Select album to play via album art

**reddeath30** · 01-13-2006, 04:33 PM

Originally Posted by xGumbyx

So what you are saying is get our requests/wish lists in to you soon :P

Gumby

Yep!
I Hava a question regarding viewing by album art to everyone. To make this work fast and to keep things organized and keep the coding as simple and efficient as possible. The program must have the music files in a single location, and for the genre list view to work as well the music must be organized into folders that the installer creates, so here is the folder structure that it will create, then the user simply places their music in them accordingly.

C:\Media\Audio
-------------------Rock,Pop
---------------------------Album Folder (User Placed)
---------------------------Album Folder (User Placed)
---------------------------Album Folder (User Placed)
-------------------Alternative,Punk
-------------------Rap,Hip-Hop
-------------------Soul,R&B
-------------------Country
-------------------Jazz
-------------------Electronic,Dance
-------------------World,Reggae
-------------------Classical
-------------------Oldies
-------------------New Age
-------------------Christian,Gospel
-------------------Blues
-------------------Folk
-------------------Vocal,Easy Listening
-------------------Soundtracks,Musicals
-------------------Children
-------------------Comedy,Spoken Word
-------------------Latin
-------------------Holiday Music
-------------------Singles

The reason why I ask this is; the program goes out and opens every single file folder and looks for the folder.jpg file when the user clicks on one of these Genre Folders and then produces the list with album art in it. If it had to look at every single folder on the hard drive for the folder.jpg or look at every mp3 file, open the id3 tag to find the album cover it would take forever and a day, so I chose to organize it in these genre folders. It then records the path of all the albums that it found album art for within that genre and places it in a hidden list.
When the user clicks on one of the album covers, the mp3 files are shown in the list and the user can select what they want to listen to.
If they hit the View Albums button, the same Album cover list shows and the user can select a different album.
When the user hits the Change Genre button to go back to viewing just the Genre list, the hidden list is then wiped clear until the user hits another Genre in the list again.

How does everyone feel about how this works? Im kind of looking for a better way to represent the genres than the existing file list. The users have the option to use the Album cover list mode or the regular file list like it currently is.
Please give me all your feedback. Im interested in any input I can get. Thanks in advance!

**xGumbyx** · 01-13-2006, 05:54 PM

The way you have posted above will get a lot of gripes from users of Mobile Impact. Most users dont want to be forced to have their music in a specific place let alone have to organize it by genre within that specific place. What centrafuse does to rememdy the problem of searching the folders each time its started is to have an "Import Music To Database" function. I personally think this is a "simple" and elegant way to go. I am pretty sure that centrafuse doesnt check the id3 tag for each song to find its album art, it just uses the "default.jpg" of the directory that the file resides in.

This can cause issues if the users doesnt keep a well organized mp3 collection, but that shouldnt be for you, the developer, to worry about.... unless of course you want to code some sort of music organizer that will scan id3 tags and organize the persons collection for them via artist/album/song.mp3. But again I really dont think the onus should be on you to do that.

Centrafuse also simplifies things a bit by not browsing by genre when viewing the album art. It just lists all album art found within directories the users has chosen in the settings page for their music to reside. Any directory not containing album art gets a generic image.

Maybe I am thinking Centrafuse works so great in this regards because I already have my music sorted very neatly. My directory structure is as follows.

D:\music\
----------->Artist1
----------->Artist2
----------->Artist3
----------->Artist4
----------->Artist5
--------------------->Album1
--------------------->Album2
--------------------->Album3
-------------------------------->song1.mp3
-------------------------------->song2.mp3
-------------------------------->song3.mp3
-------------------------------->song4.mp3

etc etc

Now every user shouldnt be forced to sort their music like this, but it should be expected that they should have their music somewhat organized for Mobile Impact to reach its highest potential as a media player. If they dont, then any type of viewing/adding music whether it be by album art or not is going to be difficult for them.

What IMHO would be ideal is if the user could, in the settins page, choose their default music directory or possibly even a few music directories, and then they could click an "Import Music" button and that button would have the function of creating a database of some type of what files are where or even which directories contain which album art. That way, when a user selects "view by album art" in the playlist editor all the info is there already in the database as to which album art to display for each subdirectoy of the default music directory thus taking a lot less time than searching the default music directory recursively for album art.

If you are really wanting to sort the musics album art by genre might I suggest this. Use the same type of database that would be used for viewing ALL album art, but have an extra "genre" row/column in the db for each album. This "genre" row would be populated by the first song listed in each albums directory and would not have to be done for each song, nor album. but only once for each artist.

Whew, I once again hope I have been clear enough. If you are unsure again feel free to comment.

Gumby

**flyingbeaver26** · 01-24-2006, 01:25 PM

Guys,
This is a great direction to take with Mobile Impact. I have tried them all and have settled on this nice and simple app. The only thing it lacks for me is the "sort by genre" feature. I agree with Gumby, please see if this is possible because it has been one feature I have been looking for in every front end.

On a second note. anybody have a good shareware app that snags album art and places it in the coresponding folder? I've tried PC jukebox with no success.
Thanks!

**reddeath30** · 01-24-2006, 05:04 PM

Originally Posted by flyingbeaver26

Guys,
This is a great direction to take with Mobile Impact. I have tried them all and have settled on this nice and simple app. The only thing it lacks for me is the "sort by genre" feature. I agree with Gumby, please see if this is possible because it has been one feature I have been looking for in every front end.

