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[RhinoBanga]

Here's the new link:

http://www.zippy.eclipse.co.uk/mjav.exe


And here is the changelog:

Fixed issue where flat scroll bars were being shown in grids
Fixed issue where you could have hilight incomplete in library but not show the completed treeview
Fixed issue where coming out of sync mode was leaving garbage on album details screen the screen if initally started with a blank album details screen.
Fixed issue where sometimes the track column in album details was being incorrectly truncated
Fixed issue where sync mode was causing the source icon in the caption bar to resize incorrectly
Changed thumbnail popup menu captions to be more intuitive
Changed overview screen titles and menu to be more intuitive
Decreased runtime memory requirements
Speeded up initial scanning of MJ database
Only allow the incomplete report if the completed treeview is shown
Added right-click menu to thumbnails and listview in Album Details screen
Added play/append album to right-click menu
Added index at the left of the overview screen showing artists ... this allows further filtering
Added code to stop hourglass flickering during lengthy operations calling multiple functions
Added option to sort tracks by location, usefull for multi-cd albums but slows down initial loading
Added ability to excude albums with less than N tracks
Added code to maintain aspect ratio of images



As usual let me know of any issues that are NOT in the readme file.

I am having a real hard time tracking down this object that is preventing MJ from terminating

What is really making it worse is that I cannot use MJ to listen to music while I develop this ... I have to resort to media player

[MWGilbert]

thanks for the new build. feature-wise, it works well and looks great. i still have some kind of corruption problem with the displayed thumbnails. if i display _all_ i get some random interspersed albums in the list, some duplicates, etc. if i display by individual letters, many/most displays are ok, but a few have random albums at the end of the listing. i have more than 1000 albums, and don't know if this is a factor. i also can't tell what criteria these random albums have that qualifies them for randomhood

[MWGilbert]

i should add to the above that again, the artist/album list is entirely correct in its window. also, clicking on one of these random albums doesn't yield a correct playlist for it, either.

[RhinoBanga]

Can you email me your MJ database please (mediafiles.jmd to be exact)

My address is jamie@jda-ltd.com

I'll look at it this evening for you dude.

[MWGilbert]

actually i had a little eureka.

the program fails around albums by different artists that have the same name:

alain caron - play
mike stern - play

check it out. if that isn't it i will be happy to email you the lib files.
thanks for your diligent support. jriver should, ah, recompense you!

[nila]

Hiya,
I mentioned this before but I'll just mention it again because I cant remember what you said.
Integration between screens I feel is an important issue. Double clicking on an artist or album in say the Reports tab should move to the album details tab and show the album details. Right now it's possible to right click and go there. It'd be nice to be able to set in options what happens when we double click on it

Also, a bug. One, I got a runtime error somehow that just killed it. Not sure what I did. I'll try recreate it and post.

Also, the Bitrate mismatch screen seems to be acting wierd.
Look at these two posts.

It's saying Bob Dylan is a bitrate mismatch yet in the album details it says they're all the same. I also checked the library and they are in fact all the same.




Also, something that would be really nice is tooltips as the dont take long to add but can really help to explain check boxes etc in the options boxes.
I'm not sure what a few of the options do to be honest.
Also - the scan the jukebox button - could you possibly make it give a confirm box before rescanning as I've hit it by accident a few times and had to then wait for the db to be scanned.

Last qu. How do the tabs at the bottom work?
I thought they just displayed the albums that began with the letter chosen?
ie if I clicked on b it would only show all albums beginning with b?
If this is the case I found another bug and I'll post a screen shot.
If not could you explain .

U have a great plugin and it might be worth you just throwing together a 10 min quick basic help file explaining all the features. Not necessarily a perfect help file, just a basic guide of the features and how what works.

[RhinoBanga]

MWGilbert:
Yup ... that would do it.   I used to sort by artist/album/type but people pointed out that compilation albums got separated.   Now I sort just by album/type ... and now you have hit a problem   I would appreciate it if you would email me your DB so I can see if there is anything I can do.


Nila:
Have you checked out the right-mouse menu item on the overview/track detail/reports screen?   All of these screens allow you to play the album or locate the particular artist/album in the album details screen.

On the bitrate issue can you email me your DB.   Sounds like something is not being reset

Also the tabs at the bottom find all *artists* beginning with the particular letter selected.   The screen is then filled with the thumbnails and a list of unique artists is shown in the listview on the left hand side.   Clicking on an artist in the listview further narrows down the selection.   Also the thumbnails in this screen can be sorted either by album name or artist/album.


