Lightweight music manager with covers

Wittfella · 2008-12-25 11:24:22

G'Day all,

I have been trying out a bunch of music library managers including the mpd frontends and none really grab me (they all seem like clones of each other!). I really like to browse my music by covers and none of the apps I have tried really do covers well, if at all.

So after investigating gui programming for linux (I have only done win32) I rolled my own from scratch, with the aim to be small, fast and focus on the covers. It is really meant to be used with full albums, so if you have directories with miscellaneous mp3's its not really suited for that. It does not read tags and gets the Artist - Album from the directory name.

It still uses your external player to play the music, or it can act as a simple MPD frontend. It also does some other nifty stuff like download covers for you, and has a really fast search function.

When you first run it it will search for all your music, which may take a minute or two depending on how much you have (i tried it with >10,000 albums) but after that it should open near instantaneously.

It's pretty small, compiles in 20-30 secs and the only dependency is Qt4, no kdelibs or anything so its DE agnostic. Its fully cross-platform and same source compiles on win32.

PKGBUILD : uberview.tar.gz
AUR: uberview 1.00-1

Hopefully someone may find it useful.

Cheers,
Wittfella

Last edited by Wittfella (2008-12-25 11:50:36)

arch0r · 2008-12-25 12:37:11

quite nice, thx! also really nice for downloading the album's cover into it's folder

Army · 2008-12-25 13:50:50

Really nice! I like the mpd support and that it stores the image files directly into the folder, so it's almost perfect for me Maybe I'm too stupid, but is it possible to download all covers by one and delete the wrong ones? Or some similar way ... Thanx for this app! Seems like it will become my no.1 choice
edit: And it would be really cool, if you would accept other naming schemes, because here I have it like

~/Musik/$artist/$year_$albumtitle/$tracknumber_$trackname.ogg

Last edited by Army (2008-12-25 13:53:54)

Wittfella · 2008-12-30 01:52:22

Hello again, thanks for the feedback!

Army wrote:

if you would accept other naming schemes
~/Musik/$artist/$year_$albumtitle/$tracknumber_$trackname.ogg

I have updated it to accept the alternative naming scheme for your albums, so now you can select "Album title contains artist OR albums in an artist directory". eg.

-> $Artist - $Album
-> $Artist / $Album

PKGBUILD : uberview.tar.gz

Wittfella · 2009-06-29 10:13:00

Hello folks!

I have done a fair bit of work on this lately with some optimisations and generally tidied up the asthetics.
Also added some neat new features, most significant being:

- Added 'Search like' feature - click an artist and choose 'Search like' and it will produce a randomized list of other music in your collection similar to the selection. If you don't have much it will also give you a couple of recommendations for other artists you might like to check out. Really helps in finding music you didn't even know you had!

- Dynamic listening profile - tracks what you play and calculates a rating of sorts. It will then start to dynamically list songs in your favourites that changes with time.

- Added thumbs cache - really speeds up loading of all thumbs by cacheing/preloading in the background.

PKGBUILD : uberview.tar.gz
AUR: uberview 1.04-1

Anyway, let me know what you think.

Cheers,
Wittfella

melomane · 2009-08-26 14:27:01

very nice program !
i have used it on windows and i am very happy to get it on linux
thank you!

Urfaust · 2009-08-27 16:34:49

Hi,

very decent!
Is it possible to display the covers when they are not named cover.jpg (or folder.jpg or front.jpg)? I have a bunch of albums with cover art in the folder but there is no uniform naming scheme, sometimes the cover is named cover.jpg, sometimes folder.jpg, sometimes 214325.jpg.:rolleyes:
I changed the default cover name to *.jpg but it didn't work.:)

Last edited by Urfaust (2009-08-27 16:38:14)

Wittfella · 2009-08-28 10:25:45

Hello All,

Thanks for the feedback!

@Urfaust:

I have modified it so that if it doesn't find "folder.jpg" or whatever is selected in the options it looks for "*.jpg" and uses whatever it finds. Should work for those who don't have consistent names for their covers.

I updated 1.07 so grab it again and try it out.

Cheers,
Witty

b9anders · 2009-08-29 21:08:15

nice app, thanks. Would be nice if it could autofetch covers though, possibly all of them to get them in.

Also, the default windows app suggestion might be better changed to /usr/bin/mplayer or something for linux.

Wittfella · 2009-08-30 01:47:45

b9anders wrote:

Also, the default windows app suggestion might be better changed to /usr/bin/mplayer or something for linux.

Ooops! Yes thanks for picking that up. I usually leave it set to "/usr/bin/xmms" for linux, and foobar.exe for Windows people. Forgot to change it back.

melomane · 2009-08-30 13:19:47

hello,
- open folder not work in 1.07 ( work in 1.06 )
- reduce uberview to notify area , play random album with mouse : at second time uberview close.

thoughtcrime · 2009-08-30 13:38:45

Hi!
I've just tried out your tool and it hardly finds related covers.

