Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[toeknee]

When I select a directory in the tree, right click and select play, all of the data files get added to Playing Now. I noticed in .095 notes it mentions you can now add data file. I don't want to play datafiles, I just want the audio and graphic files to play the way they use to.

Now every time I play using the above steps I now have to go to Playing Now and remove the data files.
Please help

[leezer3]

When I select a directory in the tree, right click and select play, all of the data files get added to Playing Now. I noticed in .095 notes it mentions you can now add data file. I don't want to play datafiles, I just want the audio and graphic files to play the way they use to.

Now every time I play using the above steps I now have to go to Playing Now and remove the data files.
Please help

I suppose that's partially my fault, I suggested the feature in the first place 
Have you considered a filtered viewscheme-
Customise View--> Advanced--> Set Rules for File Display--> Media Type Is Not (Data)

Otherwise, this would require a new feature within MC, but would an entry in the More Play Options for just audio/ video/ data be any use to you?

Cheers

-Leezer-

[toeknee]

I want to see the data files just not play them. If I don't view data files and play, they don't play. However, because of the way MC decides which graphic to display for a Large Thumb is also dependent on other files and their sort order.

The best solution would be to add a switch for playing data files or not.

I'm not sure how much this feature will be used or exactly why one would want to play a log file, review, or some other txt file. I can see it for ISO's but not most other types of data files simply don't make sense to me.

What really amazes me is that no one else has complained.

[leezer3]

I want to see the data files just not play them. If I don't view data files and play, they don't play. However, because of the way MC decides which graphic to display for a Large Thumb is also dependent on other files and their sort order.

Add coverart from file?
This'll get you the thumbnail you want
I fail to see why you need to have data files in your viewscheme, but don't play them though.

Cheers

-Leezer-

[toeknee]

leezer3, first thing, thanks for taking the time to respond to my issue. I truly appreciate any help you can give me regarding this problem.
I work for a very large software company and understand the support nightmare that can develop even with software like MC.

End use is hard to know in every situation. People will use software in ways developers never envisioned or intended. That said.....

I generally use MC from the Drives & Devices Tree. I tag from here, I play from here. I almost never use the Library view schemes.
I have 4 External Hard Drives where I keep all music. They are configured alphabetically by Artist, Drive P:/A - D, Drive Q:/E - J etc
First level of directories are Artist, 2nd Level Album, 3rd level Version of Album, 4th level Art specific to the version
By highlighting the album directory and using a recursive setting in the view, I can see all files associated to that particular version of the album including the Art directory and its contents. The art directory only contains art files so that if I want to see the art in thumbs I simple highlight the art directory.

Sort order is Media Type, Disk#, Track# in the detail pane

[toeknee]

Now, why do I do it this way....
When I start MC, the Large Thumb, is populated by one of five different images. It appears to be randomly decided on startup.
1st possibility is the image that is stored in the Image File field of the database. This in reality, should be the Large thumb that is displayed.
However, that is not always the case. The image could be the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th file that immediately follows the audio files.

When the functionality was added to attach images to data files, this worked perfectly to manage the Large Thumb being displayed.
As long as I have at least 4 data files with the cover art attached, I'll always get the correct cover art being displayed.

Image Files are named according to how I want them to play in the slideshow that is displayed in Playing Now.
Note that I change the media type for the cue and m3u file to data. I do this so that the cue file doesn't add additional lines in playing now.
I don't use playlist currently so I setting the m3u file to data gives me an additional datafile to get me to the required 4 datafiles for correct display of the large thumb.

This is what I see if I don't add the cover art to the data files. The large thumb being displayed is the data icon from the 3rd data file.

[toeknee]

Here is what I'll see if I don't display data files. The large thumb displays the third image file after the audio files. I highlighted it which shows it in the image at the bottom of the tree. In this case I'd see the inside tray image for the cover art.



I reported this twice back in MC12 and never could get anyone to really take a look at it.
In reality, all I want is for the correct cover art to display in the large thumb of the detail view.
If I view from the Library, it displays exactly the same way that it does from Drives and Devices.

Before they add the ability to attach cover art to data files the only way I could get the correct art to display was to restart MC until it was using the cover art I attached. The screen shots taken above was from a single session within MC.
In the above examples, the 3rd file after the audio files is being used. This would be the case for any directory I display until I were to restart.
Once I restart, MC will once again pick randomly the file sequence # to use. By displaying at least 4 data files and attaching cover art, I'm able to control what image is used.

Life is all about work-arounds, that's what I do for a living.