Finally I would love to do a quick help thing but I have little time to spend on it at the moment and the time that I do have available to me I want to get features/bugs sorted.   When the software goes production (which I am hoping will be within 3 weeks) I'll do something then before starting on v2.

[MWGilbert]

db sent (2.2 M) good luck

[Blaine]

Hey Nila or Rhino,

How do I get that nice Artist / Album / Track tree that is displayed in this topic?

Blaine

[RhinoBanga]

Blaine,

In the track details screen just drag and drop a column title into the box that says "Drag a column header header here to group by that column".

[lee269]

Exporting track details output does not generate the variable names correctly in the resulting csv file (at least not when I load it into Excel anyway). The field names are shifted to the left and start in col B not A, eg 'Album' appears in what i think is the 'TrackID' field and the rating column has no header. Also it seems that 'Last Played' does not contain any data.

The other reports seem to be OK.

lee269

[Doof]

Is there any way of getting it to not display albums that don't have cover art associated with them?
Conversely, is there any way of showing ONLY albums that don't have cover art?

[RhinoBanga]

lee269:
I have fixed the lastplayed issue already and I wil fix the export so it doesn't output my internal ID number.


Doof:
You can switch completed album processing (options/screen specific options/album details screen ... switch on show completed and hilight incomplete).   In the album details screen this will show another threeview with just completed albums in it.   Also the overview screen will now have a sort option to just see completed albums.   That should give you what you want.   Note that this can be *very* slow if using internal images as I have to go thru *every* track to see if it has an image.

[strips28]

Rhino,

thank you for the explanation last week, got it working. still there's something that i can't figure out.
i use this format: =>
path F:\Cd Hoesjes\!artist!\!album!  
Filename: front.jpg (as you used for an example a few posts ago, AV can read all the covers but still when i have albums from different artists with the same albumname (e.g. greatest hits, live...) it's not working correctly. AV shows all the songs from all the albums with the same name in one album and shows only the picture from the first song.

a simmilair problem i've got with albums with various artists. in my id3 tags i use always the performing artist and not the term various or something, that's why i have sometimes 18 different artist for one album.

i hope this is clear for you, have read the last posts and could't find a explanation or solvation for above mentioned problem

groeten (regards) Wil

[RhinoBanga]

Wil,

MJ inherently does not have the concept of an album ... it just groups all tracks with the same album name together (as can be seen in the media library/album section).   Therefore I emulate MJ's behaviour by sorting all tracks by album name.

Everything with the same album name (but different artists) are grouped together.

When I first wrote AV I sorted by artist/album but then people complained that compilation albums got separated (I never had any you see).

Now that I sort just by album people are getting upset that albums with the same name but by different artists are getting grouped together.


I can't win


I need to go away and have a long hard think on what I should do.   The idea I am toying with at the moment is that if there is more than one track number 1 for an "album" then split this album by artist and "pretend" that the album name is "album (artist)" to make it more unique... but even then that is not going to help those people who don't have track numbers.


Also for your information AV takes the first track of an "album" and uses it's image as the thumbnail picture.

[Dave]

Can anybody tell me the web site to see what this program is all about.
Not the link to download program, but looking for info.
Thanks

[strips28]

Rhino,

took me some while to understands how AV works, reading your last reply makes it clear that the trouble i have is something that just is about how AV works.

i'm just a user, not a developper (not even near), so i can't imagine what the diffeculties are when you make a program like this....

replying to this:

=> "The idea I am toying with at the moment is that if there is more than one track number 1 for an "album" then split this album by artist and "pretend" that the album name is "album (artist)" to make it more unique... but even then that is not going to help those people who don't have track numbers." <=

whenever you choose to let AV works with sorting by album and not implementing your idea of the pretend thing.. [works fine for me, solves all off my problems :], there is a way of solving it; just rename all off your compilation albums and albums with the same name to "artist greatest hits" or something, so that would be "Aerosmith Greatest Hits".
in that way any album is unique...eventhough i choose for the pretend thing....

wil

[nila]

Hey Rhino - here's a solution.

Do what you said but use directories as an additional check. People usually sort their albums into directories so when your checking to see if it's a unique album, see if it's in the same directory - that'll get around your lack of track numbers problem.

