Alternative and More Visual Web Based Interface for Brennan B2?

[John]

I have been using the Brennan B2 and BB1 for more than three years and have been very satisfied!  These are truly great devices and have allowed me to digitize all my iTunes and CDs in to one complete library.

Unfortunately, success with the Brennan B2 has led to a growing problem for me.  With more than 3700 albums now residing on my B2, I forget what I have in the library!  Might be my memory (getting older I guess) but I find it more difficult to navigate to music with all these albums.

I use Plex for Movies and some music and love the visual portrayal of the web interface that quickly shows album covers and allows quick drill down to album songs - all portrayed visually.  As an example, if I want to find an album for the group "Heart", I type it I and immediately all 17 album covers show up.  Easy to then pick the album. The difference here is the visual album cover portrayal vs. the listing of the B2 interface.  Another example would be the ability to "show" all albums in the library, depicted by album covers, in alphabetical order.  I might not remember the Doors album I am looking for but seeing the album cover helps recall what I am looking for.

While the B2 web UI is quite functional I am wondering if there is a way to use a more visual web UI with the B2 - Plex as an interface would be perfect or something similar.  Something that would allow me to browse the B2 library, select and have the B2 connected to my stereo directly play the music that I select?  

Perhaps others have figured this out already.  I would welcome any ideas to try.

Thanks.

[PMB]

Hi John,

Have you tried the 'New' web UI? Click the COG tab on the web UI >> click the 'New' option from the 'Original', 'Mobile', 'New', 'New mobile' line.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[John]

HI Paul,

Yes I have tried the new web UI.  It is more of what i was looking for certainly.  I like it.  It would be great if it could fill the screen with album cover choices - a more visual layout with as much screen space to show as many album covers as possible, with a menu bar along the side.  This is definitely a step towards more of what i was looking for.  I was hoping there might be some 3rd party integration capabilities so that other UI's could directly control the B2 to play yet also offer more visual based portrayal of the libraries.  Thank you for the response.

John

[Iain Bell]

Hi John,

I too would appreciate a web UI that would have the option of mainly being dedicated to showing album covers (or, with a menu bar or dropdown menus for navigation, even being totally so).

I am very happy with the B2, having had one now for close to 18 months, and despite a few temporary hiccups at the beginning (mainly due to it taking a bit of time for me to adjust to the fact that it is to be treated like a computer rather than regular hifi hardware!), I have now close to 75% of my CDs stored on it (ca. 3500). I have recently slowed down my rate of ripping as I now have quite a bit to listen to and am spending more time listening to it than uploading onto it. I am using the web UI on an iPad (sometimes iPhone) and like you, find myself wishing the the view of the albums covers, even on the new web UI, were not so limited - on my iPad the area where the covers are shown takes up about a third of the screen and shows one row of 3 covers. (On the 24" screen I use when editing with my PC I similarly get only 1 row, but with 6 covers displayed). 

I know it's impossible to please all of the people all of the time, and I have very limited knowledge of what is involved to create a new web UI or modify an existing one, but if there is one thing I would have to highlight from my B2 wishlist, greater album cover visiibility would be it ;-)

Best regards,

Iain

[John]

Iain

Thanks for the response - I agree with your comment and the screen portrayal you described is the same for me.  There is so much screen real estate available in the new UI to provide a more visual view of album covers, etc.  I know it is likely not high on the "wishlist" but it would enhance the user experience quite a bit.  The B2 is now my primary music server device and it is extremely capable.  

If the Brennan B2 could somehow be interfaced with something like Plex (an excellent movie and music library interface), I think we would have it.  

[Daniel Taylor]

I'm trying to remember...  Quite sometime back (a year or more?), Brennan made it known of a way to modify the WebUI in a sort of open-source method.  There was a website that outlined a basic description of how to access the code.  I may have this confused, so I hope someone will come forward with corrections and point us to the web page, and any pertinent forums post(s) that would help illuminate the situtaion.

[JFBUK]

WebUI's by their very nature are subjective. We probably all would like to change one or more aspects of the WebUI's provided with the B2 ( I know I do !)

Daniel, I also recall reading somewhere that is was possible to get hold of the WebUI source code and modify it but I don't recall anyone posting detailed instructions.

I've been taking a look at the music player market again and there are an increasing number around, several of which are Raspberry Pi + Linux under the hood. This includes a lot of homebuild projects.

A lot of them make use of the the opensource Music Player Daemon (MPD) as a server to the music track data.

I don't know whether the B2 uses MPD but I'm guessing it may well do.

The beauty of MPD is that there are several MPD clients around that offer a very good GUI interface, e.g. Cantata

https://opensource.com/article/17/8/cantata-music-linux

I would like to put 3rd party MPD client access for the B2 on the wishlist.

This may be possible by adding an additional service to the B2 in the manner of Librespot for Spotify ?

John