Always wanted a quick overview about the works of an artist or band? Well, here it is. ArtistAgent will provide you with a clear overview of the artist and album that is being played in XMMS. Currently, only XMMS is supported. Soon I will include other players like Juk and Noatun.
Information displayed:
- Image of artist / band - Biography of artist / band - Genre catagories - Nationality of artist / band - All released albums - Known album compilations with artist / band - Album image of currently played track - Album label and release date - Album tracks of currently played track
All images and information is stored on disk for faster and off-line display. All information of artist and album are seperately 'pickled' into a dictionary. Currently I'm working on a module which will give you easy access to this data.
By default, all information is stored under the theme's subdirectory 'albumart'. You can change this with the theme configuration menu.
Configuration options:
- Default encoding: Here you can select the encoding used to read the tags correctly Choices: - ASCII - LATIN-1 - ISO-8859-1 - ISO-8859-2 - ISO-8859-15 (default) - UTF-8 - UTF-16
- ID3 source: Select the ID3 version that you like to be used for reading the tags Choices: - ID3v1 - ID3v2 (default)
- Album art path: Select a directory where you want the data to be stored. Default directory is theme_path/albumart/
The following settings may be necessary when XMMS is streaming media from a web jukebox
- Local media path: Here you can select the root where your music files are stored This is used to determine the path to the track being played when it is streamed. Also see 'Server media path'
- Server media path: Here you can set the server path to your music (eg/ http://my.home.server/music/ )
Requirements:
- KDE 3.2 / 3.3 - XMMS - xmmspy (http://www.python.org/pypi?:action=display&name=xmmspy&version=0.4)
For reading tags the theme tries to load the following python modules: - pyvorbis (http://www.andrewchatham.com/pyogg/) - eyeD3 (http://eyed3.nicfit.net/) OR - id3 (http://www.python.org/pypi?:action=display&name=PyID3&version=0.5.5)
eyeD3 is preferred as it is easier to install and has less issues. If it can't load any of them it will read tags by using the commandline utilities instead (you should have those in order to play your media anyway)
Usage:
Start the theme and read the introduction which explains in short what this theme does and how it matches tags. You can click on the artist image to get a list of albums released by the artist or band and a list of compilations that include songs from the artist as well. When a biography is available from the artist, it will show the first few lines when the text is too large. Click on 'more' to read the complete biography. When it tries to match an artist and or album for the first time, it might take a few seconds before it shows the results. The next time it will get the information from disk.
That's all! I hope you enjoy it.Last changelog:
28-12
Due to a stupid typo in the adjusted script, artist name could not always be recognized. Changed it, so it should now be able to find an artist image correctly when available on RollingStone.com.
25-12
Adjusted script so that you can add images yourself when it dowsn't find one for you. (Images must be named as the corresponding data files with the extension JPG). These images will then be loaded the next time you play the track.
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