If people are putting albums with the same name and no track numbers in the same directory then they'd have problems differentiating them themselves so there's no way you can expect your program to do it.

[RhinoBanga]

Wil,

I'm trying to aim for zero changes on behalf of the user that is why I didn't mention renaming ... I wouldn't want to do it so I wouldn't expect anyone else to ... although in this case I might make a slight exception

The other alternative I came up with was utilizing the custom fields in MJ.   If, say, custom3 was not blank use that field as the "new" album name.   Then I would only have to make a very small change to AV but you would have to change every track in the album (which is not that hard).   The alternative to this idea is that I have my own cross-reference database that holds artist/old album name/new album name ... the upside is that you would only have to enter the details once per clash and you would get your custom field back ... the downside to this is that it is slightly more work for me.

In fact I've just convinced myself that is the way I am going to go.

I'll put in the cross-reference screen tonight ... look out for another build.

[nila]

Hey Rhino,
nice work.
Just a quick qu though.
For the external images, how does that field work?
Like all my covers are in the same dir as the albums but the naming format changes from album to album depending on the naming format used for that album. The only thing that remains constant is that all the albums have the word 'front' in the file names and they are all in the mp3 directory.
How do I set this up in the Options?

[RhinoBanga]

Nila,

It would probably be:

Directory: c:\my music\!artist!\!album!
Filename: !album!-front.jpg


But without some examples I am only guessing.

[nila]

Ok,
Here's my setup then.
I have ALL my mp3's within two hard drives in two separate folders.
Each folder is then sub divided into: Albums, Singles, Compilations, Random Songs
and within the Albums folder it is then sub Divided into each album.
Each of the album folders then contains images.
The names can vary greatly and here are some examples of different names that they can have:

BackStreet Boys - Black and Blue - 00 - Front.jpg
00 - Front.jpg
00 - Stone Temple Pilots - Front.jpg
cypress_hill-00-stoned_raiders_(advance)-front-rev.jpg


As you can see, sometimes the word Front is the last word, sometimes there is more after it. Sometimes the name has the artist and album in it, sometimes it doesn't.
The only consistent thing in all of them is the word Front and the fact they're in the same directory as the mp3's for that album.


And on another subject,
I mentioned this a while ago and I think you liked the idea if I remember correctly, I asked about rating albums as a whole.
AV brings back something that was lost with most jukeboxes including MJ, The ability to deal with songs as albums again instead of individual songs.
Would it be possible to add filtering to the albums? I know you must have some type of facility built into this as you added the filter for the minimum number of songs required to make a full album.
Like the 'Find' facility in MJ but not necessarily as powerful.
Like to only display albums with a rating of > 7, or with year > 2000, etc.
Let me search my albums by criteria rather than having to do song searching in MJ.

I really think you should speak to MJ and talk about integrating AV and the whole concept of Albums into MJ, possibly for v9, so that when I'm looking at an album using say your Album Details pane, I can modify the id3 tags etc. Or so when I was doing searches I could check a box and all my search results were albums rather than songs.
It'd be great to be able to say select a bunch of songs and check a box once they're all selected to mark that group as one album. Modifying the year or album name would then update the lot and they could not be updated individually unless the 'album' link was broken.
This is similar to real life where an album has a release year for the album as a whole.

The concepts of Albums is a strong one and something that I think is gonna be the next big step for Jukeboxes, the one that grasps the concept best is gonna have a strong lead.

[RhinoBanga]

Nila,

Looking at your examples there is nothing AV can do since it is so disorganised.   I recommend you download a rename tool and rename them to front.jpg to be consistent.   If you can't find a rename tool then just get one that copies the found files to a file and create a quick DOS batch file to do the work.   Either way you need to have something that can be calculated before AV can help.


Re the searching facility ... hmmm ... interesting.   It is possible and would be very easy for me to implement, since I already do a blank search in MJ to get all the tracks, but the issue is that an MJ search works against tracks and not an album.   For example say you have 5 tracks in an album and 4 of them have the year set to 2001 and the last one doesn't have a year set.   When you issue a search for year > 2000 the last track would not get qualified therefore it would not appear in the "album".   The workaround for this would be to say if one track qualifies then automagically qualify all tracks for that album.

I think you have just identified a new top level tab I will add when I get other bits sorted.   It will be like the overview screen but have a search criteria field at the top of the screen.   Entering criteria will qualify tracks and xref those against the albums it has already identified.   The albums qualified will then be shown.

