Topic: AlbumView 2.0.7 Beta (Read 9924 times)

RhinoBanga · « **on:** February 18, 2003, 11:37:25 am »

Here it is:

http://www.mrblobby.ukshells.co.uk/av2.zip

Here's what's new:

Added artwork caching
Added artwork resampling (an intelligent way of scaling providing much better results at a cost of speed).
Added ability to show the icon captions at the top of the image
Added ability to specify foreground/background color, bold, italic, underline and alignment of icon/tile texts
Now preserve listview sort orders across sessions
Added a "finish" option to the first stage of the db creation wizard which will use the current defaults.
Grouping can use the Artist/Album options, e.g. ignore the leading THE/name transposition, etc.
Added run-time debugging.
Can now group independantly of sorting, e.g. group on year and sort by album name.
Holding down SHIFT which choosing a track in the right-mouse menu will play/append the selected track and all subsequent ones.
Converted popup menu's to ownerdraw version.
Fixed issue where AV was preventing MC/MJ from exiting.
Fixed issue where changing the captions in options killed the background image loading.

Note that this is BETA and due to the significant changes don't be too surprised if things crash!

It's late and I'm off to bed but tomorrow I'll let you know how to specify the colours, etc, in the text.

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #1 on:** February 18, 2003, 11:40:54 pm »

Formatting tokens are defined like HTML tokens.

Foreground colours are handled via the <fg></fg> tokens and background colours via the <bg></bg> tokens.

Within the <fg>/<bg> tokens you specify one of the predefined colours:

WHITE, BLACK, NAVY, GREEN, RED, BROWN, PURPLE, ORANGE, YELLOW, LIME, TEAL, AQUA, BLUE, FUCHIA, GRAY, SILVER

For example: <fg red>This is red text</fg>

You can also use RGB values by specifying the hexidecimal codes in either C or VB syntax, e.g.: <fg 0xFFFFFF>This text appears white</fg>

Or: <fg &HFFFFFF>This text appears white</fg>

To bold some text use , e.g.: This is bold

To underline some text use , e.g.: This is underline

To italic some text use , e.g.: Italics

To right align text use <r>/</r>, e.g.: <r>This text will appear on the right</r>

To centre text use <c>/</c>, e.g.: <c>This text will appear centred</c>

Note that you can mix, match and use the existing tokens with formatting, so the following is acceptable:

<Album> - <Year>
<r><fg silver><Artist>
(<Bitrate> kbps <Type>)

Finally don't try anything too complex as it will probably not work

Autoelph · « **Reply #2 on:** February 19, 2003, 03:14:35 am »

Hey Rhino, so far much more stable than what I had before. Thanks!

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #3 on:** February 19, 2003, 11:07:51 am »

Excellent!

I am going to wait a week to see if I hear of any issues. If not then I am going to make it production.

Autoelph · « **Reply #4 on:** February 20, 2003, 06:41:44 am »

Ok, gotta say I'm really stuck on this one:

How do I go about getting the art from inside the file to show up in AV? I have been using another program (Tag&Rename) to save the image to a file but this is a tedious task with no batch ability and my size collection. I have a whole lot of these, I'd say more than 60% of my collection is this way. Others have correct jpg's in the album directory or in the MC directory, but the rest is inside the file stuff which AV just won't show.

Also, I have some files which won't link up because of weird naming situations (AC\DC in the tag cannot be AC\DC in the name of the art file, it's ACDC there, so AV doesn't pick up).

Any ideas on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,

M

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #5 on:** February 20, 2003, 09:17:10 am »

The internal image issue is an MC bug.

I have reported it again to J River to see if they will bump up the priority:

http://www.musicex.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=beta;action=display;num=1045762928;start=0#6

Regarding the filename issue I will put in an option to either strip out invalid characters or replace them with a valid one, e.g. _. The default will be to strip them out.

Look for it in the 2.0.7 production build.

