Topic: MC12 Flac Plugins (Read 13491 times)

scthom · « **on:** August 12, 2006, 09:16:43 am »

Just to let everyone know, there are version 12 specific Flac plugins available from the Sourceforge page. I've been working on them, but will unhide them and make them public now that the beta is wider.

Version 2 of the Flac encoder and input (decoder) plugins are the ones for MC12.
Version 1 of the plugins are for MC11.1.

nathanchavez · « **Reply #1 on:** August 13, 2006, 10:38:39 pm »

Any idea when we can expect the eddb plugin for MC12?

scthom · « **Reply #2 on:** August 14, 2006, 08:25:43 am »

I'm planning on waiting until JRiver updates the documentation for events. Then I'll rewrite the plugin using events instead of polling. Couple of months maybe?

ferent · « **Reply #3 on:** August 14, 2006, 03:11:55 pm »

What is "events"?
What is "polling"?
Why events is better than pollin?

Thanks

Mr ChriZ · « **Reply #4 on:** August 14, 2006, 03:59:54 pm »

Quote from: ferent on August 14, 2006, 03:11:55 pm

What is "events"?
What is "polling"?
Why events is better than pollin?

Thanks

You know when you've got kids in the car
and they say
"Are we there yet?"
Once every 5 minutes.
And you say "No" "No" "No" and "Nooooo!"

That's polling.

Events is when the kid tells you they want to know when you get there before you set off.
When you get to your destination, you tell the kid that you are there, the kid never asks,
during the journey, and alot of hassle is saved.

Doof · « **Reply #5 on:** August 20, 2006, 08:51:49 pm »

That's probably the best illustration of those two concepts I've ever read. I'm going to have to remember that the next time I'm asked.

scthom · « **Reply #6 on:** August 21, 2006, 10:16:54 pm »

I really liked it too. Too bad I didn't think of it first

Craig · « **Reply #7 on:** September 23, 2006, 05:28:38 pm »

I like it too, so any idea when we can start to use events ?

Craig

nathanchavez · « **Reply #8 on:** September 23, 2006, 11:59:25 pm »

Bummer. I realy like the Eqdb plugin. I find it very useful. I guess all my songs will be set to "Rock" for a couple of months.

Maybe I shuoold buy a calander and start marking off the days.

danrien · « **Reply #9 on:** October 17, 2006, 07:29:07 pm »

i cant get the enc_flac zip to open, ive tried using winrar and windows built in zip archiver to open it.... thoughts?

scthom · « **Reply #10 on:** October 18, 2006, 12:52:47 am »

Quote from: danrien on October 17, 2006, 07:29:07 pm

i cant get the enc_flac zip to open, ive tried using winrar and windows built in zip archiver to open it.... thoughts?

Well, it's just a plain zip. Try downloading it again?

benn600 · « **Reply #11 on:** October 20, 2006, 05:48:02 pm »

Hey Schtom,
I am still having crashing trouble with your FLAC plugin for MC12. It is so strange how it will crash mainly if I seek tracks repeatedly but it still crashes MC randomly from selecting another song, playing a song, or stopping a song. Playing/Pausing quickly does not cause it to crash. Playing/stopping as quickly as I can doesn't cause it to crash. (usually speaking at least)

It seems like it only crashes when I push Next Track or double click another song. Also, it will crash about the same frequency of times whether it is still fading in/out or not from the last song. So, if I repeatedly jump from song A to B to C etc., it crashes about the same frequency if I wait for the fade to be finished as if I don't wait for the fade to finish.

I can quickly click all over the track duration bar (seeking to various areas of the same song) and it does not crash, no matter how fast I click.

Perhaps it is something to do with how it ends the previous song and starts the next one.

Unfortunately, I'm a college student who doesn't have a huge amount of programming skill but I would be happy to help with at least testing and reproducing the bug and perhaps I'll even grab the source and see if I can make any sense of it at all. This is so important to me because I have a hard time getting others in my house to start using MC when it has unexpected results--like crashing.

I'd really appreciate your assistance in solving this issue once and for all! Thanks!

benn600 · « **Reply #12 on:** October 20, 2006, 05:52:04 pm »

Lol. I just started opening some of the source files and see the following:

Quote

//TODO: possible threading crash when "next" is clicked too quickly

Do you have any general ideas on why this happens? My Upnp music players often give Runtime errors on MC and cause it to crash from just turning the boxes off, stopping songs, seeking songs, etc. This may be the FLAC plugin or MC itself.

My first question would be what all the files do, generally speaking, and which file the problem is (or is most likely) in.

scthom · « **Reply #13 on:** October 20, 2006, 06:02:47 pm »

I haven't been able to pinpoint the problem. It happens here on my machine occasionally too, so I know it exists, I just can't figure out what it is.

