This is my first year using Kodi. I have a main library of general music. The file structure for my music is always music > artist > album > songs.
I doubt it matters, but I'm using Kodi 15.x on Win10, Confluence skin.
I set up a generic smart playlist to read all music in my library and shuffle it (I have to say I can't believe how hard it is to tell Kodi just to shuffle a recursive directory full of music -- MediaMonkey, MusicBee et al do this drop dead simple -- point at a directory and say shuffle).
The problem is that I have a second directory full of Christmas season music. Obviously I don't want that mixed into my general catalogue during playback and I don't want to spend a lot of time tagging stuff that can simply be segregated easily by directory.
The rub comes when I try to set up a second smart list to shuffle across my that Christmas directory. Again, should be simple if I were using any other media player, but I can't seem to figure it out with Kodi. It either starts mixing in non-Christmas music (which I don't want) or won't play anything at all.
Any chance of figuring this out before Christmas? ;)
Thanks in advance...
Not sure why you mention the first playlist, but here is a way without smart playlists:
Add the parent folder of your christmas folder to your files. Don't scan it to library.
Select the christmas folder, go to context menu (hit c if your using a keyboard) and choose queue media. Your songs will start playing, just go into the currently playing visualization and hit randomize at the bottom.
Related
I created a book app and used Cocos2D and physics engine (Chipmunk) to create it. I would like to add "read aloud" feature to it.
So far I found instructions/books and tutorials how to add read aloud feature when book is created with iBook Author (but I couldn't use iBook Author due to some limitations) using Epub3 and SMIL.
I also found a good tutorial from J. Shapiro how to make narrated book using AVSpeechSynthesizer. This helps, only that I would like to use recorded voice, rather than synthesized sound. I don't know if this approach can be modified to do so?
I also know how it can be done in Sprite Kit framework.
The only info that I couldn't find is how to add "read aloud" feature to the app written using Cocos2D. Could it be done within SimpleAudioEngine, or it can be combined with some other engine (possibly from Sprite Kit framework)?
I would appreciate very much if somebody can give me some references/pointers or tutorial links where to look for some answers how to add this feature.
Thanking you in advance.
I would like to use recorded voice, rather than synthesized sound
Good. Add your voice recording audio files (caf, wav or mp3 format) to the project. Play it back at the appropriate time using:
[[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] playEffect:#"someVoiceRecordingFile.wav"];
Define what read aloud means to you because I find that a lot of terms, especially semi-vague ones like this, are used differently depending on who is using it.
When you say read aloud book do you essentially mean a digital storybook that reads the story to you by simply playing narration audio? I've created dozens of these and what you are asking has multiple steps depending on what features you are going for in your book. If you mean simply playing audio and that is it, then yes you could do that in cocos2d using SimpleAudioEngine (as one option) but I assume you already knew that which is why this question has a tab bit of vagueness to it. Either way you probably wouldn't want to play narration as an effect but rather stream it. To do that along with background music you'd stream background music via the left channel and narration via the right. You can easily add a method to SimpleAudioEngine to make this nice and neat. To get you started something similar to this can be used to access the right channel:
CDLongAudioSource* sound = [[CDAudioManager sharedManager] audioSourceForChannel:kASC_Right];
if ([sound isPlaying])
{
[sound stop];
}
[sound load:fileName];
Also use the proper settings and recommended formats for streaming audio such as aifc (or really all audio in general). Although I believe you can stream mp3 without it being decompressed first, the problem is with timing. If you are using highlighted text or looping audio then aifc is the better option. Personally I've never had a reason to use mp3. Wav with narration is something I'd avoid even if just for the file size increase. If the mp3 is decompressed even for streaming (which I'm not sure if it is off the top of my head) then you'd have a huge spike in memory that will be both highly unwanted and at times down right bad.
There are many other things that can go into it but those are the basic first steps. If you want to do things like highlighted text, per-word animations, etc then that will take more work of course and you'd need to be comfortable with cocos2d, SpriteKit, or whatever you decide to use. I'll be doing a tutorial series on it one day soon so I'll cover all of that stuff.