JohnC · « **Reply #6 on:** February 20, 2003, 09:54:08 am »

Hi Rhino

Thanks for the latest build. I have not been using the recent builds for a month or so, so I am not sure when my problem started. What happen is when in Overview, when scrolling down thru my albums, I find that most of the artwork only appears if I scroll then wait.

Also when grouped in year mode, If I select say 1975, then go to 2000, the 1975 button is missing. This happens whichever button I use. If I run the mouse pointer over the missing button , it re-appears. Is this just me.? I am using MJ8 with 2.07 build of Av.

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #7 on:** February 20, 2003, 10:51:10 am »

Hi John,

Album painting works like this. When a picture is shown on the screen it is initially drawn using the default image (assuming it hasn't already been cached). A request is then made to the background thread to load the image. When it loads the image is then sends a message back to the screen to tell it to repaint the album.

If you scroll down, wait then scroll back does the artwork appear? If so then that is the correct way in which it works.

Or maybe I'm not understanding the problem?

Regarding the tabs issue did your old version of AV support grouping? Also can you tell me please which OS you are using and if you have IE 6 installed.

Autoelph · « **Reply #8 on:** February 20, 2003, 11:59:43 am »

Rhino, thanks for reporting that bug to MC about the SDK\internal art issue. Don't mean to be a pest about this, but it is stuffing my enjoyment of AV just a little.

I've noticed some drawing issues with AV2, nothing major, just every once in a while a page (or more accurately, part of the page) wont redraw after an action until you click on it or move over it. It can affect the album art as well as the AV2 body.

Media Center Registered 9.0.115 -- C:\Program Files\J River\Media Jukebox\

Microsoft Windows XP Workstation 5.1 (Build 2600)
Intel Pentium III 599 MHz MMX / Memory: Total - 261 MB, Free - 68 MB

Internet Explorer: 6.0.2800.1106 / ComCtl32.dll: 5.82 (xpclient.010817-1148 ) / Shlwapi.dll: 6.00.2800.1106
Shell32.dll: 6.00.2600.0000 (xpclient.010817-1148 ) / wnaspi32.dll: Internal ASPI Layer

Ripping / Drive H: Copy mode:ModeBurstBigBuffer CD Type:Auto Read speed:Max
Drive I: Copy mode:ModeBurstBigBuffer CD Type:Auto Read speed:Max
Digital playback: Yes / Use YADB: Yes / Get cover art: Yes / Calc replay gain: Yes / Copy volume: 32767
Eject after ripping: Yes / Play sound after ripping: No

Burning / Drive I: MITSUMI CR-48X8TE Addr: 1:1:0 Speed:16 MaxSpeed:16 Use MJ Engine:Yes
Test mode: No / Eject after writing: Yes / Direct decoding: Yes / Write CD-Text: No
Use playback settings: No / Normalization: None

JohnC · « **Reply #9 on:** February 20, 2003, 12:53:24 pm »

Rhino

Your explanation of the artwork is correct, that is what happens. With reference to the tabs, yes I did have grouping before, and I am using IE6 and win xp.

Cheers John

nila · « **Reply #10 on:** February 21, 2003, 05:22:37 am »

Hey

Loving it so far - updating a song to 'favourite' though crashes MJ.

Shelly · « **Reply #11 on:** February 21, 2003, 05:47:18 am »

It's working very nicely! I have a couple of questions, though.

1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of artwork caching?

2. Is there anyway that a balloon can display the track artist when the albumartist is being used for grouping in a complilation album?

Shelly

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #12 on:** February 21, 2003, 07:32:52 am »

JohnC:

I can't reproduce the tab issue ... can you email me a screenshot to see if it gives me a clue.

Nila:

I cannot reproduce this. Can you tell me what screen you were in, grouping options and what treeview was displayed (if any).

Shelly:

1) Caching will mean that AV doesn't have to rescan your artwork images so it will start almost instantaneously.

2) I'll add an option but it will be the first track's artist only. Is that good enough?

nila · « **Reply #13 on:** February 21, 2003, 08:41:48 am »

ok - Album Details screen - using icons.
It's set to Find.

