playlist discussion

[cjard]

I'd be interested to see htis MP3 Player, becuase i've never quite found one that i like.. Deliplayer was closest, but i now use foobar2000 because its the only one whereby if i'm playing an mp3 and it has errors and needs deleting, i can right click the playlist and delete the item from disk (via long method of showing the dir the mp3 is in etc..)
All the other mp3 players i ever tried, just dont quite have a good enough playlist editor, so im hoping yours will

 

[ImDaFrEaK]

Sure thing...

Matter of fact, I know your pain with creating a playlist with ease and you are not alone. I have had many people requesting me to implement features and improve the way of making, editing, and sorting playlists. As a result I will settle for no less than the worlds best playlists editor. I know that's a long shot but really, like you mentioned, I don't have any heavy competition. Anyways, for now that's my goal. To be honest the playlists editor is still in an engineering stage. You can build a default playlists and use it just fine; however; it is transparent to the user but is truly for testing purposes.

I am accepting all feedback and ideas for playlists control. ANY IDEAS you have I am open to and will most likely implement. I don't want to go over board but I do want the user to be able to do anything that feels right at anytime with the player.... I already have tons of features and ideas being engineered into libraries to control the concept of playlists. It will probably be the largest library I build for the player, even though it dosn't seem it could be so much, but I really intend to be the best. I hope this is what makes a name for my player. It will always be free to own and distribute, so I'm not looking for profit, but the player will hopefully become the signature that opens my company name. You know what I mean. Anyways, I work 12's and I'm only off on thurs-sat so I will try to finish the stage I am in right now (I just started on a huge update that jumps 2.3 to 2.4) and send you a BETA to mess with. It's already a great player but like I said the playlists aren't implented just yet. I honestly hope to have this finished within a month and released. Then after more testing and updates, hopefully, I will have the final release within a couple of months. Either way, updates will continue to be poured out.

 

[cjard]

Things that i have never really found in other playlists or things about other playlists that bug me:

Winamp has a jump-to-file option that, when you press F3, loads all the playlist entries into a listbox and when you type into a textbox, it removes entries from the list that dont contian the string. On a playlist of thousands of items this is very slow (each time you press f3 the items are loaded) and searching begins from the first letter you type. I complained it would be better to have a minimum number of characters typed before searching, and this would simply be the log10 of the number of list entries, thus 100 - 999 require 2 letters be typed, 1000 - 9999 require 3, 10000-99999 require 4 etc.. Either that or press return to run the search

Deliplayer has hte ability to find items by regular expression, but the way it searches is annoying.. you either search from first or search from current, chosen by radio button.. so to search effectively, you type the search term, click the From First search and searhc once, then you have to click From Current to list the rest of the results.. i'd prefer just a shortened window of all results but its not an option

CUE sheet handling in various apps.. foobar and deliplayer are ok, but they will load the cue, read the mp3 out of it and then make a load of playlist entries representing the songs inside the long mp3. Then they load the long mp3 too, and show that in the list. If there is an m3u, deliplayer loads that too, which either specifies the long mp3, or the tracsk.. however it happens you end up with a playlist containing 2 or 3 versions of the same thing..

Quite a few of the players will allow you to add duplicate entries to the list..

None of the players really allow you to manipulate the files from the list - rename, delete, move etc

ANother thing on cue sheet handling - some players load the cue file then look for the MP3 it says it contains, others load the mp3 file and look for a .cue file with the same name (dfferent ext). I'd love to see an ap that could handle and correct both of these, and if there was no cue/mp3 matching, it could search the directory for cue/mp3 pairs that were likely and allow the user to link them

CUE sheet handling of cues that are stored in the id3v2 tag..

i always wondered why playlists didnt evolve like ftp clients download queues evolved.. in cuteftp or bulletproof, you add items you want to download (top of screen) into a queue at the bottom of the screen. the bottom can be reordered etc
in just-play or random mode, the "queue" could show the last and next 10 items to be played, otherwise, for programmed mode play, it can play what the user put there. JumpToFile Exxtra in winamp does some of this, but its still a tack-on to the original playlist editor



Actually, when i think about it, playlist editors do exactly what thye say on the list - edit a list of songs to be played. Most players dont have a Play Items list, because a playlist editor can kinda do a similar job.. but they arent really the same thing, so maybe i ask too much of my players.

Hate to say it but i suspect that Windows Media Player is one of the best in this regard... The Media Library can be used to manipulate items on disk and in a trange way, it transfers them into the now playing - its not perfect.. But as im sure you know, none of the players are.. Good to know youre seeking to make the perfect one!

In my opinion, coupling windows explorer style navigation and searching of a media library, with ftp-downloadqueue style playing queue would be the best thing

 

[cjard]

oh, and another thing i think foobar does but im not sure:

when shuffling, players never seem to understand the concept of albums.. if they randomly pick track 10 of an album, then i'd like them to play that album from track 1, not just play track 10 then skip on..

