Cover Art Support R2

Cover Art Support

Cover Art Support

Report #2: June 29 - July 05

Last week: June 22 - June 28

Updating cover_art columns in tableview

As the library.cover_art column is updated in TrackDAO::updateCoverArt(), we could just emit the signal "trackChanged" and it would be enough to let the BaseTrackCache knows that it needs update the tableview. However, currently BTC is using TIOs to get the values of each column and as the cover_art column is not a member of TIO, it would not be enough.

First implementations of this project was based on the use of TIO, but we realized that it was bringing many performance issues and that everything would work much better without it. In this way, we needed another solution to update the BTC and basically the best idea that we found was implement a new SIGNAL/SLOT to access BTC::updateTrackInIndex(int trackId).

https://github.com/cardinot/mixxx/commit/7b5be7774cbb3d780796a02edd164d4f2ce4ee2b

Duplicated covers in cache (MD5 Hash)

As I said last week, the main idea to sort it out would be using md5 hash. The problem is that MD5 calculation can take a long time and it could bring many performance issues, so we need to avoid doing it as much as possible.

In this way, the best choice would be doing it just during the *search* and storing it in database. So, now we have a new column in cover_cache table (md5) and we also added it in the tableview, avoiding doing extra queries (as we were doing for cover location).

As all covers have a md5hash, now we are using the md5hash as key for our covercache (QPixmapCache) instead of doing it using coverLocation, because just the covers loaded from track directory have coverLocation. So, we did not need a QHash to maintain the md5 hashes.

Using a delay when the selection changes very fast

Firstly I thought that it could happens just when the user is holding down an arrow key. So, the simplest and more efficient solution that I found was to use the *keyevent* and *keyeventrelease* to check if the user is holding the arrow key and it would be enough to handle the loadCoverArt signal.

However, *daschuer* showed me that it would not work for Midi mapping. https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx/blob/831a1450a70ea5d19b6a44fed6b6eb71d8ba9d0b/res/controllers/Hercules-DJ-Console-Mk4-scripts.js#L59

Thus, a better approach would be using some kind of timer to know if the user is "stopped" in the same row for a definite time (I chose 0.1s). And it's also more efficient because it ensures that we'll only call loadCoverArt() after finish quick selections. https://github.com/cardinot/mixxx/commit/ab39f640619116c7ac07b21168e991aa9b121470

Remove pixmap from pixmapFound() signal

In order to avoid loading heavy pixmaps in the QT signal queue, the pixmap is being passed as reference in CoverCache::requestPixmap().

Unit test

After the changes in the "loading and searching" steps due to the implementation of the md5hash, all tests were reviewed to make that everything was working properly. I also add some tests for the md5hash.

As now we are using the “album” and “base track” names to try finding a cover, I also added a test to check if everything works with UTF8 chars.

Redesign dlgtrackinfo to show covers

As all other info about a track, the editions of covers will also be done in dlgtrackinfo. The problem is that the current layout is not ideal, because usually small screens (netbooks) have a very low height (600px) and now it has 635px, which is already too long and awful for these users. In this way, I think that the best thing to do is redesign the layout and try using more "width" instead of "height" (as other softwares do).

It's also the first issue for the second pull request. https://github.com/cardinot/mixxx/commits/coverArtSupport_2

Issues for the next week

Next week: July 06 - July 12

Second pull request

• redesign dlgtrackinfo to show covers
• load cover in dlgtrackinfo
• edit cover in dlgtrackinfo
• warning box for “reload metadata” action

Warning box for “reload metadata” action

if user reload id3tags from file, and it has a different cover from the current cover, we could use a simple warning box to ask if the user really want to reload the cover art from id3tag. We could also show both covers in this box.