Example:

Band: A Wilhelm Scream
Album: Ruiner

That makes it google for Ruiner album which returns some NSFW related stuff, but not the right cover.

Instead when I google myself for "A Wilhelm Scream" "Ruiner" album, it directly returns two hits. So I suggest to change the search algorithm to:

"$artist" "$album" album

(Why the brackets? Because otherwise it does not look for the full names, but for the single words)

Last edited by thoughtcrime (2009-08-30 13:39:16)

melomane · 2009-09-01 02:51:13

"enter" not work as expected here, no action on tree view , to play it is necessary first hit tab key;
also in list view right panel is not refresh with up / down keys and enter not have action

others signaled bugs are solved in 1.08, thank you.
uberview rocks!

Last edited by melomane (2009-09-01 02:52:46)

Wittfella · 2009-09-01 06:12:20

Thanks for the feedback melomane!

Just updated 1.08 again, fixed the listview and treeview keyboard navigation.

melomane · 2009-09-01 07:12:00

hi Wittfella,
now uberview exit when hit random tracks , from menu or icon, random album is fine.
navigation work except in history double click and enter do nothing,
also uberview exit if invoqued contexte menu play or enqueue

have a nice night

Last edited by melomane (2009-09-01 08:37:13)

Urfaust · 2009-09-01 18:34:14

Wittfella wrote:

Hello All,
Thanks for the feedback!
@Urfaust:
I have modified it so that if it doesn't find "folder.jpg" or whatever is selected in the options it looks for "*.jpg" and uses whatever it finds. Should work for those who don't have consistent names for their covers.
I updated 1.07 so grab it again and try it out.
Cheers,
Witty

Wow, that was fast. Thanks, now it works.:D
Maybe you can expand the filetypes for gif, png and jpeg but despite that uberview is a really cool small program.:)

melomane · 2009-09-02 17:30:06

Wittfella wrote:

Thanks for the feedback melomane!
Just updated 1.08 again, fixed the listview and treeview keyboard navigation.

now all work fine, thank you

Pank · 2010-01-17 11:23:31

Hi,
Nice and light app!

I have a couple of comments and feature requests.

It seems it searches on album name only.
Here is a tricky example that gives the correct cover art when searching for artist and album but the wrong result when searching for album name only.

Malk De Koijn -- Smash Hit in Aberdeen (1998)

Here is the correct cover.

Also, it would be nice if there was an option to give an url to the cover art (in case of false positive). I.e. right click "url to cover art".

Have you considered showing multiple results at the same time? I think it would be nice with a grid view of the first maybe five results including size (i prefer larger images). I.e.

--------------------------------
|Result 1| |Result 2| |Result 3|
--------------------------------
|Result 4| |Result 5| |Result 6|
--------------------------------

Last thing, would it be possible to run uberview interactively from cli? Why? To run it interactively after having ripped an album. It would be nice to run something like

uberview --get-cover-art --artist "Malk De Koijn" --album "Smash Hit in Aberdeen"

and be present with a couple of results. I would love to run something like this with rubyripper.

Thanks a lot for this already great program.

--Rasmus

PS: The AUR-package does not reflect the latest version.

brendan · 2010-05-09 14:32:25

I can't seem to build this. Am i doing something wrong?

/usr/bin/moc -DQT_NO_DEBUG -DQT_GUI_LIB -DQT_NETWORK_LIB -DQT_CORE_LIB -DQT_SHARED -I/usr/share/qt/mkspecs/linux-g++-64 -I. -I/usr/include/QtCore -I/usr/include/QtNetwork -I/usr/include/QtGui -I/usr/include -Ibuild -Ibuild src/mainwindow.h -o build/moc_mainwindow.cpp
make: *** No rule to make target `resource.qrc', needed by `qrc_resource.cpp'.  Stop.
make: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....

Wittfella · 2010-05-10 02:29:42

Hey, sorry about that, left a file out of the package, fixed now.

Cheers,
Wittfella

Arch Linux

#1 2008-12-25 11:24:22

Lightweight music manager with covers

#2 2008-12-25 12:37:11

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#3 2008-12-25 13:50:50

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#4 2008-12-30 01:52:22

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#5 2009-06-29 10:13:00

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#6 2009-08-26 14:27:01

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#7 2009-08-27 16:34:49

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#8 2009-08-28 10:25:45

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#9 2009-08-29 21:08:15

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#10 2009-08-30 01:47:45

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#11 2009-08-30 13:19:47

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#12 2009-08-30 13:38:45

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#13 2009-09-01 02:51:13

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#14 2009-09-01 06:12:20

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#15 2009-09-01 07:12:00

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#16 2009-09-01 18:34:14

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#17 2009-09-02 17:30:06

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#18 2010-01-17 11:23:31

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#19 2010-05-09 14:32:25

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

#20 2010-05-10 02:29:42

Re: Lightweight music manager with covers

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