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[RhinoBanga]

Here you go people:
http://www.jda-ltd.com/freeware/mjav.exe

And here's the changelog:

Issue where exiting options screen did not refresh the main window
Rescanning while on the overview page now refreshes
Redesigned the options screen
Added ability to specify the startup screen
Added custom thumbnail captions
Added external directory searching for artwork (very fast and recommended)
Added internal images support (very slow and I do not recommend you switch it on)
Albums/artists sorted just like MJ, e.g. an Album only tree and an Album/Artist tree.


If you find that AV is slow, try switching off some of the options, e.g. completed album hilighting if you use MJ internal or external images as in this circumstance I have to query *every* track to work out how many have images, or updating the UI during a scan.

Have fun and let me know of any issues/enhancements (that are not documented in the readme).

[Mike]

Rhino,

Looks great !

So far I only found one problem:

1.  the scroll wheel does not work on the overview screen.

Also is there a way to use the "shift" and "CTRL" buttons for multiple album selection ?  For example if I wanted to shuffle 3 different albums I would select 3 albums and "click a play button" and if I had shuffle selected in MJ it would shuffle those albums.

Mike

[Mike]

Rhino,

I hate to bring things up that do not work.....b/c all in all this is awsome.

The "Sync with playing now" button does not seem to do anything and just hangs the screens (blank) when it is "on".

Mike

[RhinoBanga]

Mike,

Syncing will show a blank screen when it cannot find the track being played.

Every 200ms it gets the playing track, scans thru the artists to get the artist, then the artists's album list to get the album then the album tracks and compares the track number and the track title to find the playing track.

That is unless you have switched on completed album processing ... in which case I just do a lookup against the filename directly in the track table.

So can you mail me a trace file please so I can try and figure out what is going wrong.



Re the mousewheel ... I have seen it but only a couple of times.   I'll look into it.

Re shuffle mode ... If you hold down CTRL when double-clicking on an album it will/should append it onto the playlist.

[nila]

Bitrate Overview mode.
I know there is the bitrate mismatch page but it'd also be nice if the overview page maybe highlighted albums that were incomplete as well.

Another column that would be nice is mp3 type:  cbr or vbr.

Another issue is screen integration.
In the bitrate overview screen it shows info but it's not possible to double click on an album and go to the album overview screen.
It'd also be nice to be able to right click on this and choose other screens to go to with that album.
Also - in the overview of all the albums, it'd be nice to be able to double click on them and be taken to that album within the media jukebox media library so that the album details can be modified, images can be gotten for the album etc.

Track details screen should show the track details for an album we have selected in a previous screen not for all songs. Showing it for all songs is just repeating the functionality of Media Jukebox.


Also - I updated an albums image in Media jukebox but when I went to album view it did not automatically reflect this. This wouldn't be so much a problem if there was a right click option to right click and choose 'update' for that specific album instead of having to do the whole library.

How does it work out what it considers an 'incomplete album' cause it's listed a lot of mine as incomplete.

On the whole though this version is greatly improoved from the last one I tried.

[RhinoBanga]

Nila,

If you want to know which albums are incomplete use the report.   The overview page is just that ... an overview of your library.

I can't give you the cbr or vbr type field as MJ doesn't give it to me.

As far as integration with MJ is concerned I can't really do much as MJ doesn't allow me to control the treeview.   I suppose I could try and force it to do something via msgs's but that will be later.

Same with the refresh of a single item ... do-able but I want to get to v1 out of the door first.

Finally AV considers an album complete when every track in the album has an image.


Rhino.

[Mike]

RHino,

I used the on start show overview function....

now when I start MJ it asks if I want to do a data scan....thing is that the message is hidden under the startup MJ logo screen ( the big blue one that shows when you launch MJ)...you have to move that blue logo over to get to the question....would be better if it did not ask at all.

and after all that I see the album overview flash when I launch the plugin and then it shows no albums....I have to go to another tab and then back to overview to see the album covers.

