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[mesue]

Hello,

I'm still in my 30-day evaluation of MC11. I'm looking at it as a replacement for Music Library and WinAmp. At first it was a real love-hate relationship, but it is growing on me. Maybe some of you experts can help me with some remaining issues and questions.

First, I have to say the most appealing thing to me about MC11 is the TrackInfo pages, which I found very easy to customize. The main reason I switched to Winamp from WMP was because MS removed the nice lyrics display that was in WMP9 when it went to version 10. Now I am reading in some of these threads that TrackInfo is either going to be removed or relegated to a tiny action window in 11.1? Please, say it isn't so!

Now for my questions...

Can the tooltip be customized? Id like it to have a larger thumbnail and show more information there.

Is there any way of making reports that can be exported to excel or text files?

At one point I saw an option for playing a list as a 30-second sampler and so on. Now I can't seem to find it again. Can someone give me a hint?

MC appears to have imported all my saved M3U playlists, but when I click on them they all show 0 files… what's the deal with that?

Is there any way of adding a list of "wanted tracks" to the library? This would be a list of songs I want, but don't have yet.

Whenever I navigate to the links in the help file, I get these script errors:
"Object doesn't support this property or method… Do you want to continue running scripts on this page?"
No matter if I click yes or no, the clicked link does not load. Does anyone know why this is happening? Or is there an alternate version of help I can use… PDF or Word format?

Is there any way to append or prepend info when moving/copying fields, so I don't lose the information that's already in the field I'm moving to?

Are there any "perks" (discount?) for submitting plugins to J River? I have some TrackInfo pages I am quite proud of, that I don't mind sharing. Hey, never hurts to ask!

Is there an RSS feed for this forum?


Now for my wish list...

It would be nice if the Lyrics input window had a save and next button. I almost always add lyrics in a batch, an album or a whole artist at a time. The way it is now, you have to click click click click a whole lot. (I've tried the Lyrics Finder plugin, BTW, but it's success rate is not too good for me. Chart Finder, OTOH, I love!)

Lyrics should be automatically populated when you have a matching artist and songname in the library.

Those little action window panels, or whatever they're called… we should be able to tear them off and float them (similar to how you can do with palettes in Photoshop). They would be so much more useful if they weren't trapped in the sidebar. I can't imagine using them in less than a 1600x1200 monitor! Also, we should not have to reopen them every time the program is closed.

Most of all, I would love love love Squeezebox integration. I noticed it was mentioned quite a bit in the thread "POLL: Which Media Receiver do you use?" (http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=24812.0). Even something as simple as being able to pass a playlist from MC to SlimServer without saving it to disk first would be great. Currently I do this by dragging and dropping onto MusicMagic Mixer and then I can pass to Slimerver from there. (MusicMagic is another program that would be great to have some integration with MC, BTW.)

Random comments...

It took forever before I figured out how to makes the columns shown the same for all views. I was going bonkers with them changing all the time until I realized I had to do "save this view." View schemes baffled me for a long time, too.

I suppose I'll eventually learn the syntax for search and smartlists, but for now I am having to refer to help on it constantly. It would be nice if there was a pop-up of crib notes that was easily accessible from all the places where they can be used.

The program just randomly quits on me fairly frequently. No error messages, nothing in the Windows event viewer. It has happened while editing the title of a smartlist and when pressing the next track button on my keyboard, just to give a couple examples.

Whew! Hope I wasn't too long winded. I look forward to your insight on some of these issues.

Sue

[marko]

Can the tooltip be customized? Id like it to have a larger thumbnail and show more information there.

No.

Is there any way of making reports that can be exported to excel or text files?

When you have produced a list of files, you can click on "file > export playlist" upon which you will be presented with the following dialogue:

Now, while I have not delved into this area myself, my understanding is that if you choose to export to .mpl you can then do many and varied things with the resultant file. AlexB  will probably have some useful tips and bookmarks for you on this subject.

At one point I saw an option for playing a list as a 30-second sampler and so on. Now I can't seem to find it again. Can someone give me a hint?

From the toolbar: "player > playback options > preview mode > [make your choice]"

MC appears to have imported all my saved M3U playlists, but when I click on them they all show 0 files… what's the deal with that?

Q: re. .m3u playlist files...
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=25582.msg193687#msg193687

Is there any way of adding a list of "wanted tracks" to the library? This would be a list of songs I want, but don't have yet.

Not that I'm aware of. MC can manage document files too, though this is another area I've never really explored in great detail. I believe that if you double click a document file from within MC, it will open in its associated program. Perhaps you could work something around that?

Whenever I navigate to the links in the help file, I get these script errors:
"Object doesn't support this property or method… Do you want to continue running scripts on this page?"
No matter if I click yes or no, the clicked link does not load. Does anyone know why this is happening? Or is there an alternate version of help I can use… PDF or Word format?

No alternative that I'm aware of. I've also never encountered these problems. I'm willing to bet it's a system setting you have. Perhaps your internet explorer security settings/firewall rules are too strict?

Is there any way to append or prepend info when moving/copying fields, so I don't lose the information that's already in the field I'm moving to?

No. You can get creative though, and try things such as using the rename files from properties tool, disabling the directory mask and and adding [field1],[field2] to the filename, then using the fill properties from filename tool to populate [field2] with [field1],[field2]
Will need more info on this though as obviously, if you're talking about things like BIOS tags, this might not be such a good idea

Are there any "perks" (discount?) for submitting plugins to J River? I have some TrackInfo pages I am quite proud of, that I don't mind sharing. Hey, never hurts to ask!

That's what we need more of around here....


new users with a sense of humour!!!!!!

Is there an RSS feed for this forum?

There's a link in the FAQ thread at the top of the forum, around halfway down (ish)
This should work. If it doesn't, check that FAQ entry and/or search the forum for rss feed.
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?action=.xml;type=rss;sa=news

Much of what's in your wishlist has been asked for 1000 times already. There's a new round of beta testing coming up, maybe some will see their way in, maybe some won't, maybe none of them will. I'll guarantee you, all of them won't!

Welcome to the forum, and enjoy your trip along the MC learning curve.

-marko.

[mesue]

Thanks for your detailed reply, Marko!

That M3U thread is confusing. The bottom line, I guess, is that you have to drag & drop the m3u's from explorer, onto the tree in MC, and then the matching 0 files playlist will be populated. I found that if I dropped the m3u file directly onto the matching 0 files playlist, it would populate with every file duplicated, so I need to be careful not to do that. Seems like a weird way to handle m3u's but as long as I can get them in there, I can deal.

The export playlists thing looks like it will work for any kind of reporting I might do. It would be nice to have it export some nicely formatted reports, but I confess I have not had a need for that very often.

No. You can get creative though, and try things such as using the rename files from properties tool… Will need more info on this though as obviously

Using the file name as a placeholder seems risky since it would be modifying the files on disk, and then I'd have to rename them back to what I originally had. It gives me another idea for handling what I want to do, though.

I think I could create a new "Calculated Data" field as a placeholder where I join the two fields [Album + Date(Year)], and then copy that back into the one where I wanted to join them [Album]. Will that work? Can a calculated field be copied?

What I'm wanting to do is add the album year to the end of the album name, but only on greatest hits-type compilation albums. Then I want to replace the year with the year of each song (using Chart Finder plugin). I know I could just create a new AlbumYear field, but I wanted something that another software could handle in case I decide not to stick with MC. If anyone has another suggestion for the best way to do this, I would love to hear it.

Glad you got my joke about perks. 

For some reason Bloglines doesn't like the RSS feed URL from the FAQ thread. Anyone else know a way to get the feed in Bloglines?