Ok - for some reason I'm suddenly having a hard time recreating it all of a sudden. It was doing it every time before

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #14 on:** February 21, 2003, 09:27:07 am »

So it's fixed then

Seriously though that sounds like an uninitialized variable issue. I look over that bit of code to see if I can spot anything obviously ... but in the meantime if it happens again take a not of the circumstances.

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #15 on:** February 21, 2003, 09:34:06 am »

JohnC,

A quick question ... do you have MJ skinning on? If so try switching it off.

JohnC · « **Reply #16 on:** February 21, 2003, 10:02:01 am »

No, skinning has been turned off for a long time. I had a problem before using AV, and turning it off cured it. I can't remember quite what the problem was then.

JohnC · « **Reply #17 on:** February 21, 2003, 10:15:24 am »

Rhino

Is it possible to add an Icon to the toolbar of MJ8, to return to AV from say playing now?

What I mean is, I use AV in full screen with all my albums on view, then I select an album to play, and switch to Playing now with Visualisation etc, it would then be great to be able to revert to AV view again by just one click of a button, instead of having to open tree view and then select plugins, then AV2. Is this possible??

Thanks

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #18 on:** February 21, 2003, 10:45:17 am »

John,

It's not possible as J River do not provide the ability to add icons, etc, to their toolbar.

bruno · « **Reply #19 on:** February 21, 2003, 11:27:29 am »

how do you view album art with this player?
can you browse your mp3 catalog by album art?

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #20 on:** February 21, 2003, 11:38:12 am »

Bruno,

First thing you have to do is create a database.

This is done by clicking the second button from the left in the AV toolbar.

Go thru the wizard and click finish.

Av will then scan your MJ database and scan your HDD for artwork images.

Av will then present you wil various ways of viewing/playing your albums via your cover art.

Autoelph · « **Reply #21 on:** February 21, 2003, 01:45:51 pm »

Quote

Is it possible to add an Icon to the toolbar of MJ8, to return to AV from say playing now?

It is possible to put the "previous" and "next" buttons on the toolbar. After being in AV, then to playing now, hit the "previous" button to go back to AV.

Shelly · « **Reply #22 on:** February 21, 2003, 03:09:34 pm »

Rhino,

Quote

2) I'll add an option but it will be the first track's artist only. Is that good enough?

Since you've asked, is it possible to add the track artist to every track? Displaying the first artist of a multiple artist album doesn't really help that much. I hate to be picky, but....

JohnC · « **Reply #23 on:** February 21, 2003, 10:03:23 pm »

Thanks Autoelph, that works fine, just what I required.

John

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #24 on:** February 22, 2003, 01:04:06 am »

I'm glad you can do it manually as I was thinking you meant programatically

nila · « **Reply #25 on:** February 25, 2003, 02:30:08 pm »

Two features for AV2.

These both obviously are going to require you to get your hands on the MJ9 SDK but when you do:

Ability to save the AV album ratings etc into the songs
(recently did a format and forgot to save my AV db. as a result I've lost all the settings I had in AV and all my ratings etc - very sad day for me).
Ability to right click on an Album and choose 'Burn Album' - This one would be soooooo sweet it's unreal.
It'd be the perfect way to burn any album quickly.

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #26 on:** February 26, 2003, 02:26:06 am »

Hi Nila,

When J River release the SDK I'll investigate these.

Also FYI I am delaying the release of 2.0.7 until Matt and I can get internal images sorted out.

nila · « **Reply #27 on:** February 26, 2003, 01:07:02 pm »

Hey Rhino

It's really developed well since back in the original day when I was testing it.
It totally handles my library with no problems and works great.

If you get a chance to add them later it'd be great too.

Good luck with the internal images.

Two other little points.

I just played an album from AV and noticed all the tags were wrong (it had the filenames instead of the track names) so I went back into MJ and updated it. I then discovered that there is no way to get AV to simply update this one album, it has to update the full db to simply update this album.
Currently the 'Update' tool works one way - updating MJ from AV. Would it be possible to make it work the other way too so that just a single album's details could be updated from MJ?

