Add ability to rate songs

[elfez]

Having an equivalent to Thumbs Up/Down would be nice. For ease of use possibly add a menu as the first item in the song context menu, with a radio button for Like/Dislike/unrated or equivalent. Skipping to next track on dislike would be a nice bonus too.

[gdhgdhgdh]

Yep this would be great - I like the Radio support, and having a 'Thumbs Down' would really improve the feature - if Google decides to play a turkey, I want to be able to say "Google, no. Just no." Auto-skip to next track would be a necessity.

[hechtus]

I agree. When I'm having some time I will have a look.

[hechtus]

It seems that there is the Mobileclient change_song_metadata() method that allows to change the user rating. I could at least easily add context menu entries for like and dislike for songs currently playing or in the current playlist. When I'm talking about the context menu I mean the menu that already has this "On Google Music" entry. Any further comments ideas are welcome.

[gdhgdhgdh]

That sounds good.

Does the SqueezeServer allow additional UI elements such as a 'thumbs up' / 'thumbs down' icon beside the 'Heart', 'Play', 'Plus' icons on the context menu, or would this need to be a pair of text lines such as 'Like this track' and 'Dislike this track' ?

[hechtus]

I don't expect that thumbs up/down icons can easily being added to the Web UI. Have you ever seen another plugin that is doing something similar? Is there a plugin that possibly has some like/dislike functionality I could adapt?

[gdhgdhgdh]

Hey Ronald,

I've not used other plugins of this style before and I think you're right that the inherent inflexibility of the web UI will dictate the necessity to use text links. Ultimately the functionality is more important than the accessibility.

[elfez]

In an ideal world I'd like to see this as the very first item when going to a track's sub-menu (where "Save to Favourites" is now), but I presume butting into the main menus might be awkward.

Given that I'd propose the submenu goes under "On Google Music", at the top, in a menu of its own, with three states: Like, dislike and undefined (or can a radio button be toggled on and off individually? The "Shuffle" menu would indicate not).

I'm trying to figure out how the code works, so I'll see if I can make any headway on this (though perl makes my eyes bleed :)

[hechtus]

If you would like to do it, I suggest to do it the same way like "on Google music". I would register two additional submenus. One for like and one for dislike on Google music.

[hechtus]

I was working on this today and got a reasonable solution. Unfortunately it doesn't work finally, because the Mobileclient API does not return the current track rating value. This is related to issue simon-weber/Unofficial-Google-Music-API/issues/182.

@simon-weber: Any idea how to resolve this? Do you need any help?

[hechtus]

Finally I found out that the rating information is NOT returned by mc.get_track_info(), BUT by mc.search_all_access() AND mc.get_album_info(). This is not a bug introduced by gmusicapi, but by Google Music itself.

@elfez: Do you want to help how the Mobileclients get the rating information? You already did a great job of finding out how "I'm feeling lucky radio" works.

[elfez]

I can certainly take a look, though I'm a touch busy at the moment, so it may be a while before I get round to looking.

[hechtus]

If anyone wants to try this out. I've pushed a solution to the v0.4 branch You could download a snapshot from here and copy the GoogleMusic directory to your installation path.

https://github.com/hechtus/squeezebox-googlemusic/archive/v0.4.zip

Any feedback is highly appreciated.

[gdhgdhgdh]

I hoped to try this over the weekend, but the weather was too pleasant. In reality the SmartMix support has left this feature out in the cold as a second class citizen. :(

[hechtus]

The (radio) auto-skip function is not implemented yet. This could be something that has to be configured through the preferences.

[hechtus]

Done in v0.4.0