On the other hand, if you are talking about recording someone's voice and having it playback i.e. a mother recording herself reading the story so her child can hear her voice whenever they are using your app, then you'd simply record the audio like you would any other piece of audio, save it to the device, and play it back when the page is displayed in the proper reading mode (or whatever you personally call it). One place to look is the AVAudioRecorder that is part of the AVFoundation framework. Simply Google "iOS audio recording" for examples if you need them.
I want to make an interactive fiction game editor, in this type of games a story has many story-lines where each gamer can finish the game with a different story. For each section of a game story we need a node that tells the story and interacts with player.
I will make an editor for drawing story sections (nodes), that every node can link to minimum one node and maybe many, also each node has some properties (like text, photo, sound, ...) and variables (like gold on the ground, HP reducer, ...) that must be used in the game story.
What's the best way for saving this story-line (nodes) in a file for loading with my game player?
If you can write a code example in C++, Pascal or PHP it is better for me.
You want to do a couple of things:
Figure out what you need to reconstruct a saved node completely enough to use it again.
Prepare all that data you need.
Look into file i/o. There are loads of tutorials online, search for "c++ file i/o" or something similar.
Now you implement file saving/loading.
I'd guess you'll end up with something like this for saving.
write number of nodes
for node in node_list:
write node info
And then for loading
read number of nodes
for i in range(0, number_of_nodes)
read node info
If you run into a specific problem ask a new question.
I think you should take a look to xml.
There are a lot of libraries to work with it, personally in c++ I prefer pugi but you can take a look to libxml2, xerces, etc...
Pugi XML
If you don't want user interaction you can always encrypt the xml before save it.
I am currently creating a game. My game will use music from an mp3 file that the user sends in in order to make decisions on where to place things, how fast the level moves, etc. I am fairly new at this, I have been reading information about mp3. Currently I have found all the frames in the mp3 file that I am using. I don't really know where to go from here. What I want to do is measure the frequencies of the sound wave of the music at certain times (like every sec) and then based on that frequency, do what I need to for the game. I don't know whether I should decode the mp3, that looks like a lot of work and I don't want to do that if I don't have 2 or if I can just read the bytes in the frame and convert them without decoding anything. I am developing this in c#, using the game engine FlatRedBall. I am not using any libraries. I am also planning on selling this game so I would like to avoid using other people's code if I can avoid it. Please someone help me, I just need a direction to go from here. I know how to parse the header and calculate the framelength, I just don't know the next step in what I want to do...
Convert your music to .ogg format which is free and use free library to play it.
Note: I was going to post this as a comment but it quickly grew too big. :)
Writing your own MP3 enconder/decoder is probably going to take a good ammount of effort; effort which would probably be better spent on your game itself. Therefore, is possible, I would be all means try to use an open source library.
That said, most good MP3 libraries are LGPL/GPL licensed. This means you can use it in a commercial setting, as long as you dynamically link to it. Also the SDL Mixer library, as of version 1.2.12, supports MP3s and is under a more permissive zlib license, but since you mention C# I don't know if stable and up-to-date bindings are available. Also since your project isn't written in SDL to begin with, it might be hard to integrate it.
Also, as #pro_metedor hinted, perhaps using a more open format could help in licensing issues. In general, OGG achieves better compression than MP3, which is a plus for things like download size, bandwidth/resource usage, etc.
Just shop around for a while, and try to be a little flexible. I'm sure you'll find something nice! :)
Basic Info:
Programming Language - C++
Platform - Windows
Audio Formats - wav and mid
I recently finished a game and was fooling around with figuring out the best way to upload it to a file hosting site. I eventually decided on using 7zip's self-extracting feature. However, I think the mistake I made was that instead of just copying what I needed to another folder and zipping that up for the distribution (i.e., not copying source files, etc.) I rearranged the actual folder that held all of my source files etc. and split it into 2 sub folders for the C++ files, and then everything else (that folder being the one that got zipped up.)
I tested downloading it and playing it and it worked fine. However, I went back because I decided to change the background music and that's when the problem started happening.
