Select album to play via album art - Page 2

reddeath30 · 01-24-2006, 09:53 PM

Quote: 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

Quote: 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

Quote: 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

Quote: 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

reddeath30 · 01-25-2006, 07:51 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by xGumbyx

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

No not that complicated. You click an album art, then click "add all files" then click another album art and then click "add all files" etc. You just cant click and highlight Album 1, then click Album 2 and album 1 still stays highlighted etc. You dont have to switch back and forth between modes. A nice thing is that when you hit the save button it automatically changes mode back to file mode for you. I tried to make it as automated as possible and tried to maintain the programs simplicity.

xGumbyx · 01-25-2006, 08:46 PM

That seems quite adequate to me. As long as a) the user doesnt have to switch screens to add music to the playlist (once the person is already in the playlist editor of course) when selecting multiple albums. Any thoughts of taking the user back to the audio player instead of to file mode after saving? Or is that what you meant?

On another note I am going to send you a private message so be on the lookout

Gumby

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