The problem, of course, is that when I use a simple debug program, it doesn't do "next" etc. And debugging from MC isn't that easy because I can't step through the code to see what exactly causes it.

For the most part, as long as you don't "next" too fast, it seems to be fairly stable.

Matt had suggested a threading problem, but I'm actually thinking it's most likely memory.

benn600 · « **Reply #14 on:** October 20, 2006, 06:15:30 pm »

Perhaps it is overwriting some key area of the current song with the next song in memory and then it doesn't have the data it needs. I just wish it didn't have to crash all of MC. That seems quite strange, but... The biggest problem is that when I try to rate songs, that inherently means I will be pushing next a lot!

hanspf · « **Reply #15 on:** October 23, 2006, 11:11:29 am »

I have downloaded both the plugins, and extracted them, but I still cant play flac formated songs. Why?

scthom · « **Reply #16 on:** October 23, 2006, 10:50:01 pm »

Quote from: hanspf on October 23, 2006, 11:11:29 am

I have downloaded both the plugins, and extracted them, but I still cant play flac formated songs. Why?

Two things, typically.

First, make sure you have the right ones, V2 is for MC12 while V1 is for MC11.1. Run the *.mjp files -- MC should give you a window box saying it installed correctly.

Second, sometimes MC just needs to be restarted. Make sure flac is selected in the audio types under the options.

danrien · « **Reply #17 on:** October 29, 2006, 07:00:47 pm »

Quote from: scthom on October 18, 2006, 12:52:47 am

Well, it's just a plain zip. Try downloading it again?

hmm i finally tried to get it to work again, and walla, it did

. thanks scthom!

Jonahsdad · « **Reply #18 on:** November 08, 2006, 08:33:42 am »

Quote from: Mr ChriZ on August 14, 2006, 03:59:54 pm

You know when you've got kids in the car
and they say
"Are we there yet?"
Once every 5 minutes.
And you say "No" "No" "No" and "Nooooo!"

That's polling.

Events is when the kid tells you they want to know when you get there before you set off.
When you get to your destination, you tell the kid that you are there, the kid never asks,
during the journey, and alot of hassle is saved.

I don't understand what these concepts have to do with the FLAC plugin.

Mr ChriZ · « **Reply #19 on:** November 08, 2006, 09:50:40 am »

Scthom pointed out that he's holding off updating the FLAC Plugin
until MC12 Events have been documented for the SDK.
Ferent requested what this terms Events or Polling meant,
so that was my explanation.

norms · « **Reply #20 on:** November 09, 2006, 06:03:15 pm »

Hope this does not offend anyone, just wish to know.
I have noticed that some other players have flac programmed into them. Is that not possibly with MC? Is it to difficult? Thanks.

KingSparta · « **Reply #21 on:** November 09, 2006, 06:10:48 pm »

Quote from: norms on November 09, 2006, 06:03:15 pm

Hope this does not offend anyone, just wish to know.
I have noticed that some other players have flac programmed into them. Is that not possibly with MC? Is it to difficult? Thanks.

J. Rivers Lossless Encoder Is APE, Created By Matt, I don't think they have any desire to work on Flac and compete with APE.

I am sure Matt will say APE is better (And It Maybe), MP3's Sound fine to me.

jgreen · « **Reply #22 on:** November 09, 2006, 06:58:01 pm »

I believe FLAC is getting hard-coded into hardware players. But I'm not aware of ANY major software jukebox that supports FLAC natively, without some sort of plugin. Maybe my info's old, certainly the FLAC page at sourgeforge would have this info. If I wasn't so lazy I would check.

norms, I too would love to see FLAC supported natively by jriver. But when you consider all the inter-corporate pissing matches in the tech world, MSFT vs AAPL, etc etc etc, I think MC not yet embracing FLAC is perfectly forgivable. And scthom does a great job of providing FLAC support. He approaches it with enthusiasm and a lot more patience than I could ever muster.

norms · « **Reply #23 on:** November 09, 2006, 08:39:33 pm »

Hey thanks so much for your reply's. I have much respect and graditude for all the free work that goes into providing the flac plugins. Of course I love MC above all others I have tried though I am only a person who downloads and burns music files for personal use and do not have the knowledge nor the smarts to be proficient even at using all the features of MC but it I do like it much better than all others I have tried....there are many lol. The ONE program I was refering to is 'Jetaudio'. It is an excellent player with many features but is no competitor for MC.
Cheers to all who contribute so much info here that the average user such as myself can benefit. *smiles*

jbony · « **Reply #24 on:** November 26, 2006, 04:25:25 am »

Hi Schom, thanks for your excellent work.
I have some serious instability issues under Vista x64 after installing the FLAC plugins. I remove it and everytthing is fine again. Any idea?