Also, the second thing is the grouping. When I group by 'Genre' it's just giving me a bunch of tabs with letters representing the first letter of the genre.
Any chance of this working like the year so instead of just saying 1, 2 etc for the years for 1999 and 2000 etc. it would say: R&B, Hip-Hop, Classical instead of what it currently does of: R, H, C which isn't much use

I'm glad you carried on working on this plugin. It's come soooo far since it's first days it's incredible

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #28 on:** February 26, 2003, 10:28:04 pm »

Quote

Rhino,

Since you've asked, is it possible to add the track artist to every track? Displaying the first artist of a multiple artist album doesn't really help that much. I hate to be picky, but....

Shelly,

What I have done is added <TrackAlbum> and <TrackArtist> as tokens which report the track's Album and Artist respectivly.

This should solve your issue.

Autoelph · « **Reply #29 on:** February 27, 2003, 04:17:35 am »

Has anyone noticed the RAM usage when using AV2? Usually MC9 is around 75M when I'm in the media library (my library is currently 37,000 songs). But when I open up AV2, it doubles the RAM to 140-150M, like it's loading a second library on top of the first. I can't have MC9 using this amount of resources, is there a way around this?

Thanks,

M

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #30 on:** February 27, 2003, 06:08:49 am »

Yes, switch off caching and use smaller images.

What you are seeing is the fact that your images are being held in memory as bitmaps within an ImageList.

Consider a single 150x150 image:

150x150 = 22500 pixels * 4 (each pixel contains 32 bits of colour info) = 87.89k bytes

Now consider that for each image there is 4 versions of it created ... one for the icon view, one for the tile view, one for the balloon and then one for the report view.

Then calculate this figure by the amount of albums you have and you will see that the memory soon adds up.

For version 3 I could implement an intelligent cache where you can set a limit on how much memory to use ... or I could go the MC way and save each "thumbnail" to a unique file but that in itself raises a whole load of issues.

You must remember also that it's a fine line between performance and usability. I can get AV to use virtually no memory but it would be unusable since it would have to open/read/resize an image every time it needed to paint. I made the decision to load everything since memory is cheap and I wanted an almost instantaneous usage experience.

Also out of curiosity how many albums with artwork do you have? I have over 350 and my memory usage is 50mb.

Autoelph · « **Reply #31 on:** February 27, 2003, 06:53:31 am »

Quote

...since memory is cheap.

Yea, I need to get some more RAM for sure. MC uses much more than I expected, but that's fine if it improves speed, which it obviously does.

Quote

Also out of curiosity how many albums with artwork do you have?

Hmmm, good question, hard to tell since AV is missing nearly half of my internal images, but let me see...

...of my 37,000 files, only 4000 do not have images...that's 730 albums out of 3500 that do not have images, so 80% of my library has images...

...or more accurately, nearly 2800 albums have images attached, but probably less than half of these actually show up in AV currently (until internal image situation is sorted).

Guess I need more RAM.

Thanks Rhino for the help...

M

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #32 on:** February 27, 2003, 07:05:42 am »

I'm still waiting for Matt to respond on the Internal Images issue ... we got further but I haven't heard form him in two days.

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #33 on:** February 27, 2003, 07:14:00 am »

Quote

Hey Rhino

Hi Nila!

Quote

I just played an album from AV and noticed all the tags were wrong (it had the filenames instead of the track names) so I went back into MJ and updated it. I then discovered that there is no way to get AV to simply update this one album, it has to update the full db to simply update this album.
Currently the 'Update' tool works one way - updating MJ from AV. Would it be possible to make it work the other way too so that just a single album's details could be updated from MJ?

What's the matter with doing a DB scan (limiting it down to your artist/album) preserving your settings? Preservation only keeps the AV unique fields and not the MC ones.

