Best music integration for 7MC

I know a lot of people have a Logitech Squeezebox or other media device which plays networked music, but I'd really like an all-in-one HTPC solution, with no need for other devices. And it need to be integrated into 7MC, so it can be controlled from a 10' interface with only a remote (like GameEx, Media Browser, and TMT). I have tried the built in 7MC Music Library, and was not fond of it. Same thing for Media Browser's music section. Maybe those are the best solutions, and I just haven't learned how to tweak them to my liking. Or is there something better?

On my desktop PC, I use FooBar with a mouse (and sometimes keyboard shortcuts), and I like it. However, it doesn't really scale well for 10' interface, nor does it have that decent remote support that I know of (nor 7MC integration to my knowledge).

Seems like a lot of people use an external device because it just works and they have a good GUI. What are some 10' interface, remote capable software options that integrate into 7MC. Thanks!

if you have an iphone/android you can get a foobar remote.

Perhaps you could share what things you do/do not like about 7MC's default music library? I used it for a long time and found it very easy to navigate, but was visually unappealing and playlist support was terrible.

I have since switched to XBMC as it is far superior to 7MC for music (e.g., remotes, playlists, navigation, visuals, etc.)

However, I do understand the desire to stick with 7MC, which is perhaps why it would be helpful to have you try and articulate what you would like to perform differently.

I don't have an iphone/android, so that is out of the question.

I didn't like 7MC because:
*It didn't handle my library well (which may partially be my fault due to metadata/tagging issues). Some items would repeat. It had a hard time figuring out what was an album and what was an artist. There were too many sortable categories which really didn't do anything.
*It was too visual of an interface (all the thumbnails) which resulted in it taking forever to scroll or locate items.
*I'm not sure if there is a learning curve (as I generally am good with technology and software), but I struggled to use it.

Overall, it just seemed buggy and slow and I had a hard time navigating and find specific things I wanted to listen to. It's been a while since I tried using it, so perhaps I'll give it another shot and specify my complaints further.

When I first got foobar, I spent a lot of time tagging and reworking the metadata for my media library. I don't have 100% complete library, but it's mostly there. I can sort by artist and see individual albums by the artist, and play say one album at a time. And I can play my entire library on random. If I want a specific song, I can either view the entire library in one window and scroll down to the song (since it's organized by artist, then by album), or I can use the branch hierarchy in a smaller frame, or I can even search for it by name. That said, I don't mind that much the interface of an iPod, where you can select sort by song, or album, or artist, then browse alphabetically from there. Perhaps I like selecting music on a text basis?

Also, I seem to recall that part of the problem was my artist list was filled with one song artists from compilations or what have you. I think foobar deals with this differently with something called "album artist" IIRC. So that the compilations are sorted under "various artists" or if it's a tribute album of cover songs, under the original songwriter. Instead, I recall 7MC being filled with artists that only had a single song (which made scrolling and navigating slower). Perhaps this is a simple fix, but I guess I didn't have the patience to learn it when there seemed to be other problems and I didn't like the interface. I also think I recall 7MC not showing my entire library (or me not being able to find something which I've listed to 100s of times on my PC).

Hope this explains things more. I'll try to go throw the music library again tonight and give it a 2nd chance.

It sounds like a lot of your problems might be related to music tagging (as you have deduced ).

7MC does support the "Album Artist" field as well as the "Compilations" tag. Your best bet is, for your compilation albums, changing the "Album Artist" field to something like "Various Artists" and then it will do what you want.

Also, when browsing music, I use the plain old "Artist" section. The rest of the sections (except for "Genre") are pretty much useless (IMO). If you use the one with thumbnails, it can indeed be laggy and overwhelming for large libraries. I found it better to sort by regular "Artist" and then you only see the album covers when you actually click into a specific artist. Also, note that with a compatible Windows Media Center Remote, you can use the number keys in "T9" fashion to find artists. So if you want to scroll to "Radiohead", you type "7-7-7-2-3" and that would give you "R-A-D". That makes it far easier/faster to navigate large collections than just scrolling.