[Alex B]

I guess you are not using the latest MC13 build.

JRiver changed the large thumbnail behavior some time ago, but not in a way you would like. Because of some internal changes in the grouping system that speed up things the large thumbnail works only if the view is grouped.

BTW, did you know that you can set a view scheme to show files by disk location? The Drives and Devices section may not be the best place to browse and use imported files. AFAICS, it is really intended to provide access to any disk location so that unimported files can be initially browsed and occasionally played inside MC before they are actually imported.

Here is a view scheme that is configured to use the disk location as a first view item:

[toeknee]

Actually, I'm using the latest release 108, with grouping defined by an expression Artist/Year/Album/Version
The reason your view works is that It's an Audio only view scheme. There are no data files or Image files so it defaults to the cover art.
It has no choice.

I've built a View All view scheme that reacts exactly the same way Drives and Devices detail view does.
The tagging of files is much quicker and easier in the Drives and Devices view.

When I Play from just an audio view scheme, I don't get my slide show of all of the images from the album. I originally started with MC10 long ago because it was the just about the only media software that would play the images along with the music.

The only reason all of this worked for me was that data files were given the ability to have cover art attached. Now that data files are played, whether from a Library or Drives and Devices, that creates a problem when Playing Now tries to play those files.

I think the real question ought to be "What benefit does adding data files to play Now bring to the customer base?" None except for an ISO file. I was already playing ISO's by selecting the ISO file and right clicking, selecting play. Why would anyone want to add txt files to playing now?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I work for a large software company and the specific software is ERP/Business in nature. When we add functionality, we're very careful to make sure we don't alter the basic functionality of the software. You need to build in switches to turn on new functionality. Software today needs to be flexible based on how the end user wants and/or needs to use it. If the powers to be insists on keeping the functionality of adding data files to Playing Now, at least give us a switch to not add data files. We use ini files in some situations for user switches. It isn't that hard programatically to add these.

[leezer3]

Why add data to Playing Now?
You're thinking of MC as only a music/ image/ video management application. The underlying strength of MC is it's database, and this can quite easily refer to anything, not just media files.
When Playing Now was unable to use data files, adding them to playlists/ smartlists was virtually worthless, as any given playlist is basically copied to Playing Now to be played. (There is no 'current' playlist concept as such, rather the contents of the playlist are copied into Playing Now)
These are a couple of my personal uses:
1. The scripting interface is unable to work with anything other than Playing Now (As this is the only true playlist in action). I've got several auto-tagging/ renaming etc. scripts, which I run on various of my filetypes, both media & data. If I couldn't add data to Playing Now, these would be far less useful.
2. I've got various smartlists to find things such as untagged files. I can set this in motion, and see at a glance what hasn't been sorted- If I'm dealing with ebooks or simply crummy filenaming a quick look at the first chunk of a file is far more useful than simply running through lists. Again, it's far more useful if these can deal with data too

I don't deny that an option to exclude data files from Playing Now would be useful in some cases (Yours for example), but IMHO new functionality should always be on by default
I'm also not denying that the current implementation needs a little refinement (Closing the data file or using the skip needs playback to be manually restarted, this should change), but because you don't have a use for this option, you seem to be writing it off.

Cheers

-Leezer-

[Alex B]

toeknee,

I see now where you are coming from. We are actually in the same boat. There is a difference in how we access the files, you use the Drives & Devices section and I use view schemes, but the problem is the same.

I didn't realize that the change in the behavior would affect what i have done for years -- namely playing an album from a top thumbnail in any of my "All Media" views (many of my albums contain various imported and tagged data files). Apparently I just have not done it very recently.

Since this thread already contains several nice screenshots I added a few old pictures, which may not be familiar to recent forum members. 

... During the last few years I have used MC for moving my "auxiliary" files together with the main media files. It is possible because MC can handle and tag image files and documents as well as audio and video files.

Here are some old example screenshots from my library:


Click to enlarge.


Click to enlarge.



I have imported the cover art, other related image, document, subtitle, etc files and tagged all files with common basic tags (the tags that I may use in a naming rule if I move the files). For tagging and renaming files I use "all media" view schemes which don't have media type restrictions.

Since I always store the linked cover art file in the media files' folder the link doesn't contain a path and it will always be correct if the folder and all files inside it are moved.

The only reason I have several album images imported is MC's ability to play them in a slideshow during music playback. Besides tagging the image files I use my "All Media" view scheme for sending the music files together with image files to Playing Now.

At other times I use audio only view schemes as well.

