictures of the artist or relevant album covers are fine.

When I play Greek music (I am Greek by the way), all sorts of irrelevant pictures are being retrieved. Either because the ID3 tag is in Greek characters, or because a word in the ID3 tag means something else in English.

For example when I play songs by a great lady singer called "Marinella", I am getting mostly pictures of a village in Italy called Marinella, which is kind of distracting on my TV. The same with another singer called Arleta. There seems to be a city called Arlete in the US, so photos of various Arleta citizens pop-up in my living room.

So, my suggestion is, can we users have some control over the media slideshow?

Maybe we can override the automatic correlation based on the ID3 tags? Like having a free text field we can use to enter the search parameters?

This could be very interesting in other ways too.

When I listen to classical music by Charpentier for example, the search could be based on "Renaissance Paintings".

Whan I listen to spanish guitar, use  "Pablo Picasso"

Think about if if you find the time!!!

Thanks,
Pete

Like MrHaugen said, we've requested more control and flexibility over the Online Slideshow in the past. Hopefully it's something they are considering for future development.

In the meantime, you can avoid most of the irrelevant images by turning off Google Images as a picture source.

Tools > Options > Theater View > Theme > Online Media Slideshow , uncheck Google Images.

[fitbrit]

Playing 'Seal' and suddenly getting images of baby marine mammals being clubbed to death does little to enhance music listening.

[marko]

• Go to your MC install directory and enter the "Data" directory there.
• create a new folder here called "Custom Resources"
• Go into the existing "Default Resources" folder and copy the "ArtistSearch.txt" file
• Go back to the custom folder you created in step 2 and paste the "ArtistSearch.txt" file in there.
• Now open this txt file from the custom folder and add to it.

Playing 'Seal' and suddenly getting images of baby marine mammals being clubbed to death does little to enhance music listening.

adding:

Seal
Seal Music

to your custom file will fix that.

I had to do a similar thing for the band "Texas" to stop all the map images coming down!

[wig]

• Go to your MC install directory and enter the "Data" directory there.
• create a new folder here called "Custom Resources"
• Go into the existing "Default Resources" folder and copy the "ArtistSearch.txt" file
• Go back to the custom folder you created in step 2 and paste the "ArtistSearch.txt" file in there.
• Now open this txt file from the custom folder and add to it.

adding:

Seal
Seal Music

to your custom file will fix that.

Interesting. So this is an exclusion file? Is it for all Online Slideshow search locations, or just Google Images?

[marko]

I don't think it's an exclusion file, no. My understanding is that if the artist equals seal, then instead of searching for "seal" and returning mammal clubbing images, it searches for "seal music" and comes back with images of the artist "Seal"

I'm also sure that it only works for music playback, which I believe uses Google Images.

[sKiZo]

First post, so I'll get all the smilies out of the way ...

  ?

I feel sooOOOOooo much better now. <G>

On a somewhat related note ... can the slideshow be stored to the local drive instead of having to have a live connection? I absolutely like the feature, but my five giggle bites a month go fast enough as it is ... be nice to have a button that you can click towards the end of an album and say ... ya ... I like that ... keep it! I'm sure those are stored to a temp directory while the music is playing, so it do sound doable.

<edit>
One other thought ... if the slide files were stored in a local drive using the same structure as the media files (for instance: DVD/Album/Track) we could then scan those and trash the ones we don't want. You think looking at baby seals being clubbed is bad, try a recent pic of Mick Jagger ... <urp!>
</edit>

[sKiZo]

HellooooOOOOoooo

<BUMP>

[marko]

For example when I play songs by a great lady singer called "Marinella", I am getting mostly pictures of a village in Italy called Marinella, which is kind of distracting on my TV. The same with another singer called Arleta. There seems to be a city called Arlete in the US, so photos of various Arleta citizens pop-up in my living room.

So, my suggestion is, can we users have some control over the media slideshow?

Maybe we can override the automatic correlation based on the ID3 tags? Like having a free text field we can use to enter the search parameters?

I feel I may have addressed these issues at least, when I wrote:

• Go to your MC install directory and enter the "Data" directory there.
• create a new folder here called "Custom Resources"
• Go into the existing "Default Resources" folder and copy the "ArtistSearch.txt" file
• Go back to the custom folder you created in step 2 and paste the "ArtistSearch.txt" file in there.
• Now open this txt file from the custom folder and add to it.

adding:

Seal
Seal Music

to your custom file will fix that.

I had to do a similar thing for the band "Texas" to stop all the map images coming down!

Did you try this at all?

[FastKayak]

sKiZo, listen to Jimmy Buffett and be ready to duck with Warren Buffett shows up.  Not as bad as Mick but unsettling in its own way. 

Anyway, I too would like to see some controls.  In my case pictures in portrait mode are always cut off and I've never figured out how to stop that (eg. nose and down with no forehead or sometimes just the reverse.)

FastKayak / Larry

[sKiZo]

Or worse ... the Golden Corral Buffet.

I'm on a diet right now and listen to music to keep my mind off food ...  

Not sure if there's any copyright issues involved. Right now MC isn't doing much more than your standard search and view, which is perfectly acceptable, but having JRiver saving copies offline could be a problem. That said, just having the ability to do it myself - search the net, find pics I like, save those to the individual album folder (or artist, if it's not album specific) and have those run in an offline slideshow - would be great. T'were me, I'd set it up so any images other than "folder.jpg" (the cover pic if you've got it set up that way - which I do) would automatically turn off the online search and run in slideshow mode if present in those folders, AND a software switch is checked in the options list. I mean ... it's not like gooooogle can be sued for infringement if I happen to save a pic offline that I found using their software, right? If there's no pics present, MC defaults back to the online search, or with another switch, no search at all. Just the generic wallpaper, even if you are online. I'd also add a "generic" pic folder for stuff you wouldn't mind seeing pretty much anywhere during a listening session. In a perfect world, I'd then be able to build and save a control file (stashed in the same directory as the images, that I could use to set slide order, how long the slide is displayed, transitions ... make my own stage show to go with the music.

Not asking for much ... am I? <G>


In your case, you'd be able to resize pics as needed to fit your resolution settings.