[nila]

Glad you liked the idea.
Seeing as you cant edit the id3 info of the songs, you could possibly introduce your own storing of data. For albums that dont have consistant years, prompt the user with the years that the album contains and ask them to choose a year. Then have your own db for the albums that saves the year.
I personally would welcome AV having it's own album database that had information on an album level.
Even if this means extra storage, whats 10Mb these days to store all this info.
Plus, searches etc would be speeded up as they would be through an album collection of a few hundred rather than a song collection of thousands.
Having your own db would also just give you a lot more power in general to control AV as you wanted and do what you want with it.
Then just use the 'Sync' button you have now to update the info from Media Jukebox.

As for the problem with covers here's what I was thinking.
It'd be a pretty good solution for anyone who had all their albums in separate dirs.
This is just pseudo code:

Foreach Album()
{   $albumDir = getSongPath();
   foreach file in $albumDir()
   {   if(($filetype = bmp) OR ($filetype = jpg)) //Whatever file types you want to allow;
          imgArray = $fileName; // Add all the images into an array;
   }

   if(count(imgArray) = 1)
      theCover = imgArray[0]; // If there's only one image then use it as the cover
   elseif(count(imgArray) > 1)
   {   coverNotFound = true;
       while(coverNotFound and moreImages)
       {   $x = 0;
           if("cover" is in the string imgArray[$x])
           {   theCover = imgArray[$x];
               coverNotFound = false;
           }
           $x = $x |PLS| 1;
       }
       if(coverNotFound)
          give the user a list of all the images found in that dir and ask them to choose one (presuming any other rules set do not work);
   }
}
// The End

Except you make the word "cover" a variable which the user can set. In my case I would set it to the word "Front".
This would allow people to just choose a word that was in all their covers and Album View would find it.
To save having to do this every time, this info could be stored in AV's own db.

What'd you think?
Am I on crack or does that seem viable?
If I'm on crack just tell me cause I aint eaten much today so I got an excuse so I wouldn't mind being told.

[RhinoBanga]

Nila,

While it sounds good it's more work than I am prepared to invest.

The searching will always use the raw MJ database as that already provides the search mechanism (including conditional operators/range handling/etc) so I won't re-invent the wheel.   Also this guarentees that there is no sync'ing issues to contend with.

Re your album cover art issue ... I'll look at allowing wildcards in the filename specification and pick the first one that qualifies.   Although I do recommend you invest 10 minutes of your time to do a batch rename to something more coherent.   Then your problem is solved straight away without having to wait for me to get round to implementing slow wildcard lookups.

[RhinoBanga]

Nila,

I have modified the artwork rules section.   There is a new token called !albumpath! which resolves to the path of the first track in an album.   Also I have added wildcard support to the filename part, so you can now say:

Directory: !albumpath!
Filename:  *front*.jpg

[Blaine]

Rhino,

I really like tha Track Details screen.  Being able to setup the heirarchy is really slick.  I would suggest that the view be persistant, however.  Another suggestion would be to scan the MJ database and save in your own format so you don't have the scan penalty everytime you access album view.  Are you using .Net?  What language are you using?  Are you using the Infragistics controls?

Rhino, this is a great extension to the MJ system and is a great example of what can be done.  Keep up the good work and what we can do to encourage you!

[RhinoBanga]

Blaine,

The view should be persistant within the current MJ session ... is that not the case?

I didn't bother adding code to save the state between sessions as I didn't think people would be too bothered ... do you want me to add it in?

Also I am not keen on the idea of keeping my own database at the moment as it raises so many issues, the main being the keeping in sync with MJ.   Also the amount of work involved far exceeds what I can afford at the present time (having to juggle normal work/kids/leasure/coding/sleeping in 24hrs is a nightmare) ... especially for a free plugin.

I will consider it for V2 as that version will be primarily a performance version.


Also this current version is written in VB using:

Stinga's SGGrid control from www.stinga.com
Modified MBSplitter/MBScroller controls from www.vb2themax.com

The rest I have written myself.



V2 will be written in C|PLS||PLS|/STL and probably ATL but I am not sure yet.

I think what I will do is cutoff the development on this version quite soon (since it's almost functionally complete) and start on V2.

[nila]

Yo Rhino,
GREAT plugin.