Quote

Also, the second thing is the grouping. When I group by 'Genre' it's just giving me a bunch of tabs with letters representing the first letter of the genre.
Any chance of this working like the year so instead of just saying 1, 2 etc for the years for 1999 and 2000 etc. it would say: R&B, Hip-Hop, Classical instead of what it currently does of: R, H, C which isn't much use

I'll put that in now ... I already thought about it but I was in two minds as to implement it. You've convinced me now

Quote

I'm glad you carried on working on this plugin. It's come soooo far since it's first days it's incredible

Thank you ... and fyi I am currently toying with the idea of a v3 and if I get the time to do it it will be mind blowing!

wickesy · « **Reply #34 on:** February 27, 2003, 09:59:13 am »

Hi Rhino,

I have just discovered a problem with the artwork thumbnails in the Overview screen.

I have three albums - The Corrs, Everything But The Girl and The Ronnettes - all titled Best Of. I have used the exceptions.txt file to ensure they display as separate albums but all three thumbnails are the artwork for The Corrs.

I have the same problem at the bottom of the list with Kim Wilde - Very Best Of and UB40 - Very Best OF.

I tried turning off artwork caching and re-creating the database but it did not make a difference.

I keep my artwork as external files in the same directory as the relevant album.

It seems that the overview screen is only picking up the artwork for the first album of each title.

I hope this makes sense.

David Wickes

Media Center Registered 9.0.120 -- C:\Media Jukebox\

Microsoft Windows XP Workstation 5.1 (Build 2600)
AMD Athlon 2082 MHz MMX / Memory: Total - 523 MB, Free - 109 MB

Internet Explorer: 6.0.2600.0000 / ComCtl32.dll: 5.82 (xpsp1.020828-1920) / Shlwapi.dll: 6.00.2800.1106 (xpsp1.020828-1920)
Shell32.dll: 6.00.2800.1106 (xpsp1.020828-1920) / wnaspi32.dll: Internal ASPI Layer

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #35 on:** February 27, 2003, 12:28:03 pm »

Hi,

Is the artwork different in the Album Details screen?

Also in the Album Details screen, change the bottom left dropdown to read "Album Overview" and click on each problematic album. What does it say for "Thumbnail"?

nila · « **Reply #36 on:** February 27, 2003, 04:25:00 pm »

I hope you got enough for your playstation I think it was you wanted from the money you made from AV.

I hope you do make a v3.

One nice feature for it would be the ability to create custom trees like in MJ.

Another feature that would be VERY smart is the ability to create smart type lists that actually recommended music to you to listen to.

Ie you could create a rule like this:
album lastplayeddate > 4 weeks
rating > 7

And you could set AV to prompt with a message:
You have not listened to the following good albums for over a months: 'thealbumlist'.

That way it would actually be suggesting music to you to listen to rather than you having to think about it - a very nice feature I think. It's basically just an add on to smart playlists so that it tells you new files have fallen into the smart list.

Also what might be nice is to do a WMP9 type thing where it remembers the time of day that albums are played and when so it can like suggest even time albums, midday albums etc.

All this would basically change it from being a reactive program waiting for us to tell it what to do and what we want to listen to and would make it suggest things to us more based on what we liked etc.

Marketting companies try to do this all the time because it's such a useful way to make us think of things we might not have thought of. Only difference is with AV we'd want the info, with marketters we just want them to disappear

.

That's really all I can think of at all. I'm not sure what on earth else you plan to do to it.
Voice recognition so we could tell it what to play might be cool

Autoelph · « **Reply #37 on:** February 27, 2003, 06:11:01 pm »

Hey Rhino, trudged out in the snow today and got some more RAM, 512 for $80. Not bad, should make a difference though. I 'm jazzin' now, just waitin for this internal image fix. O, I can't wait to see the end of that one, then AV2 will totally rock my world (in more ways than one!)

Thanks for nudging me out the door to the memory store, I needed that bad...

M

wickesy · « **Reply #38 on:** February 28, 2003, 07:58:50 am »

Quote

Hi,

Is the artwork different in the Album Details screen?

Also in the Album Details screen, change the bottom left dropdown to read "Album Overview" and click on each problematic album. What does it say for "Thumbnail"?

