Thanks for making this, it's wonderful and will make a _huge_ difference to my listening on Spotify. For example, I've got a thing about Ravel's Piano Concerto in G and I've found a whole load of new recordings I knew nothing about. A few comments and suggestions:
Pieces are sorted strictly alphabetically, which means that lists of "String Quartet number X" are sorted like:
Not sure how complicated that is to change, but it would make browsing a little easier if they were listed numerically.
I find the horizontal listing of composers a bit unintuitive, and would prefer a vertical list (probably to do with ubiquity of vertical scrolling in apps and browsers), perhaps between favourites and list of works. Really like the fact that it includes images and isn't just a dry list of names though.
Seems like there are a number of not-so-esoteric composers missing, such as John Luther Adams (a different person from John Adams), Gavin Bryars, Jacques Duphly and Gérard Grisey, despite the presence of composers that I'd never heard of like Orlande de Lassus. I guess this is a limitation of the data sources, but would love to see some more of those included too.
Searching for "Jana" doesn't return Janáček - presumably because of the accents. Would be great to ignore accents for easy typing on British English / American English keyboards.
The small application icon on Mac - for example the installer disk image icon, and the icon in Mac notifications, is a frazzled multicoloured square rather than a proper icon.
Sometimes a message comes up saying "This isn't available on Spotify - bummer!" but doesn't explain why. I didn't think to check when it happened, but I guess it might be that it's not available in my territory (the UK), and I have Spotify set to show tracks that aren't available. If there was a way to have a bit more explanation in that error message somehow that would be helpful - for example, if it's to do with my setting to show tracks that aren't available, a sentence to say that toggling that setting would make that not happen.
A tiny, tiny thing - clicking Apple + A when in the search box doesn't select all text although double-clicking does.
I’ll carefully analyze your suggestions for our next releases.
The Spotify message is not related to territorial restrictions. Putting it shortly, Concertmaster database wasn’t pre-checked; it checks the availability of each recording in real-time, after user’s request. That's why Concertmaster keeps showing recordings that don’t exist at all on Spotify.
This is brilliantly implemented so hats off for that. It's something I always had on my backlog of personal projects but never got round to doing, but you've managed it far better than I could ever have hoped to.
One thing that would noticeably improve the experience for me: Being able to sort a given series of works by opus/[equivalent catalogue number] or date. It seems at the moment the only sorting method is alphabetical, which is often not particularly helpful (for example, as someone else noted, when 10 appears before 1).
I'm studying the sorting thing. Opus/catalogue number: not so easy because the data comes from sources that treat this information as strings. But I can think of a text parser, for example. Year of composition: doable.
The new release is working on my Mac whereas yesterday's didn't. Thank you!
I was intrigued by the metadata handling for works; would it be possible to support searching via that data? For instance, I'd be interested in seeing works conducted by Bernstein, or performances by a specific orchestra.
I think this is the most common request. Now, Concertmaster is heavily composer/work-oriented. But I see your point and sometimes I find myself willing some sort of musician search.
Maybe we would switch to a more flexible UX in the future.
I've tried to install this on Arch Linux with the latest version, but I get stuck at the loading screen as others have reported. I would have sent you an email, but I was not able to find your email address. I would be happy to help figure out why it does not work.
I have written a simple PKGBUILD file for installing this on Arch, and I am happy to share that (or upload it to Arch AUR) when I get it to work.
I’ve tried 1.17.1214 on Ubuntu and it worked flawlessly.
A colleague here said that Concertmaster was freezing on his Linux machine because it was lacking a notification server. I wonder if it’s not the same issue you are experiencing.
About Arch: thanks so much for the help! Please confirm the notification issue and I’ll sent you a plain zip version, non-DEB, of Concertmaster.
Thank you! I can confirm that this works for me on Arch Linux after unpacking the .deb and running the executable from there. (This is with Spotify v1.0.67.582-1 from AUR - but I never saw the other freezing problem that mafrasi2 mentioned, so I can't comment on that)
Thank you for the fix and this awesome program in general!
I found the issue that caused concertmaster to freeze for me: I wasn't running a notification server. It's working perfectly now that I've installed xfce4-notifyd.
Pieces are sorted strictly alphabetically, which means that lists of "String Quartet number X" are sorted like:
String Quartet no. 1 String Quartet no. 10 String Quartet no. 12 String Quartet no. 13 String Quartet no. 2
Not sure how complicated that is to change, but it would make browsing a little easier if they were listed numerically.
I find the horizontal listing of composers a bit unintuitive, and would prefer a vertical list (probably to do with ubiquity of vertical scrolling in apps and browsers), perhaps between favourites and list of works. Really like the fact that it includes images and isn't just a dry list of names though.
Seems like there are a number of not-so-esoteric composers missing, such as John Luther Adams (a different person from John Adams), Gavin Bryars, Jacques Duphly and Gérard Grisey, despite the presence of composers that I'd never heard of like Orlande de Lassus. I guess this is a limitation of the data sources, but would love to see some more of those included too.
Searching for "Jana" doesn't return Janáček - presumably because of the accents. Would be great to ignore accents for easy typing on British English / American English keyboards.
The small application icon on Mac - for example the installer disk image icon, and the icon in Mac notifications, is a frazzled multicoloured square rather than a proper icon.
Sometimes a message comes up saying "This isn't available on Spotify - bummer!" but doesn't explain why. I didn't think to check when it happened, but I guess it might be that it's not available in my territory (the UK), and I have Spotify set to show tracks that aren't available. If there was a way to have a bit more explanation in that error message somehow that would be helpful - for example, if it's to do with my setting to show tracks that aren't available, a sentence to say that toggling that setting would make that not happen.
A tiny, tiny thing - clicking Apple + A when in the search box doesn't select all text although double-clicking does.