To sum the problem up, Mix_PlayMusic() is being called and is working correctly. However, for some reason no sound is playing (and neither are any of the sound effects called from Mix_PlayChannel()). The odd thing is that you can hear the music when Mix_FadeOutMusic() is called. I also have a sound toggling feature, but after thorough testing I've come to the conclusion that it isn't the problem.
I finally decided to create a completely new project and just bring all of the files I needed into that project in the same "organization" that they were in originally. However, the problem is still there.
I have no idea what's wrong. The files are being loaded in fine, it's just that when the music is supposed to be playing (and according to testing it is), it's not playing. This also applies to sound effects.
Edit: I actually wrote a test for each game loop for whether the music is playing and apparently the music is playing. It's just that for some reason it isn't being heard.
This could be a number of things. It could be an issue with the SDL_Mixer library you have, so you could try getting it again to rule that out. Your volume may have somehow got set to zero somewhere, so I would check the volume as a test. And the final thought would be that the source sound file you are playing is incompatible in some way (not likely if you can play it in another sound player, but possible). Besides those suggestions I don't believe I can help you any further with the data you have provided.
I've got two directories containing ~20 GB of music files (mostly mp3, some ogg), and I would like to detect all duplicate songs. There are two complicating factors:
A song may have different filenames in the two directories.
Two files containing the same song may have different ID3 tags and thus have different checksums.
What is a good approach to solving this?
The way I have gone about this in the past is to use genpuids that come from Music IP. The closed source software creates an audio fingerprint of a file regardless of format, id3, checksum etc.
More information can be found here.
This should ensure the most amount of positive duplicate matches and minimize false positives. It can also correctly tag incorrect id3 tags.
Here's what I would do (or have done before)...
Load all songs onto itunes (bear with me)
(note, if you can use itunes here, then stop ... I assume your list of dupes is long and unmanageable)
Delete all songs, sending them to the trash can, this way you get rid of the directory structure
Obviously, don't "empty trash". Rescue the songs to a folder on your desktop
Use software like mediamonkey, dupe eliminator or even itunes itself to identify the duplicates. Dupe eliminator is good in that it checks by a varying amount of factors, artist, length, filesize and whatnot and guesses what is a dupe and what isn't)
Reload onto Itunes, this time around check "Auto arrange songs", which will drop your new, dupeless list onto a nice by-artist-by-album arrangement
... voila! (or if you read digg: "...profit!")
/mp
If you have a library that can parse the files, you can run the hash on the audio data. This will not help you if the song is a different rip or has be recompressed/transcoded/etc.
Are the ID3/OGG-equiv artist and song metatags accurate? If they are, you could use those.
Edit: If they're not, perhaps they could be made to be... If you're only dealing with whole albums, there are several tools that will get all the tag data based on the number of tracks and their lengths.
If you're dealing with mixes of albums and single files, it gets more complicated.
I'm sure there's more elegant solutions out there - but if the audio data is equivalent, then stripping the ID3 tags and hashing should do the trick. After hashing, you can put the ID3 tags back if you like.
Perhaps the Last.fm API would be useful. It includes a track.getInfo call which returns XML including the track's length, artist name, track number, etc. You could compare tracks and see if they have more than N fields equal and if so, assume they're the same track.
I have no idea about whether they're going to be OK with you submitting API requests for 40gb of music, though.
How about something like this: find a library to get the mp3's length as well as a pointer to the audio data (looks like there are a couple libraries out there that can do this), do a first pass filter based on song lengths, and for the songs that have matching lengths checksum their audio data. Similar to this script for finding duplicate files / images.
Some adaptation of ffTES has worked great for me for a very similar task.
I was faced with the same problem, so I wrote a command-line program that tries to detect similar audio files by comparing acoustic fingerprints: https://github.com/derat/soundalike
It uses the fpcalc utility from Chromaprint to generate the fingerprints, and then builds a lookup table to find possible matches before comparing fingerprints more rigorously.
It worked pretty well when I ran against my music library, but there are various flags to tune its behavior if needed. If it works for you (or if it doesn't), let me know!