I tried the CTRL ...but it only adds the first song of the album to the playlist.

It would also be better if you did not simply append....but selected the albums, then play...reason is that if you append MJ no longer shuffles the playlist(if that option is on).

Mike

[nila]

Found a bug - check it out at the bottom of the screen shot.
The scroll bar has stopped yet there are more items. I can double click the top of them and they play.

nila.dyndns.org/delete.jpg

[strips28]

Rhino,

this plug-in is something we'll be waiting for, just found a "bug" or just something i can't figure out.
i have some albums with the same name (like Live or Greatest Hits) from different artist, but i can't get the images from the different albums, AV picks out one image for all the artist so when i look at Billy Joel - greatest hits i see a picture from let's say Aerosmith - Greatest Hits. I made the connection to the different externel images .
is it something i'm doing wrong or is it something for you to work out ?

Wil

bytheway, do you know what All Times CST means, i'm reading that everywhere....

[bennyd]

Hi Rhino,

Nice plugin, one question:

Every time I restart MJ, the plugin needs to re-scan which takes a long time for my 8.000 files (external images)

Is there a way that it remembers the last scanned ones or is this normal ?
Now when re-starting MJ it takes a few minutes to re-scan my images all the time.

[RhinoBanga]

Nila:
The scrollbar issue is documented in the readme.
Also the track screen is not repeating the functionality of MJ as you can't group data in MJ.


Mike:
I show the prompt as fetching all the albums may take a long time.   I'll add an option to override this display but I'd recommend you switch off the MJ splash screen in case any errors get shown.
I've fixed the CTRL key issue but switching off the shuffle mode sounds like an MJ bug to me.


Wil:
AV uses the first track of an album as the thumbnail.   If you want to use a specific one for the whole album use the external directory scanning feature which (by default) looks for images in the MJ artwork folder called ARTIST - ALBUM.jpg


bennyd:
The plugin has to scan the MJ database in order to work out which albums belong to which artist (and if you switch on complete processing it has to query every track to see if it has an image).   On my machine (1.5ghz AMD) it takes 2 seconds to read/sort/store the MJ records, what machine spec you using?   Also getting the artwork should be pretty instant if you use AV's own directory scanning feature.   Try switching that on.


Thanks for the feedback guys.

[lee269]

Geting better and better. Thanks for the artwork rules.

Issues:

1. Not sure if this is a problem or my ignorance - I moved my artwork to another location and cleared out the JRiver\MediaJukebox\Data\Cover Art directory. Thanks to your new feature, album view picks up and displays the artwork from the new location fine. I dont have artwork for all my files. The highlight incomplete albums option doesnt appear to work however - it now shows my entire collection in red on the treeview, both for those artists where I have complete art, and those where its incomplete. I dont get the (say) '3/5 complete' indication anymore. Perhaps I should have specifically deleted artwork from the MJ library in 'file properties'?

2. Moving the mouse to the right of the options button highlights a 'ghost' button - clicking on this doesnt do anything.

3. Synchronise with playing now works for me, but if the album thumbnail pane in album view is not high enough to encompass the picture and description, the albums 'vibrate' up and down on screen.

lee269

[RhinoBanga]

lee269:

1)  That sounds like a bug ... I'll check it out.

2)  That ghost button is my internal debugging one ... I'll disable it in future releases.

3)  LOL ... I never coded animation ... consider it a feature
   Seriously ... I've reproduced it here so I'll fix it in the next release.

[RhinoBanga]

Friends,

Just to let you know I have fixed the following bugs:

1) Issue where holding CTRL when double-clicking on an album was always playing the album instead of just adding it to the playlist.
2) Fixed thumbnail painting issue where resizing did not refresh the page properly.   This has also fixed the scrollbar issue.
3) Fixed issue where thumbnails were always being repainted on a sync.
4) Reworked startup code so that overview screen doesn't ask for a db scan if the database if screen is choosen to be the startup screen.   If you want the screen to be filled you must enable the scan DB on startup option.