On a second note. anybody have a good shareware app that snags album art and places it in the coresponding folder? I've tried PC jukebox with no success.
Thanks!

Here is my preferred album art downloader. Its a pretty easy to use program. The best part about this program is that it is totally free.
http://louhi.kempele.fi/~skyostil/pr....6.0-setup.exe

One way to set up your music by genre is to set up genre folders like this:

So when you are in MI in the filelist mode it will display like this:

I tried to come up with some code that reads the ID3 tag on mp3 files and then sorts them by genre, but can you imagine how scrambled the list would be for someone with som 500 to 800 full albums. No to mention that the program would have to read the tag from each and every file. If you had in the hundreds of files, this process would take way too long. Even if stored in a database of some sort.

**xGumbyx** · 01-24-2006, 05:49 PM

Reddeath30, something to look at to make it "easier" and faster to sort albums by genre would be to only look at hte first audio file in a given directory and if the info is stored in a database of sorts to have all music within that directory be classified by the first songs id3 genre. So if a program is creating the genre entries in its database, it searches recursively through each artist directory, ie: Artist1->album1->song1.mp3 this file would create the genre for all of the mp3's within the Artst1 directory. I'm not even sure that this is a posability, but it might be an option if it is and it would save a lot of time in creating a database. Again, a user might run into a problem if their collection isnt organized but as I have said in the past, that is their responsbility not yours.

**reddeath30** · 01-24-2006, 09:53 PM

Originally Posted by xGumbyx

Reddeath30, something to look at to make it "easier" and faster to sort albums by genre would be to only look at hte first audio file in a given directory and if the info is stored in a database of sorts to have all music within that directory be classified by the first songs id3 genre. So if a program is creating the genre entries in its database, it searches recursively through each artist directory, ie: Artist1->album1->song1.mp3 this file would create the genre for all of the mp3's within the Artst1 directory. I'm not even sure that this is a posability, but it might be an option if it is and it would save a lot of time in creating a database. Again, a user might run into a problem if their collection isnt organized but as I have said in the past, that is their responsbility not yours.

Thanks for this. I totally agree that it would make it faster to just look at the first files in each album folder. To give you more of an idea of how id3 tags work, if you open an mp3 file as a binary file or even open it up in notepad or other text editor you will see that the first 100 or so characters of the file are where the id3 info gets stored, and the Genre information is stored as a number and not text. So here is what issues are faced, first the file needs to be opened to read the Genre info, then the number needs to be translated into text, which as you probably know that there is around 150 or so that are defined in Winamp alone. Even if it was held in a database of some sort, I still think that it would be incredibly slow in reading the database and displaying it for people that have really large collections. I really want the option to sort or organize by Genre though and Im going to continue to work on an efficient way to accomplish it.

**xGumbyx** · 01-24-2006, 10:28 PM

Hopefully if it is on your "list of features" to add you will get it done. For myself its not a big deal as the album art was the main feature missing for me. Is there going to be the ability to click on an album and have its contents loaded into the current playlist or add multiple albums at once to the playlist? Maybe I should just wait until its release and see. hehe

**reddeath30** · 01-25-2006, 08:53 AM

Originally Posted by xGumbyx

Hopefully if it is on your "list of features" to add you will get it done. For myself its not a big deal as the album art was the main feature missing for me. Is there going to be the ability to click on an album and have its contents loaded into the current playlist or add multiple albums at once to the playlist? Maybe I should just wait until its release and see. hehe

Im glad you asked, I wanted to get your feedback on it. The way it works is you click on the album on the left to select it, then you hit the "Add All Files" button to add the whole album. The Add File button is disabled until you switch it back to Filelist mode. Visual Basic is limited in the listview control because you have to hold the control key down to select multiple files and this obviously cant be done with a touch screen. The album art and filelist view buttons were very easy to add and allowed me to make some needed changes to the listboxes. The up and down arrows now work for both lists, the user just has to click in the listbox to select which one to scroll. Thanks for all your suggestions.

**cody_04L** · 01-25-2006, 04:34 PM

Originally Posted by reddeath30

How about something like this?

Red,

Awesome job you have done with this frontend. I love how this seup looks. It would be awesome to be able to select which album to play via album art. When can we expect a new release? They just keep getting better and better.

**xGumbyx** · 01-25-2006, 05:37 PM

Originally Posted by reddeath30

Im glad you asked, I wanted to get your feedback on it. The way it works is you click on the album on the left to select it, then you hit the "Add All Files" button to add the whole album. The Add File button is disabled until you switch it back to Filelist mode. Visual Basic is limited in the listview control because you have to hold the control key down to select multiple files and this obviously cant be done with a touch screen. The album art and filelist view buttons were very easy to add and allowed me to make some needed changes to the listboxes. The up and down arrows now work for both lists, the user just has to click in the listbox to select which one to scroll. Thanks for all your suggestions.

The way I understand from your description is that you'd have to click an album (by art), click "Add all files", click file mode, click album mode, click an album, click "Add all files", to append these to the current playlist. Is this correct? If this is the case, would it be possible to have another button called "Select another album" and that would refresh the page to that the songs that were just selected were added, and the user can then add a second, third, fourth etc. OR maybe there is a way to have a button that would allow for the keypress and hold of ctrl.

Just a few thoughts.

Gumby