Print

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

[bspachman]

Over the past 3 months, I've used Media Jukebox to create my own "electronic" jukebox. I've ripped all my albums as full-length APE files with cue sheets via EAC, then used Matt's fabulous utilities to convert the cue sheets into APL files. I've got the APLs (mostly) tagged and imported into MJ.

The next step was to get some basic remote control going for MJ. I installed a StreamZap remote, Girder, and the MJ8 Girder plugin. I found a basic MJ GML on the Girder website & have most of the basic functions working well.

Now I need some help...

I'd like to use my Marantz 5200 remote control to select albums & tracks from MJ (it's a relative of the Phillips Pronto remotes). I know I can create an interface on the remote to control the basic functions of MJ through Girder. There is also a utility called SuperNudelist (SNL) that has been designed to create remote control panels for Sony & Kenwood CD jukebox changers. Some people have had success using SNL to activate WinAmp and choose playlists by number. They set up a playlist for each album in a special directory, each playlist is assigned a number, then they can use SNL, Girder & WinAmp to select and play any given album.

Because MJ rocks so much more than WinAmp, I thought there must be a more elegant way to select albums from the Media Library via remote control. Once an album has been selected, subsequent remote control panels would allow me to have direct track access.

Any ideas? Do I need to go the route of making playlists for each album? I could create a new MJ library that contained only my full-length album APEs, but I would then lose the ability for direct track access.

Will MJ9 help me in my quest? What do you all think?

Best,
Brad

[Matt]

Hey Brad, thanks for all the kind words

About playing playlists, the best thing is to create the playlists in MJ and then do it through the command line.  You can play any tree path, device, or playlist that way.

Check this out:

http://www.musicex.com/mediajukebox/DevZone/CommandLine.html

Thanks again!

[Matt]

Oh, and by the way, MJ 9 is lots better for fancy stuff like this, but only use it if you're a little brave

The good thing about using version 9 now is that you can help us shape its future.

[bspachman]

Hey Brad, thanks for all the kind words

Where quality is delivered, kind words (& $$$) ought to follow!

About playing playlists, the best thing is to create the playlists in MJ and then do it through the command line.  You can play any tree path, device, or playlist that way.

Check this out:

http://www.musicex.com/mediajukebox/DevZone/CommandLine.html

I've looked at that page before. Since I haven't really created any playlists since I've been using MJ (I normally just navigate through the default and a few custom views I've created in the library), I'm a tad confused.

Does MJ actually save playlists as a separate file (like WinAmp)? In order to accomplish what I'm trying to do, I think I need to have a way of individually selecting each playlist via Girder. I suppose I could create an individual Girder command for each album that uses mjextman.exe to play a given album. Instead of having 500+ playlists, I would have that many Girder commands that just say "mjextman.exe \Play TREEPATH=Media Library\Albums\AlbumName", right?

I guess I'm trying to figure out a way to avoid having to create 500+ of anything for this project (except for the remote control panels--that's a given). Since the remote control panels must be created, I was hoping that the IR commands can be sent from the remote to Girder, then to MJ, which would do the heavy lifting of selection.

Oh, and by the way, MJ 9 is lots better for fancy stuff like this, but only use it if you're a little brave

The good thing about using version 9 now is that you can help us shape its future.

Although I've downloaded a build of MJ, excuse me, MC9, I haven't installed it. Are there any specific things I should look for to help me in the "fancy things"?

I'm also worried that MJ9 isn't ready enough to play nicely with Girder and/or the MJ Girder plugin. Any worries there?

Best,
Brad

[bspachman]

I guess I'm trying to figure out a way to avoid having to create 500+ of anything for this project (except for the remote control panels--that's a given). Since the remote control panels must be created, I was hoping that the IR commands can be sent from the remote to Girder, then to MJ, which would do the heavy lifting of selection.

Sorry for following up on my own post, but it's a combination bump and telling of what I've learned. In the past couple of days, I've haunted the Girder site and discovered that there are ways to actually store values within Girder, then use those values to create a command line.

What that means for me is that I can program my remote to send "1" & "2" & "3", then have Girder put it all together to put together an mjexman.exe command that says "Play playlist 123".

In order to avoid having to create hundreds of playlists, I still need to figure out if I can have Girder do a lookup in an index file. That would mean I can have girder build up the "123", then look in another file to find that album 123 is actually "Abby Road", then it would send MJ the command to "Play Album 'Abby Road'".