Here are the screenshots from the "sorting problem" thread:

A library view:



Playing now after a right-click>play on the album image stack (the sorting issue is resolved now):



The album images play in a slide show. The slideshow can be paused and the images can be enlarged for reading the texts. Often I set MC's display to TV out and display the images on the big screen.

When I add new CDs I tag the images and docs at the same time. So it's not much more work to do. Also, I don't usually mass move my albums (not anymore - I am happy with my current system), but I have found the imported and tagged album image files useful in many ways.

For example, I am playing this playlist now:



These files make an Alice Cooper compilation named "The Beast of Alice Cooper". I have not actually bought this album, but I have all original main albums. Because I liked the track selections I recently gathered the "Beast of" tracks with the corresponding main album images to this playlist. I also downloaded and added the "Beast of" front and back covers.

When I play this playlist the PN display looks like this:
(The animated file is about 0.5 MB, so it may take some time to load.)




EDIT:

I changed the example to a smaller one. The image files were too big.

It depends. Here are the fields I have made visible in my All Media view:


Click to see the full size image.

I scrolled the view horizontally between the screen shot slices. I am so comfortable with using the horizontal scroll bar that I don't normally use the Tag Info window at all.

and finally:

Well, I'll try to explain better:

MC has native support for single image file, which is linked to a music file or placed inside the file's tag area. Actually that is not an album image but a track image. MC can find it automatically if certain conditions exist. Instead you can manually link one image file to a single track or to several tracks (e.g. to all tracks in one album).

MC has also native support for importing image files to the media library, e.g. your digital camera images. You can tag them as you like. With MC you can show image files in slideshows when playing music files. I use that capacity for playing and showing my albums.

I want to have my albums complete in MC, including music, cover art and printed information. Usually I scan several images: front, back, booklet, inlay, CD 1, CD 2, etc. I make them at least 800 pixels wide. If there is small printed text I make them bigger. So all text can be read if/when enlarged (you can pause the slideshow and enlarge an image). I also make a smaller version of the front cover, which is used as a usual track image. I store all images in the album folder.

I import those image files to MC and tag them. Because they have the same album tag as the music files the images become part of the album in the MC library. I can see them together in the All Media view. I can search for the album name and I get a list of the music files and the image files. If I send them all to Playing Now, MC displays a slide show during the album playback. I can also make playlists of them (incl. music & images).

I have not found tagging them too awkward. Importing and tagging the image files takes only some seconds. For example, you could do that just before listening to each album. Listening to an album takes usually at least 40 minutes.

Here is an example of the files included in one of my albums:



Here is an example of the album images:



The file named "Bonnie Tyler - Silhuette In Red.jpg" (labelled as "Front") is the standard cover art image, which is associated with the music files. It is used when I play single tracks in various artists playlists.

When I play the whole album with images I don't usually include that small image in the playlist because the cover is included in the "Booklet 1" image. In this case the booklet spreads are 1600 pixels wide.

I usually use the all media mode and go to the MC tree > advanced > Hard Disk Location. Then I just right-click the album name (=same as the folder name in my case) and select "Play".

The same goes if you make a playlist of the album files (audio files & images). Just select "Play" for the playlist.

[toeknee]

Alex, we are very close in the way we use MC. I also tag everything. I've been using the Stacking function to stack and add at the same time all of the files to the database. Stacking works perfectly from the Drives & Devices view except that collapsing a stack changes the top of stack icon and doesn't actually collapse the stack. More than a few releases ago, the stacking functionality was removed from the right click menu when viewing in Drives & Devices. My work around here has been to go to a Library View and perform the stacking functions I want. These will now be available to me in Drives and Devices as I have my "Right Click recent commands count" set to 8. This is just another example where they give us functionality and they alter it or take it away. Once I have them stacked, tagging Artist, Album, Genre, Year and Info (my text data field for identifying version, I have 7 versions of Dark Side Of The Moon) is extremely simple. I do a rename and hit enter in each field of the top of stack file and in 10 key strokes I've tagged all of the files.

So when your using an All Media view and select the folder you want to play, the data files get added to Playing Now I would assume.

Just a thought, developers are currently making modifications to the File Types area. Wouldn't it make sense to use this list to decide which file types, including data types, that are capable to be played (added to Playing Now)? You can set these various file types to No for their association to MC. If a file type is set to No, it would never be added to Playing Now. By the way, this is one of the many ways I've tried to work around the situation but MC still adds the files regardless of how I set the association switch.

