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[scott_r]

Hello!

First of all, MC XML Export 1.0.1 is available now from the Media Center accessories pages, so no more 404's

Secondly, I'm in the middle of coding MC XML Export 2.0, which is significantly faster than it's predecessor (I guess taking "COMP317 Design and Analysis of Algorithms" was worth it )

It's a complete from-scratch rewrite. Written in C# instead of VB, it's got a completely redesigned interface and the internals don't suck any more. And I promise that large libraries won't kill it.

So, there's a couple of things I need:

1) Does anyone still use this plugin? I know I've got a couple of emails in the last few weeks since it was taken down, so that's encouraging.

2) If anyone's got a _really huge_ library that you'd like to share with me, it would really help with the testing. In the past I used Mastiff's library, which was pretty sizeable, but thanks to the Windows XPerience I lost it, so I need another big test library. If you're an avid collector of music then give me a PM and we'll sort something out. I don't need the media files, just the library backup file.

Thanks heaps,

Scott.

ps.. Does anyone else think that "XP" makes a particularly appropriate emoticon?  

[LonWar]

What do you call big? I got 11K.... But I don't think there's any larger then Dragyn's....

[scott_r]

I think the library I was using had about 40K entries...

I guess anything from around that figure and up would be good.

[JimH]

Hi Scott,
Maybe PM KingSparta.  We use his library for testing.  Maybe he'd provide a copy.

Thanks for your work.

Jim

[hit_ny]

Hi Scott

Glad to know youre working on v2. I use ur plugin from time to time to export stuff..

THing that always bugged me was the way in which it went about populating every single smartlist in my tree when i only wanted it to do just one.

i always felt...if one could select which smartlists to populate before letting it run, it would have made things better.

However with v11, i expect there will be significant speedups.

[tlongacre]

I've got about 21K songs, if that's big enough. I've used the plugin in the past, but not often 'cause it is a memory hog on my setup and I find the interface confusing (I have to re-learn everything each time -- particularly filenames and locations).

[IlPadrino]

Scott,

I often use your plugin so I look forward to any new developments.  Did you ever come to a decision regarding an MC XML Import plugin?

[scott_r]

THing that always bugged me was the way in which it went about populating every single smartlist in my tree when i only wanted it to do just one.
i always felt...if one could select which smartlists to populate before letting it run, it would have made things better.

That problem should be a thing of the past, as 1.0.1 populates the entire tree before it starts up, whereas v2 only populates the part of the tree you're looking at.

I've got about 21K songs, if that's big enough. I've used the plugin in the past, but not often 'cause it is a memory hog on my setup and I find the interface confusing (I have to re-learn everything each time -- particularly filenames and locations).

The new interface should be much more intuitive - you'll have the choice of using a "Wizard" type interface to specifiy all the export options or you can just use a one-step preset. Overall things are looking much better - I'll post some screen shots soon for people to look at once I've got it nailed down.

The exporter should be much less of a memory hog as well, though I need to do some testing on that.

tlongacre, if you could send me a copy of your library backup to sraynel @ gmail.com - it will have to be a version 10 library though.

Also, because I've coded it in a modular way (the gui is separate from the  back-end) I'm looking at the possibility of adding scheduled exports using presets. What do people think about that?

Cheers,

Scott.

[scott_r]

I often use your plugin so I look forward to any new developments.  Did you ever come to a decision regarding an MC XML Import plugin?

Cool Yes, I think once I've got v2 sorted out I'll also integrate an importer as well, spare-time permitting

Cheers,

Scott.

[MarkCoutinho]

Hi Scott,

I tried your plugin for MediaCenter for I want to use my lyrics in a database-file.

As you state in your ReadMe.txt (from December, 2003) that appears not to be possible.

Have you studied on this problem in the meantime?

Would be great if you could figure this problem out!

Thanks in advance,

[scott_r]

That would be the other Scott R (I made the plugin, Scott Raymond made XSLT transformation scripts, which you're referring to).
His email address is in the readme file, I'd email him there - I'm not sure if he still frequents these boards.

Cheers,

Scott.

[Michel Lefebvre]

Hello!


2) If anyone's got a _really huge_ library that you'd like to share with me, it would really help with the testing. In the past I used Mastiff's library, which was pretty sizeable, but thanks to the Windows XPerience I lost it, so I need another big test library. If you're an avid collector of music then give me a PM and we'll sort something out. I don't need the media files, just the library backup file.

Scott,

Your'ew welcome to mine. "Only" about 28,500 entries, but the library is chock full of user defined fields that may help in your testing...

The may file be too big for emailing (around 18 MB) so we may have to set up some other way.

Michel.

 

[MarkCoutinho]

Mine consists of some 11,000 songs.

The zip is about 19 MB

Interested

[Diverdown1964]

Hi Scott

Glad I checked in here, thought this had gone away...

Yup - I use it! And if you want a library, it's around 45K tracks now.

[Mastiff]

Man, I'm sorry I didn't see this until now! you should have PM'ed or mailed me, I would have sendt you my (now 53 000 + tracks) library at once! I use your plug-in every time I need an update to the playlists for the car an my son's room.