Hopefully that helps a bit. A large part will really just be cleaning up the "Album Artist" field. There are numerous renaming programs that can automate this process and get you fixed up quickly.

I'll check that out. Like I said, I have most of the tagging done. I guess foobar puts all the untagged items in one big section that's "?-?" where media center appears to be mixing file name alphabetizing with artist alphabetizing. I dunno, my memory of my problems with it could be fuzzy, so that might not exactly be it. I'll give it a second chance and report back.

Honestly? I have 7MC launch iTunes since that's what I use on my desktop. I do have access to my iTunes created playlists in 7MC's music library too which really helps navigating such a large collect (over 10,000 tracks). I'm planning on trying out the new Media Browser music plug-in at some point here.

Anyways, it sounds like your real problem is your music's tagging then anything else. If anything you could just use MC Studio to add Foobar or whatever to 7MC and disable 7MC's music tile.

rhouck said:

Perhaps you could share what things you do/do not like about 7MC's default music library? I used it for a long time and found it very easy to navigate, but was visually unappealing and playlist support was terrible.

I have since switched to XBMC as it is far superior to 7MC for music (e.g., remotes, playlists, navigation, visuals, etc.)

However, I do understand the desire to stick with 7MC, which is perhaps why it would be helpful to have you try and articulate what you would like to perform differently.

Click to expand...

I'll take that one, just to vent somewhere on the net:

I was a long time Meedio user until Yahoo torpedoed that ship, and I got tired of waiting for MeediOS. I have always been fanatical about keeping tags organized and up to date - because I used a few tagging tricks for Meedio, it was a simple matter to copy a chosen tag field over to the Album Artist field en masse.

What don't I like about WMC? The music interface is designed for small collections, and even though it's album-centric, it has the worst ways of navigating through albums. If there are ways around any of these complaints, I would be grateful if anyone could help me out:

1. If I click on an artist, I get the album thumbnail view. I (and everyone else I know) tend to organize albums chronologically, but WMC arranges them alphabetically, with no way to rearrange them. I loved the way Meedio gave me a sorting option at every view step - mainstream artists would arrange albums chronologically. Classical artists would skip the album step and arrange by suite or symphony. WMC was clearly designed with an Artist=Album mentality that doesn't account well for singles, classical, compilations, box sets, etc.

2. All views and navigation are one step only - if I go to Genre, and then select a genre, it displays every album in that genre, instead of giving me the option to refine further. I would rather navigate by Genre->Artist->Album, or Genre->Year. In general, you get one main category, then one selection screen after that, without the ability to drill down in different ways.

3. Speaking of, it would be nice to be able to do searches by year or by decade - either search by genre then decade, or decade then genre.

4. If I have an album tag blank for a track, then WMC calls it "Unknown Album". That wouldn't be so bad, except that if I navigate to an artist, then select their "Unknown Album", it will give me a track list of EVERY track in the entire collection that has a blank album tag, including ALL artists. There are plenty of valid reasons to not have an album tag, but the workaround is to just tag the indivdual tracks with "Artist XYZ - Misc Tracks". I hate doing that, but it works.

5. Click on an album and it pops up the action screen with the track list. Why is there so much wasted screen space that I have to scroll down through the track list instead of seeing it all on the screen at once? Use two columns, use less space above, whatever, but since a vast majority of albums are more than 5 tracks, give the screen enough room.

So overall, WMC (well, WMP12) has the ability to build a library out of tag data, but it has no idea what to do with the data, and it takes too long to build and maintain said data in order to *not* use it for navigation, or smart playlisting, or anything else useful.

^ Agreed 100% on basically every point, I had actually started to forget about some of those (like the Unknown Album issue...). This actually made me chuckle as I read it because I remember the frustration of dealing with it. After awhile I resigned myself to the bugs and limitations (i.e. only using the "Artist" tab because the other 27 or whatever are worthless).... then I moved to XBMC