Thanks for your post and a thanks in advance for any influence you might have to find a better solution for playing data files.


leezer3, I certainly have a better understanding of why you supported the addition of the data files to Playing Now. Your post also enlightened me to the fact that you could use this for scripting purposes. I would really be interested in the script your using to tag files in Playing Now as I can see this would be very beneficial for tagging. As I stated earlier, I'm tagging all files for an album with Artist, Album, Genre, Year and a self defined field named Info where I have version information, Remaster, Japanese Edition, secondary release date and the such. 

Does the script take specific tag information in the audio files and apply them to all files being played?

Thanks for you post and again, thanks for your help

[leezer3]

Have you seen the scripts thread?
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=33020.0
Basically, it's possible to do just about anything with a script, just depends on precisely what you're after
I admit I've never tried copying a large-scale field from one file to another, but it should be easy enough.

This is a quick and dirty script to copy the notes field from the first file in Playing Now to all others:
WARNINGS:
*This will mangle line breaks. I can probably write a slightly more complex version which saves the field to a text file and then reads it back again, but this is more of an example than anything.
*This script alters tags. Be 110% sure before you hit the trigger, I'd advise using on a backup library!
*This will only work for default fields (Change Track2.Notes & Track.Notes for your required field names). Not sure if this is an issue with the scripting plugin or MC's definitions, others will have to investigate further really.

Code: [Select]

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;     
using System.IO;
//css_reference MediaCenter.dll;

class Script : MarshalByRefObject
{
    public void Init(MediaCenter.MCAutomation mediaCenterInterface)
    {   
        //Save changes to file?
        const bool saveChanges=false;
       
        //Get the current playing now playlist
        MediaCenter.IMJCurPlaylistAutomation playlist = mediaCenterInterface.GetCurPlaylist ( );
        {
        //Get the file from the first position in the playlist
        MediaCenter.IMJFileAutomation track2 = playlist.GetFile(0);
        //Save the Info field to a string
        string trackInfo=track2.Notes;
       
        //Iterate through all the files in the playlist
        for (int counter = 0; counter < playlist.GetNumberFiles() ; ++counter)
        {     
            //Get the file from the current position in the playlist
            MediaCenter.IMJFileAutomation track = playlist.GetFile(counter);
            {
            if (saveChanges==true)
            {
            //Write the previously saved info for all files
            System.Console.WriteLine(trackInfo);
            track.Notes = trackInfo;
            }
            else
            {
            }
            }
            }
            }
    }
}
If you're after anything else in this line, please do post, I've been playing with this sort of thing quite a bit

Cheers

-Leezer-

[Alex B]

So when your using an All Media view and select the folder you want to play, the data files get added to Playing Now I would assume.

Yes, except that I often use a "thumps on top and list on bottom" view so it is natural to start album playback from the album thumbnail in the top split.


leezer3 explained how the Playing Now is useful for other tasks than playback. I have used PN for tagging data files since it became possible to add data files to MC. I usually drag the files from Windows Explorer to one of my Playing Nows. The Zones feature makes possible to have more than one PN lists. I can play music in a separate PN while I use another PN for tagging and organizing files.

In this post I explained how I use PN for tagging and renaming video and data files simultaneously: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=36072.msg246236#msg246236

Just a thought, developers are currently making modifications to the File Types area. Wouldn't it make sense to use this list to decide which file types, including data types, that are capable to be played (added to Playing Now)? You can set these various file types to No for their association to MC. If a file type is set to No, it would never be added to Playing Now. By the way, this is one of the many ways I've tried to work around the situation but MC still adds the files regardless of how I set the association switch.

This is close, but not quite the solution I would like to have. Personally I have all file associations disabled, at least on the MC instance that usually handles my main library of 65,000 files. I use smaller viewers and players that don't have a database for quickly previewing media files directly from Windows Explorer. The file associations have nothing to do with my preferred playback behavior inside MC.

However, the problem could be easily fixed by adding one or two additional file type specific playback methods to the list. One would be "None". It would work like MC worked before the change. It would just skip the file type when it is included in the selection and the files would not be addded to Playing Now. This would make possible to play ISO disc images, but disallow some other file types.

Since it is sometimes useful to be able to add data files to PN, I'd like to see another playback method option added. Its name could be "Skip (when advancing in Playing Now)". It would allow adding these files to Playing Now, but when playing a PN list that contains other playable file types MC would simply skip them and play the next playable file instead. This should not disable the possibility to directly double-click a data file in PN and open it in with an external program (e.g. with a text editor, pdf reader, web browser, etc).