[KingSparta]

so what would you load this MXL in, besides a browser?

it seems Excel will stop at around 65,000+ Rows

[IlPadrino]

so what would you load this MXL in, besides a browser?

it seems Excel will stop at around 65,000+ Rows

A file this large is best accessed using server-side scripts.  You certainly don't want to have a browser try to render such a large file!  Really, it's a shame that JRiver doesn't provide a tie to the library with SQL.  In the meantime, XML works OK - but it's probably too much to expect that people will be savvy enough to run something server-side.

[gregoryx]

Site under "About" is 404. I was hoping to look at some of the other XSLs out there... and it seems like there used to be some on the site.

Can someone point me in the right direction for XSLs and/or the pre-release of the new plugin mentioned here?

Thanks!

[lOth]

I was wondering if there would be a way of using XML export to do one of the things the iPod plug-in for winamp can do. This plug-in can export the winamp (5) library to a .xml iTunes library. The goal would not be to prepare for a shift from MC to iTunes (hell no...) but to upload that .xml file to http://www.musicmobs.com

Musicmobs is similar to audioscrobbler except that it exports not what you play on your computer, but your complete playcount. As a result your musical profile would be much more accurate than audioscrobbler's, and this for 2 reasons: 1) if you have an old MC library, it would take into account everything you've played since you installed that good old Media Jukebox. 2) If you listen to music a lot on a portable device, this listening (after sync with MC library) will be taken into account as well.

As matter of fact, because I do a lot of listening on my iPod, and because I don't listen to the same things when I'm out with my iPod, my audioscrobbler profile is already different from my musicmobs profile after only a few weeks of parallel use:

http://www.audioscrobbler.com/user/l0th/

http://www.musicmobs.com/user.php?userId=12579
(check out the 'In heavy rotation' section on the left, that's also a nice feature... as you can see musicmobs is rather album-oriented while audioscrobbler is more track-oriented)

Anyway, back to .xml export, does the export of MC's library to an itunes library format seem doable?

[IlPadrino]

Site under "About" is 404. I was hoping to look at some of the other XSLs out there... and it seems like there used to be some on the site.

Can someone point me in the right direction for XSLs and/or the pre-release of the new plugin mentioned here?

Thanks!

You can get the presets at http://pages.sbcglobal.net/scottraymond/Presets.htm - plenty of XSL to get you started.

[Mastiff]

Scott, how's version 2 coming along? Every time I fire up 1.0.1 it takes around five minutes before it's ready for use. 

[scott_r]

Scott, how's version 2 coming along? Every time I fire up 1.0.1 it takes around five minutes before it's ready for use.

Yeah, I know - sucks, huh?

The horrible load-time is a stupid bug on my part, that I'm unable to fix as I don't have the source code anymore. Bloody annoying. So I've re-written about half of it so far (and fixed the stupid bug), but there are a few things getting in the way from finishing. First up is University. I pretty much have zero time to work on fun things like this, plus I'm hardly ever in Windows in the first place anymore! I haven't even tried out MC11 properly yet!! Second is the real show-stopper though... It seems making COM calls (to MJAutomation) from a multi-threaded .NET environment causes so much overhead in marshalling stuff around the place that the export itself takes about 10 times longer than it used to.

Basically I want to have the export taking place in a separate thread, allowing the GUI to remain responsive, as well as allowing other things to happen, like scheduled exports running in the background, or simultaneously.

In version 1, everything happened in a single thread. Each time round the main export loop the screen was repainted to make it look like things were happening. The main draw-back to this approach is that we can't cancel a currently running export, as the MouseDown event won't be received untill the export loop is finished. Bleh.

I don't really know the answer. You can either have exports that take an order of magnitude longer than they used to, with the ability to do cool new things, or you can have it how it's always been, but unable to cancel

Or someone can find the answer to this COM/.NET madness. I don't quite hate myself enough to delve into the depths of COM threading models, but here's what (I think) I know about the situation:

• COM objects (MC, MCXMLExport, etc) get put into Apartments
• There are two types of Apartments, Single Threaded (STA) and Multi Threaded (MTA)
• Objects in the same type of Apartment can communicate directly - objects in different types of apartment require an in-between object to marshal data back and forth
• MC creates my plugin inside an STA
• All's well until I spawn a new thread (the exporter thread), which, obviously, gets put in an MTA
• Calls coming from the export thread are in an MTA, and are targetting the MC object, which is in and STA
• Slowness ensues.

Any Windows programmers care to comment? I wouldn't have the foggiest idea. Surely this is a common thing?

[Mastiff]

I only have a faint idea what you're talking about, but I would prefer the export to be as snappy as possible, and not being able to cancel it. If it matters what I think... 

[scott_r]

I only have a faint idea what you're talking about, but I would prefer the export to be as snappy as possible, and not being able to cancel it. If it matters what I think... 

Heh, yeah, kinda got a bit carried away there...

I might get a version out that's just single-threaded and see how that goes. Although I can't promise a specific time-frame, I'll see what I can do.

Ciao,

Scott.

[Mastiff]

Thanks! I'll be looking forward to that.

[quirtep]

Greetings.  I'm just wondering if you are still working on MC XML Export 2.0.  I use 1.0.1 regularly and would love a faster version.  Thanks for the update.

[lOth]

I'll follow-up on the bump to throw again in the air my question about exporting to an .xml compatible with iTunes (see above).