Thanks for all the work you've put into it.
I know free work is always the hardest to squeeze in but it's the most appreciated.
We all love your plugin.

[DocLotus]

Have been using MJ 8.0 for some time now (many betas).  Just found your Album View plug-in... GREAT Addition to MJ 8.0.  I really like where you are going with this one!

A couple of suggestions...

* The dual tree view (MJ 8.0 & Album View) are rudundent.  They take up too much space.  Would be nice if only the MJ 8.0 tree was used.
* Would like to see an Album View icon added to the MJ 8.0 icon list.  This way I can pop back & forth very quickly with the two icons (MJ 8.0 Now Playing & Album View).
* When closing down MJ 8 with Album View open then re-opening MJ 8, Album View is not showing.  Would like MJ 8 to come back up just a I left it.

Other than that, keep up the good work.  I look forward to future updates.

[RhinoBanga]

DocLotus,

>  The dual tree view (MJ 8.0 & Album View) are rudundent. They take up too much space. Would be nice if only the MJ 8.0 tree was used.

I would like that as well ... but unfortunately J River don't allow it

> Would like to see an Album View icon added to the MJ 8.0 icon list. This way I can pop back & forth very quickly with the two icons (MJ 8.0 Now Playing & Album View).

See above.

> When closing down MJ 8 with Album View open then re-opening MJ 8, Album View is not showing. Would like MJ 8 to come back up just a I left it.

That's an MJ option and nothing to do with AV ... make sure you have Last Location enabled in sartup settings.

[dragyn]

I didn't read the entire thread but when I installed the lastest version, it has a massive memory leak when opening. MJ was using over 400MB of memory. It kept rising until Out of Memory.

I uninstalled AV and it doesn't do it anymore.

[RhinoBanga]

Dragyn,

What OS are you on as I have never seen this issue before.

VB doesn't have memory leaks as such ... what was the memory usage while it was running?

[dragyn]

It only happened twice. Trying to reproduce but can't now. Un/Resinstalled and it happened again. Not sure what was up. Using WinXp pro. Memory usage was like 40MB. Virtual Memory was in the area 300-400MB (for just MJ) before I killed it.

I'm using Internal Images, and excluded some file types. That's all I changed.

[RhinoBanga]

Dragyn,

I am wondering if it's related to internal images.

Do you happen to have the completed treeview shown?

In this circumstance I have to ask MJ to query *every* track to get it's image and if all tracks have an image then it's marked as complete.   Maybe that would account for so much memory usage.

[DocLotus]

Hi Rhino;

Have you talked to JRiver about the possibility of incorporating AV into MJ 8.0?  This would be really a wonderful thing & would resolve some of the limitations you now are facing.  Would make MJ 8 just about perfect!

[RhinoBanga]

I haven't talked to them but I wouldn't be surprised if they implement their own AV in v9.

[lee269]

Looking forward to next build - in the meantime Ive got one more 'bug' and a couple of stupid questions (sorry if these have been covered, but I cant find any mention in readme or interact):

'Bug': in Track details the tooltips work fine until you change the field order by dragging the column heads. Then it goes wrong, because you presumably get the tooltip data by expecting the info to be in certain column numbers. I guess its possible that this is unfixable due to MJ - in which case it certainly doesnt detract from my enjoyment of AV.

Q1: In the cover art pane of album view there is a flag symbol in the title bar next to the button to select what this pane shows. What does this signify? It disappears if you choose anything other than thumbnail or MJ external image, and also if you double click to show cover art at original size. I get the feeling I am answering my own question here somehow but I cant figure out what it means.

Q2: In the track list pane in album view there is a paper clip symbol column left of the track # field. Does this signify a file exists for this track? In my db this column is filled for every track and doesnt appear to provide any info. Also the columns in this pane are not resizeable. It sort of feels like they should be (like the reports) but again Im not bothered either way.

lee269

[RhinoBanga]

lee269,

Thanks for the heads up on the bug.

Q1:  The flag indicates if the artwork "size to fit" option has been set.

Q2:  The paperclip indicates which tracks have an image associated with them.   I was in two minds whether or not I should allow sizing of this grid.   In the end I decided not to allow it as it spoiled the "clean" look of the screen.


Finally I don't think there will be a build tonight.   I am trying various things to speed up parsing and I have screwed something up in the code and now nothing works

One of these days I should install Source Safe


Hopefully though I will have a build tomorrow.