cmus browser

[Udo Hortian]

Hello,

I discovered cmus some days ago and I like it. However I have a few
questions about it:

1) Is it easily possible to list all tracks of a given album? If all
tracks are by the same artist, this is trivial. But if not it seems that
the tracks are split between the artists in the artist/album view. I
guess this is not possible now, since in the views, as they are, this has
no place. One could achieve this using filters, but I was hoping for an
easier solution.

2) Is there a possibility to list all tracks of a given artist not matter
to which album they belong? In my situation this is very desirable. I
would expect all these tracks to appear when selecting the artist in the
artist/album view without selecting any album. Is this possible? If not now,
what do you think about implementing this?

3) Is there an easy possibility to store which files have been played,
ideally together with a timestamp.

4) Is there in a way to execute two instances of cmus with output to
different sound cards? This would be useful for prelistening while
playing something else.


Best regards,
Udo

[Marco]

Post by Udo Hortian
1) Is it easily possible to list all tracks of a given album?

I guess the easiest is to filter the album in the sorted library view.

Post by Udo Hortian
If all tracks are by the same artist, this is trivial. But if not
it seems that the tracks are split between the artists in the
artist/album view.

It seems that your files are not correctly tagged. Add the
compilation tag, see

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.audio.cmus.devel/780
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.audio.cmus.devel/787

Post by Udo Hortian
2) Is there a possibility to list all tracks of a given artist not matter
to which album they belong?

What's wrong with filtering the artist in the sorted library view?

Post by Udo Hortian
4) Is there in a way to execute two instances of cmus with output to
different sound cards? This would be useful for prelistening while
playing something else.

You can use the --listen <socket> argument to provide an alternative
socket. Then you can start a second instance. Redirect the sound to
the desired devices using the sound server, that's not the job of
the music player.

Marco

[Udo Hortian]

Post by Marco
It seems that your files are not correctly tagged. Add the
compilation tag, see
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.audio.cmus.devel/780

I see a similar behaviour as described by Marco there. I thought it is
meant to be like this.

So how should I change my tags? What if there is no reasonable tag for
"albumartist"? What should it be in the case of samplers?

Post by Marco

Post by Udo Hortian
2) Is there a possibility to list all tracks of a given artist not matter
to which album they belong?

What's wrong with filtering the artist in the sorted library view?

I have to type in the name of the artist. That's all.

Post by Marco

Post by Udo Hortian
4) Is there in a way to execute two instances of cmus with output to
different sound cards? This would be useful for prelistening while
playing something else.

You can use the --listen <socket> argument to provide an alternative
socket. Then you can start a second instance. Redirect the sound to
the desired devices using the sound server, that's not the job of
the music player.

Thank you. I will try this. I know jack can do such redirections. Is
this also possible with pulseaudio?

Best regards,
Udo

[Marco]

Post by Udo Hortian

Post by Marco
It seems that your files are not correctly tagged. Add the
compilation tag, see
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.audio.cmus.devel/780

I see a similar behaviour as described by Marco there. I thought it is
meant to be like this.
So how should I change my tags? What if there is no reasonable tag for
"albumartist"? What should it be in the case of samplers?

For FLAC/Vorbis set the *compilation* tag, e.g. using

lltag --yes --tag COMPILATION=yes <file>

For MP3 set the *TCMP* tag, e.g. using

eyeD3 \
--set-text-frame=TCMP:yes \
--no-tagging-time-frame \
<file>

Then the compilations are listed as “Various Artists”, if you don't
want this, provide an “albumartist” tag.

Marco

[yawfle]

Post by Udo Hortian
3) Is there an easy possibility to store which files have been played,
ideally together with a timestamp.

Yes, you can make a script named 'playlog.sh' :

#!/bin/bash

echo "$(date)" "$4" >> playlog.txt

...or similar, and then set the status_display_program preference in cmus to be the path to the script. You can replace the "$4" parameter (which will be the full path of the file, suitable for using the log as a playlist later) with any of the other parameters supplied, which are

status <playing|stopped|etc> file <file_path> artist <artist> album <album> tracknumber <nn> title <title> date <release_date> duration <length_in_seconds>

hope that helps.