I have about 250GB of FLAC files, I don't want to convert everything to another format.

scthom · « **Reply #25 on:** December 03, 2006, 03:58:08 pm »

Quote

I have some serious instability issues under Vista x64 after installing the FLAC plugins. I remove it and everytthing is fine again. Any idea?

I don't think anything in my code would give a problem under 64 bit, but I believe the flac library would. I understand the next release of the flac library may fix that problem, but I can't hazard a guess as to when that might be. Soon, I understand.

MrC · « **Reply #26 on:** December 04, 2006, 11:04:29 am »

The next release being 1.1.3??? If so, its out.

scthom · « **Reply #27 on:** December 10, 2006, 07:43:21 am »

True. Probably around the same time I posted it.

I'm already working on incorporating it, but as always little things bedevil me.

scthom · « **Reply #28 on:** December 14, 2006, 11:33:30 pm »

Yesterday I posted Version 2.1.0 of the encoder. It's using flac-1.1.3. Feedback on x64 would be interesting, but I think your comment was really about the decoder.

Still working on the decoder (now with image capabilities) and also some ideas on the "next" crashes.

After that it's EQdb and Wavpack.

Next week is vacation and holiday, so it won't be too quick.

Wildcat · « **Reply #29 on:** December 15, 2006, 07:55:35 am »

A fix for the "next crashes" is all I want for Christmas....even if it's in January!

Thanks.

thenoob1 · « **Reply #30 on:** December 15, 2006, 11:03:51 am »

Scot have you ever thought of a wavpack encoder plugin?

I love the encoder, but I have not the programming skills to do this.
It would be also great if someone creats a plugin with nero aac.

But maybe you could release a wavepack encoder plugin.

Scarpad · « **Reply #31 on:** December 20, 2006, 01:20:18 pm »

I'm just starting to think about ripping to a Seperate lossless library, I've only ever worked with WMA Lossless and Apple Lossless. I installed the FLAC Plugin, I noticed the quality setting, how does this work exactly? I thought lossless was lossless, how does the quality come into play?

MrC · « **Reply #32 on:** December 20, 2006, 04:00:50 pm »

Quote from: Scarpad on December 20, 2006, 01:20:18 pm

I'm just starting to think about ripping to a Seperate lossless library, I've only ever worked with WMA Lossless and Apple Lossless. I installed the FLAC Plugin, I noticed the quality setting, how does this work exactly? I thought lossless was lossless, how does the quality come into play?

The quality setting is a misnomer. Its a compression level setting. Think of it as "quality ... of compression". Flac will work more aggressively to compress the file as optimally as it can. Higher quality levels require more time to compress (but not decompress), and the gains are typically very small (less than 1 meg per file roughly). If you have the CPU horsepower, push the setting as high as you want.

jkrzok · « **Reply #33 on:** December 22, 2006, 05:59:52 pm »

Just wondering...

Will the quality level have an effect on CPU usage when decoding?

scthom · « **Reply #34 on:** December 25, 2006, 09:42:39 am »

Quote from: jkrzok on December 22, 2006, 05:59:52 pm

Just wondering...

Will the quality level have an effect on CPU usage when decoding?

Yes, but barely. Decoding is practically the same regardless of Quality level. In practical terms, only the encoding is affected by Quality.

John Gateley · « **Reply #35 on:** December 25, 2006, 11:41:26 am »

How about a FLAC page in the new wiki? I started one here, but it needs to be filled out:

http://wiki.jrmediacenter.com/index.php/FLAC

j

scthom · « **Reply #36 on:** December 26, 2006, 11:05:35 pm »

Nice! Thanks, John.

I hadn't had time to check on the Wiki as of yet. Too busy fixing the "next" crash bug and implementing images in tags. Maybe one of the more zealous users could help me out there?

scthom · « **Reply #37 on:** December 28, 2006, 01:52:14 am »

I just posted a version 2.1.0 of the Flac Decoder plugin.

I think it fixes the "next" crashing bug.

It also updates to flac-1.1.3, and now has image file capabilities. Note that since the image block is not part of the Vorbis tags, "Remove Tags" will not delete the images from the file. You'll have to use metaflac command-line for now to do that. Hopefully I can come up with an option or workaround for that.

I've heard reports that Unicode characters still may not be handled correctly -- Please let me know if you find anything of that sort.

Wildcat · « **Reply #38 on:** December 28, 2006, 11:19:31 am »

So far no "Next" crashes here.

Very nice!

