My short review

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nidzo
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Jan 24, 2018 8:36 am

My short review

Post by nidzo »

Hi, I am a long time user of LMS/Squeezebox. The main advantage of this player is: customization.
Today, i have installed MUSO to acces to my LMS, and i find it quite disappointing.
I don't want to do any criticism, i just want to give my feedback.

1) ARTISTs are treated very badly. For example, in the filter field.... I can just search ALBUM ARTIST.
A search for a COMPOSER, a CONDUCTOR, an ORCHESTRA/BAND, or even an ARTIST who is not an album artist.... results in nothing.

2) Obviously, same thing in the Hierarchy list. ARTIST = ALBUMARTIST. But that's not enough. Let's say I want to find all Miles Davis albums... i want as a result also some J. Coltrane album where Miles has played. Usually, in my tags, I put in ALBUMARTIST tag the main artist (let's say PINK FLOYD), but in ARTIST tag also other artists that I want associated to that album/track (let's say David Gilmour).

3) trackstat integration is only one way. If I rate an album in MUSO, it is not rated in LMS.

4) LastFm is .... very cheap. It's full of errors and very incomplete. But... ok.

5) Classical music: ok everybody has his own scheme. The point - in my opinion - is not to give precedence to COMPOSER (actually, I don't. i give precedence to the performer.... ). The point is to go beyond the usual disc structure. So, one could collect music for COMPOSER/WORK (opus, or whatever), for CONDUCTOR/ORCHESTRA, for ARTIST/COMPOSER (for example Accardo/Paganini) and so on, forgetting ALBUM TAG which is more or less useless.

But I have also read very enthusiastic opinions about MUSO, so maybe i am missing something. :)
musoware
Site Admin
Posts: 1847
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 6:50 am

Re: My short review

Post by musoware »

Give it some more time :)

1) I'm not sure what you are doing wrong, but the filter text does search on everything, even the comment field.
2) You are right that Hierarchy by Artist only includes the albums where those artists are titled artists, I will take a look at this because that's not true for other attributes.
3) It is two-way for track ratings, when you rate them in Muso, it pushes the rating through the LMS CLI. I'll check it works when rating at album level, if that's what you are doing.
4) ok
5) I could think about making it configurable which tag to give precedence to. I made it composer because that's what the vast majority of classical CDs do. But if an album has a consistent orchestra (band/ensemble) field - or conductor - while having multiple composers, it will assign the common attribute as the 'titled' artist.

As I said, use the 3 month trial to play with the config and see if it becomes useful to you. Only buy if you are completely happy!
oyvindo
Posts: 57
Joined: Tue May 05, 2015 6:56 pm

Re: My short review

Post by oyvindo »

It's disappointing to read your "review" @nidzo :cry:
Muso is such a fine product and your "review" fails to give any credit to the effort behind the development of Muso and its many excellent features.
If you truly wanted to contribute to, and encourage further development, you regretfully failed big time.
So next time, instead of just criticism, go home and try to develop something similar yourself. It better be perfect!

Muso is a result of years of development effort, and evolution based on feedback from users - such as myself. I have no vested interest in it except as a user, and I can also see that Muso isn't perfect. But development hasn't stopped, and the authors willingness to support his community of loyal users, is exceptional.

Despite your negative attitude, the comments you did leave behind are most likely being picked up, and I wouldn't be surprised to see some of them implemented sometime in the future.

-/Oyvind
MDE
Posts: 479
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 12:05 am

Re: My short review

Post by MDE »

It seems to me that these are some initial comments after just a short while using the product. Unlike much software, the developer responds very well to constructive comments, so I expect that any substantive issues will be addressed. I don’t understand the point about classical music. If you don’t want composer to feature above artist then just set the classical music options to not include any genres. Then you’ll get the “non-classical” interface for everything.
Over many years, I have researched the best library management systems for the LMS environment and every time Muso comes out tops. The main criticism I have is the shortage of help documentation. Hopefully this too will be addressed, but in the meantime just post any specific questions to the forum and you should get plenty of help.
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