I have been using a handy program called mp3tag for quite awhile to embed ID3 tag info and album art into my MP3 files. It also creates playlists and renames files simply to a preferred scheme. My preferred is ##-artistname - releasedate - songtitle.mp3 but can be manipulated to whatever. now you are probably wondering what that has to do with the hub. Well while playing with it yesterday and using one of JoeySmiths demo music xml files I was able to make this program also generate a valid mp3 album xml sheet compatible with the hub. Then all you have to do is run the album through TG to create the moviesheet.
Here are my settings for mp3tag. You can extract the whole thing to “C:\Documents and Settings<user>\Application Data\Mp3tag” or just the “xml.mte” to “C:\Documents and Settings<user>\Application Data\Mp3tag\export”
To utilize the script its in file-export-xml. File name needs to be the same as the folder name for the album in order to work on the hub.
Drizzt, this is totally awesome. I tried to do the same a while back but could not figure out how to properly setup the export configuration file (.mte). I was using the 2.49 version at the time.
I and I’m sure other would greatly appreciated it, if you would. I try to create one over the period of a few days but the hub never could read the generated XML and display it. Maybe my naming convention was setup wrong.
This is a great find, thank you drizzt09 will save me a few hours (and probably some hair loss :smileyvery-happy: )
On a slight tangent.
I’m using Joey’s theme and I have a rather large music collection, but I really like the way Tinwarble’s MoJo theme handles it.
For example I have my music in Artists folder and then albums in separate folder within. When scrolling the artist folder sit shows a picture of each artist (in a square folder) . Upon clicking the artist, the album(s) for that artist are then displayed in separate album folders with the album art being used as the folder cover again in a square shape, then you click the album and the album cover art is displayed with the tracks listed (hope this makes sense )
I’m not sure If I can replicate the above using Joeys theme as it looks like you can only do them by albums? (I’m probably wrong) what’s everyone else doing?
I should work but with Joeys theme I do not believe you can just throw an image in the folder and rename it… I think it would need to be generated by his music template. Best to ask him that question. You would only need the xml in with the music of course.
Joey did not provide instructions for music with his latest theme so it was a learning curve for me. Probably best to ask him in his thread for the best answers.
drizzt09 , this is amazing! thanks so much for letting us know about how to do this. Copied your xml.mte file to the correct directory and was able to export the new XML to the albums directory no problem.
Thank you so much for sharing. In my previous attempt at generating .xml with Mp3Tag, I was trying to include to name of each tracks for the album .xml. I know there is a “loop” command which can be used but I would end up getting an error message when exporting. I will try again when I have a chance. Maybe with your .mte and a bit more experimenting I will get to result I’m looking for.
I wish I could Kudo more than once. Thanks a lot. I tried to do this but I could never get it right. My programming skills have never been the best. Again Thank You.
Okay, thought i had it all but apparenty am confused. I have run the MP3tag app to generate the XML file. My my music is all in FLAC and already had all the metadata and album cover embeded, as well as a folder.jpg for each album, which are all in individual folders.
So, now what do I do? I have generated the XML into the folder of each album but am not sure how to get to view it in the same way I view my movie XMLs. I am using the MOJO theme. I saw that I need to run the albums through TG but do I still need to do that if I already have the folder.jpg?
Sorry to be so confused. I have not really used TG as I went through my movies with Hubgen. Seems that there are only two views for music and neither read the XML. Here is a sample XML that was generated.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
AC/DC
Hard Rock
1976
N/A
N/A
N/A
So, can anyone point me in the right directions please. I am excited with the prospect of having my music setup with sheets like my movies are.
Ahh I think I got it. So per song you can look at the data that is in the XML with Artist, Genre and Year.
So my question now becomes: I already have all of that info embeded into my FLAC files and i see all of that when I am simply playing an album, along with the album cover, next song etc. So most of the info I already have available.
What I am figuring out here is that by manually adding data to the section of the XML I can bring that up vy hitting “view info” when listening to an album. Is that what you are using this to do? You would use this for an album review or info about the muscians / band or album there?
If there is more I am still missing let me know. Also are you manually editing that section or scraping that from a DB somewhere? I am trying to decide if I am going to go through my albums and add the reviews etc from someplace like allmusic dot com.
with the download the overview section is blank so in mp3tag you can add whatever info you wanna put in about the artist or album. Or if you replace the downloaded mte code with what I pasted a few posts back it automaticially puts the album track listing in the overview section. dont need to put anything manually.
Unfortunately I have not seen a way for mp3tag to scrape album/artist information data automatically.
But yes the purpose of having the xml for music on the hub is for the options-view info. If you do not wish to use this feature you do not need to. It just depends if its a feature you are interested in utilizing.
Perfect drizzt09, got it and it is going to work really well for me now that I have been playing with it. I have been collecting live recordings for many years so they are a huge part of my music collection. In each music folder I have a text file that indicates info about the concert, the recording equiment used and stuff like that. I realized that your setup is going to work great for that. Instead of me having to connect to the hub via my laptop to read that info when I am listening to a show, I am now going to have it all in the XML and just be able to pull it up on the TV. Killer.
My next project is to write a script that takes the data from my info.txt file that is in every concert’s directory and have it pulled into the overview section of the XML file in that directory. If I cant figure that out, “cut and paste” it is :smileyvery-happy:
Thanks so much for the help and getting this app to make the XML files. Going to work like a charm for my needs now that I understand it.
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