Sundog_AK · « **Reply #39 on:** December 28, 2006, 10:05:31 pm »

I have MC12 Build 130 with the new Flac plugin V2.1. I have tried a variety of rapid "next" selections and do not seem to have any crashes either. Prior to this build, I could generate a crash within 2 or 3 rapid next selections almost 100% of time (on both MC11 and MC12). So the bug seems like it may be able to get moved to the "squashed" list.

Thanks for keeping at it to find the issue with the plugin. I do not have to "baby" MC anymore to keep it from crashing with my Flac files. I was really hoping I was not going to have to transcode back to APE.

Again, thanks for all the hard work.
Chris

benn600 · « **Reply #40 on:** January 16, 2007, 12:18:03 am »

I tried to get it to crash and like some others, I used to be able to get it to crash in 5-10 tries. I did notice that my new Core2 desktop was much less prone to crashing.

However, I cannot duplicate the crash anymore after quite a bit of testing. Thank you VERY much for your hard work and dedication to Media Center! Try a "Select Song," Enter...then Arrow Down,Enter,AD,E,AD,E over and over really fast. Nothing! Perfection! Thanks!

nathanchavez · « **Reply #41 on:** January 31, 2007, 12:12:34 am »

Is it safe to assume that EQDB, at least for version 12, is dead?

scthom · « **Reply #42 on:** January 31, 2007, 08:25:18 pm »

No, I wouldn't say dead. At the moment, I'm trying to implement Events Handling, once that is done, it's ready to go. A few more weeks, something like that, hopefully.

marko · « **Reply #43 on:** February 01, 2007, 02:50:54 am »

Scot, you might want to chase this up, you might not, but the jriver plugin pages are listing in_flac v1.6.6 and enc_flac v1.6.1 as v12 plugins.

Some people will be sure to be caught out.

-marko.

Alex B · « **Reply #44 on:** February 01, 2007, 06:41:09 am »

My post in another thread:

Quote from: Alex B on February 01, 2007, 06:26:08 am

Actually, the decoder (input plug-in) link leads to the same Sourceforge download page. Only the version number text on the JRiver page is incorrect.

The encoder plug-in file for MC12 is indeed incorrect. It tries to install the old MC11 version, which does not work with MC12. This could be changed to lead to Sourceforge as well.

Also, the version numbers could be removed so there would be no need to update them each time scthom releases new versions.

nsteele · « **Reply #45 on:** February 03, 2007, 03:52:20 pm »

Just got a new Vista machine & running MC 12.0.157. Installed the latest FLAC encoder and decoder (2.1.3), and it looked like it finally installed OK, but I can't get the Tools/Options/File Associations check box for FLAC files to stay selected, and consequently am not able to play any FLAC files, even though I can successfully import them. Also, while I was able to import all my FLAC library, they do not display in the file lists (I guess because there is no FLAC file association enabled). No problem with any of this on my old XP machine w same versions. MC bug or in scthom's world?

scthom · « **Reply #46 on:** February 04, 2007, 10:47:32 pm »

I have read about Vista's new registry management features, and suspect there may be some issues there?

But, the fact that the FLAC checkbox shows up at all probably means the plugin is installed correctly. Really, the only thing installation entails is getting the dll copied over and adding a couple of entries to the registry so that MC can find it. I can't think of any reason why Vista wouldn't run it once installed correctly.

tommythom · « **Reply #47 on:** March 19, 2007, 09:22:38 pm »

I noticed that a new version of FLAC (1.1.4) has been released, and it encodes faster.
Any plans to update the plugins?

Osho · « **Reply #48 on:** March 19, 2007, 11:04:04 pm »

Quote from: scthom on August 12, 2006, 09:16:43 am

Version 2 of the Flac encoder and input (decoder) plugins are the ones for MC12.

Thanks for your excellent work on FLAC plugins for MC12. I have encoded around 150GB of audio files encoded with FLAC and it works great!

Do you have any plans to support embedded cover art in the FLAC? I believe that is the only thing that is missing in the FLAC that I would like to see.

thanks,
Osho

Osho · « **Reply #49 on:** March 19, 2007, 11:06:57 pm »

Quote from: jgreen on November 09, 2006, 06:58:01 pm

I believe FLAC is getting hard-coded into hardware players. But I'm not aware of ANY major software jukebox that supports FLAC natively, without some sort of plugin. Maybe my info's old, certainly the FLAC page at sourgeforge would have this info. If I wasn't so lazy I would check.

There are some major software jukeboxes that support FLAC natively: Winamp, VLC, foobar2000 come to mind. On linux OS, there is mplayer, xine, amarok - all of them support FLAC natively. I have found FLAC to be the easiest (next to mp3) to find native software for on different OSes. Here is a link for more info

http://flac.sourceforge.net/links.html#software

thanks,
Osho

INTERACT FORUM

Author Topic: MC12 Flac Plugins (Read 13491 times)