OK I've solved the problem. When I was examining the problem last night I noticed that the artwork for the problem albums wouldn't be picked up by the tokens I set in Artwork Directories when building the database.

I added to the list but had "preserve my settings" checked when I rebuilt the database

I unchecked that rebuilt the database and all is now well

Thanks for your help anyway.

David

nila · « **Reply #39 on:** March 07, 2003, 07:21:08 am »

Rhino - Feature request from my 12yr old cousin

He wanted to look through my list of albums to get a few and told me to print off the list so he can see what I have.

I was like yeah sure, one sec.

I realised however there is no way to print a list (wasn't expecting there to be) OR to extract or copy a list of albums thou (this is what I just presumed I'd be able to do).

I could just make a list of all the albums with the:
artist - album
then copy into word and print.

A NICE feature would be the ability to export a list of all the albums choosing what fields we want to export

Is this hard? I'd imagine it'd be pretty easy.
If it is easy, any chance of it soon so I can print him out a list

lol

Goes to show - everyone has different needs from software - my cousin wants things I'd never have thought of

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #40 on:** March 07, 2003, 07:26:31 am »

Nila... could you not so this in MJ itself?? set up a viewscheme that just contained the Artist/Album fields and maybe track #, sort by track # then copy all the track ones and paste into Word/Excel??

Adam

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #41 on:** March 07, 2003, 07:37:05 am »

I have just tried this and it works really well. Set up a view scheme showing just Artist/Album and Year with Search Criteria to only include track # 1. Sort by Artist then Year. Select All and copy into word and convert to a table... perfect list of all your albums...

Adam

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #42 on:** March 07, 2003, 08:06:58 am »

Or just use the save icon in AV, output it as .CSV and edit it to your hearts content.

nila · « **Reply #43 on:** March 07, 2003, 08:19:51 am »

This worked great NoCode

THANKS!!!

11 Pages of it - Wahoo!!

Still gonna request this as an AV feature thou just cause the MJ solution gives everything, singles, random songs, etc etc.

The AV solution would just give albums and would also have AV specific info - matching bitrate, number of tracks, etc. etc

NoCodeUK · « **Reply #44 on:** March 07, 2003, 08:28:59 am »

Unless you added an extra boolean field - "include in catalogue". if set to yes then it will appear in the catalogue...god I am full of ideas today...I am gonna add that myself

Adam

nila · « **Reply #45 on:** March 07, 2003, 08:49:01 am »

Lol.
The number of fields possible to add is limitless.

I personally created one that had three possible values:

Album, Single, Music Video

LisaRCT · « **Reply #46 on:** May 02, 2003, 06:10:29 am »

The price of AlbumView is listed as 7 pounds??
What about us Yanks??
Paypal?

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #47 on:** May 02, 2003, 07:12:20 am »

Hi,

You can pay in GBP via PayPal and it will do the conversion for you.

nila · « **Reply #48 on:** May 02, 2003, 10:11:55 am »

Rhino - where's AV Hairstyle mode?

lol.

You still working on it or you taking a rest these days?
I remember at one point you saying you had some crazy ideas that you might put in - are they still planned?

RhinoBanga · « **Reply #49 on:** May 03, 2003, 02:14:59 pm »

lol ... no point in doing a hairstyle mode.

I got an xbox, got it hacked and put on a program called XBMP. It blew my socks off.

Its the wave of the future ... your multimedia hairstyle experience is here now.

It's so good I am considering getting a 2nd xbox for the bedroom to play my DVD's, AVI's, MPG's and MP3's ... and the occasional game too

Best money I ever spent and it was an even better purchase due to the price cut

INTERACT FORUM

Author Topic: AlbumView 2.0.7 Beta (Read 9924 times)

Autoelph

Autoelph

Autoelph

nila

nila

Autoelph

nila

nila

Autoelph

Autoelph

wickesy

nila

Autoelph

wickesy

nila

nila

nila

LisaRCT

nila