Wait--an idea just came as I was tying! Is it possible to have the command line activate a selection based on a custom field? Then, is there a way to automatically generate a custom field that is a simple index number (eg. "Abby Road" = 1, "American Salute, An" = 2, etc. etc.)

Although I've downloaded a build of MJ, excuse me, MC9, I haven't installed it. Are there any specific things I should look for to help me in the "fancy things"?

Any ideas?

I'm also worried that MJ9 isn't ready enough to play nicely with Girder and/or the MJ Girder plugin. Any worries there?

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Brad

[Matt]

Oh, I didn't realize you wanted every album.  I have like 10 main playlists assigned to 0-9 on my remote.  Simple things for simple minds.

To do what you want, all I can think is to either:

1) strap a display to the computer and use MC's menu-driven Hairstyle system

2) use a wireless PDA and Glissando or WebRemote (plugins) to control MC

Let us know if you come up with anything cool.

[Mastiff]

I use the second solution, with a Fujitsu-Siemens PocketLoox running NetRemote (which by the way uses CCFs, so you can keep those), but I do also have another solution for the other zones. For now I'm using (don't tell anybody, it's embarassing!) WinAmp (or Brand Eech, as Marvel would have put it) and controls that via a nice little Girder gml called (I think) playlist opener.
It works like you say, I push the number buttons on the remote and it starts the corresponding cd. The downside is that you have to create playlists for them all. But with the right programs it does not take that much time. I think I spent about eight hours one weekend creating playlists for all my albums (at that time about 1300 albums, I think I'm closer to 1500 now). I also put the playlist number in the "comment" ID3 field. This way works great for my wife and my six year old son, they know the numbers of their favourite albums, and every now and then I export the playlists from MJB to Access, strip them for everything else than the artist, album title and comment and print those. If only MJB could do that export... But all in all this solution works perfectly for me.  

[bspachman]

Oh, I didn't realize you wanted every album.  I have like 10 main playlists assigned to 0-9 on my remote.  Simple things for simple minds.

I see...

No, it'll eventually be a system where I can have direct access to each individual album (then direct access to each track). I'll also set up direct access to various SmartLists, mostly based on genres.

I like the possibilities with the command line for defining the shuffle mode because I would want to shuffle the genre playlists, but play albums straight through (usually).

So, there's no way to "Play" via the command line by specifying a custom field in the TREEPATH? Would "TREEPATH=Media Library\SomeCustomView based on index number" work? The docs on the TREEPATH modifier are a little skimpy.

Best,
Brad

[bspachman]

So, there's no way to "Play" via the command line by specifying a custom field in the TREEPATH? Would "TREEPATH=Media Library\SomeCustomView based on index number" work? The docs on the TREEPATH modifier are a little skimpy.

Well, this will probably be my final update in this thread. I'm happy to report that using the command line with the TREEPATH modifier works great! I spent about 2 hours learning some detailed Girder stuff & about an hour creating a custom index field for each of my albums. Zipped together a spiffy new view scheme, and POW! direct numeric access to 500+ albums (complete with OSD).

An overview of what I did:

1) Created a command group for regular MJ functions in Girder & learned the appropriate IR commands.

2) Created an "Album Selector" group in Girder that uses the numbuilder plugin to store a 5-digit number in a register, then builds an mjextman.exe command line to pass the number to my custom view scheme in MJ using the TREEPATH modifier. The numbers are sent to Girder via IR.

3) Defined one of the custom fields in MJ as an "Album Index", gave each Album a unique number, then created a view scheme for "AlbumIndex/Album".

4) Finally, I spiffed it up a bit using the DVDSpy plugin for Girder so I can actually read the track, artist, & album information on my TV. I'll eventually be able to modify this to drive my VFD display.

The last thing to do will be to actually program an interface for it all into my remote, but that's primarily tedious cutting and pasting...perfect for a long weekend.

Best,
Brad

[tomrusse]

Brad,

Don't know if you are still playing around with this but I'm attempting to create roughly the same environment.  There are some spiffy vbs scripts that a fellow posted on the AVS forum that auto-magically creates playlists for every album.  I modified them to support APE and a few other tweaks to better address the interface to MJ.

Tom

[bspachman]

I am still working with this. I'm pretty happy with the solution I detailed above. I'm not really interested in having a zillion playlists floating around my hard drive. I usually rip an entire album to an APE/CUE combination, then blow apart the CUE list into APLs. I import the APLs into MJ, and work with them from there.

