Rockbox Technical Forums
Support and General Use => Theming and Appearance Customization => Topic started by: Clark on June 09, 2018, 11:15:06 AM
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Hi,
As I was reaching the iPod classic’s firmware data limit (40000 songs approx), I decided to give Rockbox a try. I immediately loved the vast customization it allows, but there’s one thing that I couldn’t figure out even after hours of investigations : is it possible to have the album artworks displayed as I browse the Album Menu in « Database », just like the original firmware does? What about the artist name (Rockbox only shows the album names, not very convenient for huge libraries)?
I hope this is not a repost... but I honestly lost hope in finding an answer on my own!
Thank you for your help
-Clark
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is it possible to have the album artworks displayed as I browse the Album Menu in « Database », just like the original firmware does?
As far as I know this is not possible. The icons on the left (if activated) are picture files associated with a menu entry. But try pictureflow.
What about the artist name (Rockbox only shows the album names, not very convenient for huge libraries)?
Where does this happen? On the While Playing Screen or in Database? Does the artist name exist?
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Thanks for your prompt reply cereal killer,
Where does this happen? On the While Playing Screen or in Database? Does the artist name exist?
In the database, where I browse by Albums, I would find it convenient to see the Artists mentionned just next
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Have a look at https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/DataBase#Examples
Maybe you can use a custom tagnavi file to achieve this.
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:) Thanks for the tips Cereal but holy christ that doesn't look like casual tweaking! Do you have any idea of anyone who could give some help with that? I'm definitely willing to pay the person who's gonna take the time to sort that code for me!
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I don't think custom tagnavi is capable of doing that. It would indeed be neat if Rockbox did that, but I think it would require serious rewritting of Rockbox itself. Pictureflow is the closest you can get.*
(Now if you are good enough with C/C++ to rewrite picture flow so it will let you sort by artist as well as album - which I reckon would be far easier than rewritting Rockbox's browser, but still a lot of work - that would be great! I honestly believe there was once a time when I would have been capable of doing that, but not any more, all the relevant brain-cells have long since died).
Though I've given up using picture flow because the size of my library means it takes hours to build the picture database.
* Edit - oh, never mind, I misunderstood your question, thought you meant showing album art. Putting the artist name in there might be possible with tagnavi, but I'm not clear what it is you want and how that differs from just looking at the database by artist.
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Yeah the picture flow thing isn't so convenient!
What I would love to achieve:
1. I usually browse by "Albums" rather than "Artists" (So that DJ's mixes with proper tags for each track end up in one single folder for example...), and having the Artist Name specified after the album in any fashion would be super convenient.
2. Getting rid of the huge pile of "The" in the album/artist lists... It'd would really, really relieve me if someone could find a way to have the "The" ignored, without having to retag everything as, lets say, "Beatles, The".
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You cant use tagnavi for that. I've just lost hope in finding an answer.
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You cant use tagnavi for that. I've just lost hope in finding an answer.
You could have a tagnavi that made an 'artist by initial' menu that put all the 'the..' bands in a separate entry, under 'the...' rather than 't', so the top level artist-by-initial would be be
q
r
s
t
the
u
v
...
with the 'the...' bands listed alphabetically in the 'the' submenu.
That seems to be the best one could do. Don't think there's a way to get them into the main listing in 'real alphabetical' order.
As far as the other point goes, the problem is that 'artist' is a property of a track not an album (even 'album artist' is actually stored in the tag of an individual track). So the database can only append 'artist' to the track title, not to the album name. After all, the album might have tracks with different artists, even different album artists, specified, so how can it know which one to use?
There would need to be a more complicated tagnavigation engine, that let you use a heirachy with levels made out of an arbitrary combo of tags instead of just picking one of them at each level.
But surely those DJ mix albums would have the DJ name as the album artist, so browsing by album artist ought to work?