XBMC Aeon MQ5 Skin – A look at the Music and Concerts Libraries

I’m moving from the XBMC skin Aeon MQ4 to Aeon MQ5 at the moment. I’ve already written about the Aeon MQ5 Movie library here and the TV Shows library here. Today I am going to be looking at the Music and Concerts libraries. You can see my previous post on the Aeon MQ4 Music library here for comparison.

XBMC Main Menu - Music

Music Playback whilst on the XBMC main music menu.

Here you can see the new Skin Widgets / Recently Added albums just above the main menu, in MQ4 these were hidden away more on the top menu. Next Tracks is also a new feature.





If I select an album from the Skin Widgets, you can see that the entire main menu now displays the name of the album you currently have highlighted which I really like. You can just click OK to start the playback of this album from the list of Recently Added albums etc.

Also new is the partial spinning disc that can be seen in the bottom left hand corner.



New main menu / sub-menu (smart menu)

Music Recently Played / Music Recently Added / Music Video Clips (doesn’t work) / Music Genres / Music Playlists / Music Artists / Music Albums / Music Tracks / Music Files / Music Party-Mode / Music Compilations / Music Top-100 / Music Clean Library / Music Update Library / Search



I am very happy to report that now with the completely new menu customisation feature of Aeon MQ5, it is now possible to change to the main Music menu item so that when selected it will always launch in to the
Music-Albums section. This was not possible before in Aeon MQ4.



Music Genres

Custom / Alternative Music Genre icons and backgrounds in the new Right List view!







Music Playback Full Screen

The music playback in full screen has been greatly improved with some new features and looks awesome!
Mosaic slideshow + Viewing (VIZ) with Lyrics



Next Tracks is a new feature, it shows which tracks are up next and you can even select the tracks from this full-screen and start playback of them which is very nice indeed.



Music Recently Played – In Poster view

Aeon MQ5 makes much better use of the clearart artist logo images and where it displays them.



Music Albums – Wall view

By default in Aeon MQ5 the wall views scroll up / down instead of from left / right as in Aeon MQ4.



Album Information



Music Artists – Right List view





Artist Information



Music Compilations – Wall view



Music Albums – Low List view



Music Albums – Panel view



Music Albums – Coverflow view



Music Videos / Concerts

I have a few music concerts on DVD that I ripped, however most of these are single Music Video files I downloaded from the Internet. XBMC isn’t very good at adding music videos in to the library. The default scraper for Music Videos is TheAudioDB.com but I found it did not detect over half of my music videos. So I took the time to manually download a poster and fanart image and to manually create a .nfo meta-data file and then had XBMC import my music videos in to its Concerts library.



Using the Skin Widgets – Recently Added Music Videos







Music Concerts Library – Shelf view



Music Concert / Video Information









Music Concerts / Videos Playback

Music Video Playback with information overlay. Note the media info icons are displayed at the bottom. Starring is empty probably something to do with my .nfo meta-data text file having a missing field.



Music Video Playback – When skipping / pausing playback etc you can see the progress bar in the bottom left hand corner and the Current Time / Remaining Time and Ends At which is a nice feature not in MCE.



Transport Controls / Playback menu



Summary

There are some nice new features with the Music library and music playback in Aeon MQ5. Overall the Aeon MQ5 is a worthy upgrade to the previous Aeon MQ4 skin.







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