I should hopefully be releasing 0.3.1b tonight.

[dragyn]

Only problem I see is AV is using the wrong image for the albums. I have internal searches selected. Only show like 4-5 different images total but for multiple albums.

Also when refreshing, the scroll bar in missing in "Entire Collection". Have to switch views (completed only/entire) to get it back again.

[RhinoBanga]

Friends,

Version 0.3.1b can be picked up from the usual URL.

Here's the changelog:

Issue where holding CTRL when double-clicking on an album was always playing the album instead of just adding it to the playlist.
Fixed thumbnail painting issue where resizing did not refresh the page properly.   This has also fixed the scrollbar issue.
Fixed issue where thumbnails were always being repainted on a sync.
Reworked startup code so that overview screen doesn't ask for a db scan if the databaseif screen is choosen to be the startup screen.   If you want the screen to be filled you must enable the scan DB on startup option.
Added right mouse button on grids and overview thumbnail screens to allow jumping to the selected artist/album.


Also Dragyn ... I think I know what the problem is but I have to create a proper test bed to prove what I think the issue is.   I only have 1 file with an internal image so it may take a while ... unless someone knows where I can dl some un-copyrighted material.

[Cmagic]

Hi Rhino,

Version 0.3 works great with mp3 albums but I have a probleme with
my mpc albums.
In fact the !album! Token returns something like "Abbey Road - mpc" for
a mpc encoded album instead of simply "Abbey Road" as it should.
The result is that the images for mpc albums have to be
named "Beatles - Abbey Road - mpc.jpg" for the plugin to correctly retrieve the images.
Don't know if it's also the case for ogg, wma formats ?

[Rich]

I am getting the following error messages when installing Album View.
Please help.

C:\ProgramFiles\JamesDickson\MSAlbumView\MJAlbum View.ocx
and
C:\Windows\System\JDCaption.ocx
                \JDScroller.ocx
                \JDSplitter.ocx
                \DivederLine.ocx
all with:
Unable to register DLL\OCX:Load Library failed; code 1157

[Dave]

Is there a web site available so I can see what this program is about?

[Doof]

I'm having the same problem that Dragyn is having regarding internal images and only 4 or 5 showing for every album.

[RhinoBanga]

Cmagic:
I know what the problem is and I'll fix it.


Rich:
I'd take a guess that it's because you don't have the VB6 runtime files on your machine.
Try installing this:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q235420


Dave:
If you do a search for "Album View" in interact there are a few screenshots kicking about.   I'll get a website done when it goes production.


Doof:
I'm going to look at the problem tonight when I get back from work.

[nila]

Hi, I'm not sure if this is possible,
but it'd be nice to be able to rate albums as a whole. Maybe you could save this data somehow as well so that I could rate all my albums as albums rather than as individual songs.
By being able to do both I'd be able to specify the good and bad albums but also specificy say a good song within a bad album, or a bad song in a good album.

It'd be a great feature

[Mike]

Rhino,

I am not sure I understand the Sync button......whenever I press it and a song is playing....nothing happens except all the thumbnails disapear and the album details go blank aswell.

Am I doing something wrong ?

Mike

[RhinoBanga]

Nila:
If you had a ranking facility how would you want AV changed to take advantage of such a feature?   I would personally never use it so tell me how you think it should work.   I'll let you do the design work and I'll consider coding it


Mike:
I answered this msg at the beginning of this thread.

[MWGilbert]

latest version works OK, but i have 2 questions:
1) can the sort order of overview be changed? currently it sorts by album only, and i would like it to sort artist - album
2) how about adding a subdirectory option for the image searching? i keep my music as S:\artist - album\artist - album - track - name.mp3 and the image as :\artist - album\artist - album.jpg. hence, i would like to search S:\ and its subdirs

btw thanks for your very good and useful work!

[RhinoBanga]

MWGilbert:

On the top right hand corner of the screen is a little arrow ... click on that and it will give you the sort options.

