Keyboard (2)

My Media Center madness knows no boundaries. When shopping for paint for my house, I found the shop's paint blending machine was equipped with a very tiny keyboard with integrated trackball. How neat would that look in the living room? A trackball is much more precize than the little joystick-like device I have on my keyboard. On the downside: it was attached by a cable. Of course, I had to ask the shop attendant if I could inspect their equipment from up close. On the back it said iOne, and after I had bought my paint and returned home, I found their website. Sure enough, they do have similar keyboards in multiple wireless versions.

The best choice appears to be the Scorpius P20MT model. It combines a compact sized keyboard with 10 meters of RF range, multimedia keys and a trackball.

Update April 24th 2008:

Logitech released an innovative design for a Media Center PC keyboard with the diNovo Mini. It features bi-colored back lighting and a multifunctional touch pad. As with all products in the diNovo line: the price is prohibitive and I don't particularly like the style, but it has a high gadget factor.

And if you like using a laptop style touchpad, your keyboard of choice may very well be the Adesso SlimTouch Wireless. Their site also features other interesting keyboards.

Antec Fusion HTPC case

Tom's hardware has posted a review of the Antec Fusion HTPC case. The timing seems odd, this product is not exactly new on the market. But they did a thorough job and it is a nice case.

Album Artist View

I've been blogging before about the Album Artist view in My Music. I found out that not all of my album artists were displaying correctly, so I had to sink some extra calories in it.

In general, I like to play music by album. And I want to select an album from a list of artists. The trick is in here: I don't like to have artists in that list that don't have full albums on my harddrive. Hence the definition of album artist. Every album on my harddrive has a single album artist. If the album is a compilation album, the album artist is "Various". If the album contains guest artists or duets, the artist of the particular song can be "Santana featuring Rob Thomas", the album artist is still just "Santana".

The problem is that "album artist" was never formally defined in the ID3 tag definition. So different programs use different solutions. I use MediaMonkey to organize and tag my music, which I would definitely recommend to anyone with more than two mp3's on his pc. MediaMonkey does work with an Album Artist field, and using a plugin called MagicNodes it's even possible to view the database by Album Artist. By meticulously tagging and renaming all the music on my harddrive, I should have my mp3's set up for correct display in MediaPortal.

The configuration screen in MediaPortal that's applicable here is the one for Music Database. The top box indicates where the music shares are that need to be scanned into the database. The first tick box will ensure artists like The Beatles will be listed under B not T. It's important that the tick box for "Treat tracks in an individual folder as an album" is checked, this eliminates the compilation album artists from the album artists list. For folders with mp3's by multiple artists the album artist will show as "various artists"
The two boxes below only affect the generation of thumbnails. I don't like the automatically generated thumbs for artists, so I switched that off. Then, for the database updating you can select to do a full update or only incremental. I found out that even the full update does not overwrite all of the database. If you really want a fresh start, you need to delete the databasefile itself. It's called MusicDatabaseV10.db3 and is located in the MediaPortal\database folder.

So far there's a couple of things I don't understand: I found out that there's still a couple of album artists that don't show up as such in MediaPortal. Nor can I find those albums back under various artists. And how does mediaportal distinguish between an album from B. B. King plus guests and a true compilation album? Does it use an album artist tag or rules to convert artist to album artist? The fact that the database scan uses folder locations seems to suggest the last. Also, I haven't found out when the Auto-update on changes in share comes into action.

Shoutcast Plugin

Today I installed the shoutcast plugin. This plugin uses the shoutcast directory at http://www.shoutcast.com/ to find internet radio stations from within MediaPortal. For install it requires only unpacking in the MediaPortal directory and there are no configuration settings. The plugin is easy to use and within a couple of minutes I created a favourites list of the stations I'd like to listen to.

But that's about all the plugin has to offer. If I were frequently in search of new radio stations to listen to, I'd use the plugin more often. But once you found your station, it doesn't offer anything that My Radio doesn't do. So I'll write down the station names and add them to My Radio.

As an obvious improvement, the plugin could provide a list of the most popular stations, as shoutcast does on their homepage. An annoyance is how the selector for minimum bitrate resets itself over and over again. This is by design, as the author wrote on the forum.

My conclusion: this shoutcast directory search is great if it was integrated with the My Radio section of MediaPortal. As a stand alone plugin, I won't be using it a lot.