 

[ImDaFrEaK]

All was noted and I read some interested concepts. The queue lists was something already in the works but not liked you mentioned. I think I will adjust it to resemble more of what you are saying, such as a download engine does.

Also, I don't support ID3v2 in my player. I know this is going to sound like a drag to you and if your all over your v2 tags then you'll simply hate the player. But I wrote the tag reader myself and after doing a ton of research and talking to many other developers, even some on this forum, I have found that ID3v2 just isn't up to parr. There's a lot to it that's cluttered and w/o standard. Sorry bout that..... (Be weary of using WinAmp. On many sites and forums I read negative things about winamp and how it writes information to mp3's. Pretty much it jacks up mp3's. I personally don't know, these are things I have read on in a few different locations.

The search function in my program is really simple and i would love any suggestions ot improve it, but for the most part it works great. For now I only offer four options for searching by and combination of Title, Artist, Album, and Genre. (By default it searches them all, just un-check the oens you wish to exclude) It automatically searches by File Path as well. One way to search is to Right Click, type in the textbox whatever keywords your looking for, then press enter. Immediately a window pops up with your list of songs containing those key words. In this window you may edit, play, and work them into playlists just as you can from the main player window.

If you want to play songs from a specific artists in my player is simple. One way is to Right Click then choose one of the following from a combobox (Play All Songs, Play this Artist, Play this Album, Play this Genre, Play this Folder. So in your case if you wanted to stick to a certain album but stay on shuffle then you right click then choose Play this Album. You can change these settings at anytime while the player is playing. I think you meant more to it than that and I am feeling you. I will update the player with an option to stick to certain areas while on random, until finished, then move on. For example: If it randomly hits and album, it will finish the album (randomly) then move on to another one and do the same, I will also make this to work for Artist, Genre, Comment, and Folder.

Thanks for the huge response, I will most definately be on top of it. Also, I said I want to have the worlds best playlists editor, meaning, imbedded in my player I want the playlists editing to be the worlds best, I don't however feel the player is worlds best as a whole. I have a lot of work todo.

 

[cjard]

interesting.. i never saw anyone code with underscores and initcaps to separate words before..

one tip - the forum software makes a real mess of copy pasted code if youre working in advanced mode.. i recommend you work in simple mode - there's a button that looks like [A/A] in the top right.. click it and wait for the editbox background to change.. pasted code looks nicer now, i think because things like Public Sub when pasted in blue gain tags between but the space is not preserved.. so Public[/color][c olor=blue]Sub runs the words together...

i got some more suggestions for your player...

regarding the album sticking thing, can i request an expansion...?

there are two kinds of albums out there - mixed and nonmixed. I'm dimly aware youre in the states and so i know that club/dance music and mixed albums arent so popular over there but here goes:

i have a few albums that are separate tracks,, as in separate files, but they play back to back without interruption.. when encountering one of these albums, i'd love for the shuffle mode to play it from the start, all the way through in order before moving on

other albums are not mixed and they can be played in any order.

as for how to tell.. this is really diffcult! the only solid way is to look at the way the tune goes right up to the last milliseconds.. if it's still playing then its agood guess its a mixalbum.. standing in your way on this are problems like mp3 encoders filling up frames with silence if the data isnt enough to fill the frame. this typically occurs on the start of a song, not th end though.

a reasonable guess at whether an album is mixed or not, could be made from whether its all the same artist or not.. but this breaks in albums like Time by Electric Light Orchestra, where they mixed it, or albums like 40 top ten pop hits type albums where all are separate tracksfrom separate people

given the difficulty in determining what is a mixed and nonmixed i think you can resolve the logic by deferring to the CUE sheet situation i mentioned earlier...

if you loaded a cue sheet which specified an mp3, or you loaded an mp3 which has an equally named CUE, then its a cueable album.. you can parse the cue sheet and read the tracks out into the list to provide some visualization of them but...
if shuffle randomly lands on a track that is from a cue then it plays the mp3 file from the beginning
if shuffle randomly lands on a normal track, it randomly plays normally..

any ripper worth their salt, myself included (har har), who listens to gapless albums WILL rip the album as one long track an generate a cue to split it "logically" rather than "physically".. so this "if its a track thats part of a cue and shuffle (full albums) mode is on, then play from beginning" rule will be okay

regular expressions in searching are VERY handy, and having a little tickbox showing if the regex is valid and compiles is handy too

for more ideas see deliplayer

if you have a link where i can try a beta of the layer, i can come up with a ton of suggestions foryou im sure - never been interested in skins, visualization etc.. just a cool easy player with a great database andfile manipulation skills