Also you don't need a subdir option.   Just delete the directory search rules that are there and add a new one containing:

Directory: s:\!artist! - !album!
Filename:!artist! - !album!.jpg


And AV will resolve the directory/filename accordingly when it checks for artwork.

[strips28]

Rhino,

i've been trying to sort this out for days, but i can't get it working.
as you adviced, i want to work with directory scanning, so i made a directory
"F:\Cd Hoesjes" (dutch for CD Covers...)
there i put in all my covers in this format: artist - album (Abba - Live)
in the AV optionstab, Artwork rules, under directories to scan, i create a
directory F:\Cd Hoesjes, with filename !artist! - !album!
there is also an "v" in de directory scanning option..
my mp3's are named the same way, but when i scan for covers, AV finds anything.
i've been trying this now for so long with different formats, i can't find out how it works

can you tell me how i must fill this in (maybe with an example??)

as said before i want to work with external images but then with albums with the same name i get some problems in showing the right cover....

can you give me some explenation...


regards wil

[RhinoBanga]

Wil:

When AV scans the MJ database it uses the first track of the album as the thumbnail image source.

When it cache's the image it passes the album and track name to the image caching class.

This class then goes down the list of "Order of Precedence" you have defined in the options, e.g. directory scanning first, external MJ second, internal MJ third.

When the directory processing priority is invoked the function goes thru all your directories to scan and replaces the tokens with the values to look for.

So for example if you have:

Directory: F:\Cd Hoesjes
Filename: !artist! - !album!


The function will replace !artist! and !album! with the appropriate values from the first track and look for the exact filename it has built.   For example using the album "Live" from the artist "Abba" would build the filename:

F:\Cd Hoesjes\Abba - Live

And look for that *exact* filename.

If it is not found then the next directory to scan is processed.


There is some other things it does but I won't bore you with the gritty details.   The above should give you an indication of how it works in the majority of cases.


So ... getting back to your problem The first thing I would check is that you have .jpg at the end of the "Filename" specification, e.g.:

Directory: F:\Cd Hoesjes
Filename: !artist! - !album!.jpg

Obviously if your filename is actually "Abba - Live.gif" then change the entry accordingly (or add a new one).


Now there was a bug if you referenced a non-preffered type album it would pass in the wrong album name, e.g. if Abba/Live was a WMA type and your preferred type was MP3 it would pass in "Live - WMA" as the album name and as such not find any artwork ... but I have fixed that in the latest version I have here.


Hope this helps.

[MWGilbert]

> On the top right hand corner of the screen is a little arrow ... click on that and it will give you the sort options.

so much for my inate, exploratory curiousity...indeed it does.

> Also you don't need a subdir option. Just delete the directory search rules that are there and add a new one containing:
> Directory: s:\!artist! - !album!
> Filename:!artist! - !album!.jpg

this works as well.

thanks.

so, moving on:

1) when the thumbnail size is set to anything but small, you cannot scroll down to the end of all your albums/images.
2) the sort by artist-album on the overview works, but not entirely. for example, i have one album that reappears a few times in random places, and a (small number) few albums that either appear out of order or repeat.

this is starting to look like an integral part of media jukebox...hint, hint j. river

[nila]

hmm, how would I want it designed.
Nice question.
Well basically, I guess the easiest way when it first works is to total up the average rating of all the songs in the album and use the average as the album average. This could then be modified by us to whatever value we want.
Could u make it out of 10 though instead of 5 so just double the average it makes.
Then have a column sort option of rating as well as album and artist. so I could have say:  rating/artist/album.
Ideally it'd be nice if Media Jukebox could then read this.
That's actually a possibility - use one of the customer fields and make it an 'album rating' field. That way Media jukebox would support direct searches for album ratings.

I know I personally have a LOT of albums these days and it'd be nice to be able to do quick searches for good albums, even old ones.

