Many of you will be aware of the great work Dave Blake is doing to improve the music library functionality of Kodi. The thing that I’ve been wishing for that Dave has now delivered is the inclusion of roles in the database. The issue is how best to utilise this functionality in skins. A big long list of contributors isn’t particularly useful as it could take days to scroll through a reasonable sized library, or if you’re into hip-hop then months as there’s generally about 15 co-writers and 35 samples per song.
The ways in which I think this would work best is firstly by search if you know who you’re looking for, and by hearing something you like and think “hey now Kodi can tell me who wrote it and I can see if I’ve got more stuff written by them in my library”. Someone has very kindly already added the textbox information in the song-information screen in confluence (Krypton version) and presumably in Estuary too:
<control type="textbox">
<description>Contributors</description>
<left>340</left>
<top>520</top>
<width>900</width>
<height>120</height>
<label>$INFO[ListItem.ContributorAndRole]</label>
<font>font13</font>
<align>justify</align>
<textcolor>white</textcolor>
<autoscroll time="3000" delay="4000" repeat="5000">Skin.HasSetting(AutoScroll)</autoscroll>
<visible>String.IsEqual(ListItem.DBTYPE,song)</visible>
</control>The long-winded way to find other songs by that composer, orchestra, etc, would be to check song-info then return back to the roles node and either search or scroll through the list. To make this easier I was trying to change the text box above into a list, so that in song-info you could select the composer or orchestra name and immediately go to a list of their music in your database library.
So, I’ve been playing with this idea, but unsurprisingly not having too much luck, as I know more about life on other planets than I do about skinning. So, before I waste too much of my life trying to get my <itemlayouts> and $localizes correct, is there any reason the principle wouldn’t work in the first place, i.e. is it prohibited to include such a list in a page like DialogMusicInfo.
Thanks