Assigning an index number to each album works fine. I have yet to get into the programming of the remote, but now that SuperNudeList 2 is out, I hope to make progress on this over the holidays.

Which scripts were you referring to? There are some massively long threads in the HTPC forum. Could it be one of the MainLobby threads? How are you integrating your system?

Best,
Brad

[tomrusse]

Using:
MainLobby<-->Girder<-->MJ9 with a hook to a VFD

The VBS scripts do indeed create a playlist for every album as well as dynamically created mainlobby screens by artist/album.  Tweaking these very slick scripts by a more talented person than I, I altered the ML screen creation scripts to send command lines to MJ to add the selected album to the playlist.  I think your solution is more elegant but may be beyond my girder skills at this point  :-/

Anyway, what you're doing sounds very interesting  and somewhat similiar to what I'm attempting eg
1) using MJ girder scripts for basic functionality,
2&3) using ML for album selection based on the VBS script output,
4) DVDSpy to get info, and
5) Using the DVDSpy info, MJ's visualization object (for looks), and general ML control buttons for a ML playback screen on the TV.

The ML screen generation and playlist scripts were made by jotter with a screen shot here:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=1484299&fullpage=1

The scripts (needs modification for APE and a better interface for MJ9) can be found here (about half way down:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=183237&perpage=20&pagenumber=4

Current challenge is step 5.  My solution to display DVDSpy data is via OSD overlaying a ML screen with playback controls (volume, get more albums to play, stop, etc).  Somewhat brute force as I don't like having girder's OSD controlling some of the display and ML the rest of the display.  I need to purposely deactivate the OSD when I leave the ML screen otherwise the info remains.  Still needs work.

If you want a set of the modified scripts, let me know.  I'll email them to you.  I think I need to learn about numbuilder and TREEPATH.  News to me.
Tom

[bspachman]

Using:
MainLobby<-->Girder<-->MJ9 with a hook to a VFD

The VBS scripts do indeed create a playlist for every album as well as dynamically created mainlobby screens by artist/album.  Tweaking these very slick scripts by a more talented person than I, I altered the ML screen creation scripts to send command lines to MJ to add the selected album to the playlist.  I think your solution is more elegant but may be beyond my girder skills at this point  :-/

Well, I'm not sure about "elegant"

These scripts take the place of SuperNudelist in my setup. Since I don't have a PDA/Webtablet--"only" a Marantz programmable remote--a lot of the home automation threads get far beyond my equipment.

For me, SNL generates panels on my remote that allow me to select an artist, then their album. It then issues the numeric code I've assigned for the album to Girder, which parses it and assembles the mjextman.exe command line to launch the appropriate album.

Anyway, what you're doing sounds very interesting  and somewhat similiar to what I'm attempting eg
1) using MJ girder scripts for basic functionality,
2&3) using ML for album selection based on the VBS script output,
4) DVDSpy to get info, and
5) Using the DVDSpy info, MJ's visualization object (for looks), and general ML control buttons for a ML playback screen on the TV.

Current challenge is step 5.  My solution to display DVDSpy data is via OSD overlaying a ML screen with playback controls (volume, get more albums to play, stop, etc).  Somewhat brute force as I don't like having girder's OSD controlling some of the display and ML the rest of the display.  I need to purposely deactivate the OSD when I leave the ML screen otherwise the info remains.  Still needs work.

If you want a set of the modified scripts, let me know.  I'll email them to you.  I think I need to learn about numbuilder and TREEPATH.  News to me.

Thanks for the pointers. Although my ultimate goal is to not use a monitor/TV at all, these interfaces look quite friendly. Maybe I'll start investigating as a backup....

As for TREEPATH, check out MJ's command line page:

http://www.musicex.com/mediajukebox/DevZone/CommandLine.html

There are lots of threads on numbuilder on the Girder forums. It was not intuitive. I'm still not sure what all the scripting and numbuilder plugin options do, but I was able to understand enough to modify the examples for my own purposes.

There are ways to set a "timeout" value for the various OSD Girder plugins. I believe the examples in the DVDSpy distribution have a 2sec. timeout (for example, when I pause my player, the OSD disappears after 2sec.). Maybe adjusting that value (or implementing a timeout) will help you with your screen issues?

Best,
Brad