I mean the main problem with functionality is that Album View is a plugin instead of an integrated part of Media Jukebox. This would be something nice possibly for version 9 as it's a big jump to 'slip' into version 8.
But to be able to say check a box in the 'find music' section and do searches for albums instead of for individual songs.
It'd be really nice if your plugin was really tightly integrated into Media Jukebox fully.

Anyway, just basically give us an option to set album ratings which could be a field we could set when also browsing the albums and possibly store this value into one of the 3 custom fields.

[lee269]

AV 0.3.1b/MJ8.0.260:

Been looking a bit more at the 'incomplete album' problem I posted yesterday. Ive now used 'file properties' in MJ to explicitly remove all artwork. I have 83 album images and 105 albums in my MJ library. The AV incomplete album report shows approx 45 rows, and like the album details, not all of these are actually incomplete. All but the first 3 artists in the artist/album treeview of album detail are highlighted in red - those 3 actually have art. Ive fiddled with the artwork rules order in options but still no luck. Incidentally every so often after a db refresh (and Ive been doing that a lot) the incomplete albums report showed lots of albums with 1 track incomplete less than the total no of tracks - consistent with your statement that AV looks at the first track in any album for the picture. But I cant figure how to reproduce this consistently, cos another refresh seems to 'fix' it (incomplete=tracks, even though that album may/may not have artwork). So, I dont know what else to do. Hope this info helps in some way.

Other than that I must say this is a really important addition to MJ, and I second MWGilbert - looking like a standard component in the download.

lee269

[RhinoBanga]

MWGilbert:
Does the scroll bar appear if you exit MJ and re-enter it?
Also can you check that the sort sequence in the treeview is ok.


Nila:
I'll see what I can come up with this weekend.


lee269:
I have literally just finished fixed the incomplete processing code ... my bad ... it was totally screwed.
I am now just seeing if I can speed it up when using AV's directory processing.


On a general note I would love to this to be in the main MJ treeview (to save screen real estate if nothing else) but there are a few technical reason why I doubt this will happin in the near future:

1)  This is written in VB (because I wanted something quickly) ... but v2 will defo be C|PLS||PLS| and be zippy fast.
2)  The current MJ plugin infrastucture does not allow additions to the treeview (which would be a real pain anyway for J River.   For example on a node click they would have to work out which plugin the msg should be forwarded to).


Mind you I wouldn't be surprised if they implement this functionality in a later release.


Finally ... look out for a new build l8r people.

[MWGilbert]

> Does the scroll bar appear if you exit MJ and re-enter it?

the scroll bar is always present. with thumbnails set to small, one can scroll up and down from beginning to end of all albums (1036 in my case). with thumbnails set to anything larger than small, one can scroll up and down from beginning to some arbitrary point. the larger the image, the less the number of albums can be scrolled to.

> Also can you check that the sort sequence in the treeview is ok.

the sort sequence in the treeview is ok, just not the displayed overview, where it is corrupted

thanks.

[lee269]

Couple of really picky things:

1. The tooltips that appear when you wave the mouse over a track in track details show artist as a number eg 'Artist:69 Album: Abbey Road'. Guess you need to pick up the name rather than the id from the library.

2. Probably not essential, but if possible perhaps useful to show an art location field in track details seeing as we can now store art wnywhere. This doesnt come out in the MJ exported playlist.

3. (OK more than a couple) FWIW the mouse wheel is not working for me in overview either - or the thumbnail pane in album view either.

lee269

[RhinoBanga]

MWGilbert:

I have found the scrollbar bug and boy is it a biggie
I have a picturebox inside my scroll control and it seems that the maximum height for a picturebox is 16384 pixels (this is a VB limitation) even though it allows you to paint beyond this figure

I am going to have to have a rethink on this whole area of code


lee269:

I have fixed the tooltips issue.
I will not show the artwork location in the track view as there are certain circumstances where AV may have been started and it doesn't know any of the locations yet.   I will add it as a report and I can force the resolution of the artwork.
As far as the mouse wheel not working ... I can only assume that the mouse software you are using is not translating the wheelmouse scroll messages into normal scrollbar movement messages.