All things NAS - Page 3

natedawgg · 05-19-2008, 02:13 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by Mobiuslogic

I just updated the new beta and was playing around. In the first 3 minutes, I noticed that

1) Shuffle, next, back buttons appear to work somewhat sporatically. 80% of the time they did what I expected. 20% it seemed that if shuffle was on, it wouldn't go to the next track, if shuffle was off, it would

ok with shuffle on, when you click the next button it will go to the next song in the shuffled list. ( shuffle works by taking the list of songs that are in the album and randomizing that list to make sure that all songs get played at least once with others playing multiple times). so by clicking next, you are skipping to the next song in the randomized list. with shuffle on, if you want to go to the "real" next song you will either have to turn shuffle off or just click/tap the song you want to play.

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, and with shuffle on, it still bounced around the tracks in order. That's ok for now, though. I know you're still working on it.

this could be the very unlikely chance that the random number generator actually generated the same ordered list as the unshuffled (highly doubt it though). More than likely the the shuffle flag did not get set for some reason and thus the tracks did not get reorganized. i will look into it though and make changes accordingly

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2) I tried to click the coverflow view and completely froze it up. I suspect that has something to do with having 3037 songs, for 13.46 gigs of music, and random/broken album art for all of it. Also, I didn't use the "decode album art" and didn't give it time to finish... i was doing other things too so I force-quit.

this is exactly what happened. i personally have about 142 albums with artwork, and it briefly hangs while generating the coverflow. the good news is that once you load it up it stays loaded (very quickly switch between coverflow and list) as long as the app is held open (ie. if you just put your mini to sleep then you don't have to worry about it). on the flipside coverflow is slow, i do realize that. as i mentioned before i did not actually build the coverflow component, i just modified it for my needs. i am looking into some ways to speed the process up to make the whole thing more usable with large Librarys.

you don't have to use the "decode album art" util. i put that in for people you just don't want or have any other way of getting their album artwork other than itunes. the actual coverflow component just looks for any jpg, or png in the album folder to use for album artwork. i am also working on a way to associate pics with albums from within the app. should make things easier. but it may take a while to implement

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3) Cosmetically, I like night mode better than day, but I haven't tested them in full sunlight yet.

i agree with you on the night/day look. i really like the night, and honestly day skin was kind of an after thought and i will probably revisit at a later time to make it prettier.

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Also, the attenuation button was clearer as "ATT"... as pointed out by NeonDev, it's a little confusing as it is with the three different sizes. The buttons, however, are touchscreen-friendly and that is very welcome.

this is true and will be changed shortly

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As always, don't focus on the cosmetics. You just keep coding that functionality in. Keep up the good work and if you get behind on your progress I'll send you 1,000 PMs a day until you update the beta download.

actually the cosmetics are the easy thing to change, but i dont want to focus soley on the cosmetics either.

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More seriously, though, I'm glad you're doing this. Curious, unless I missed something, why NAS? I know why the name change, I mean why "NAS"? What stand for?

well i am pretty lame when it comes to naming conventions, and i had to have something to get the subforum going (consequently it is up now so all of this will be moved soon). NAS are my initials, but i like to think of it as Nate's Awesome System or something lame like that. it is very probable that the name will change again.

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....AND one more thing. Version numbers? NASv0.03.air.zip or something... if you can and if you feel like it. Eventually, versions are going to get a bit complicated so might be good to get in the habit of, no? Also, it's easier/easiest to keep track of having the newest one (short of an email notification list) if we can see the version number on the download. Also, if someone comes up with a bizarre bug, you can see if they're running the newest version or not. Just a thought.

you are right. this is a big deal and i have been putting a lot of thought into how to do this correctly. the big advantage to adding the version numbers is for the autoupdate feature that i will implement. this will give the app the ability(while connected to the internet) to autodetect if it is the most current version and if not download and install the latest. so until i get all of that worked out i will hold off on the version numbers. but in all honesty it should not be to long before i get that working, it is pretty high on the priority list.

Quote: Originally Posted by Mobiuslogic

Not mute. I like still hearing the song, especially if I press ATT to have a quick conversation about directions or order at the drive-through. Better than mute, I think.

Although, when you get to preferences and a built in .plist editor, being able to switch the ATT button between Mute and Attenuation would be good. That way everyone can have their cake.

Maybe change the ATT symbol to a line art symbol of an ear or a mouth with sound, indicating that "press this button if you wish to hear things" or "press this button if you wish to speak things". This would allow it to be mute or attenuation without changing the icon.

i am working on something like this for the future

thanks for your help testing this app. as i mentioned before my mini is busted so i can't do any actual in-car testing. so thanks for your input and ideas it all really helps the development process

Mobiuslogic · 05-19-2008, 10:51 PM

Keep "Nate's Awesome System". I don't think anyone would fault you for coming up with a great UI and naming it after yourself. Take the cred, man.

natedawgg · 05-20-2008, 12:06 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by Mobiuslogic

Keep "Nate's Awesome System". I don't think anyone would fault you for coming up with a great UI and naming it after yourself. Take the cred, man.

haha thanks i may just do that.

ok so i got bored on some of the other stuff so i started poking around with the UI and made some changes. download the new version and please let me know if you like the changes

tormodnt · 05-20-2008, 12:44 PM

I have now got the time to test the new beta.

I think I still have a bug, when volume i lowered and I skip to next song the volum goes up again, but the levelbar on the volume stays the same..

natedawgg · 05-20-2008, 01:01 PM

ok good to know i will work on a fix for that tonight

natedawgg · 05-22-2008, 06:02 PM

i just uploaded a new version of NAS today. it is labeled v1.2. i have not implemented the auto update yet, but that should be done very soon. this update revolves mostly around the volume UI. i just wasnt happy with the last version and the way it all looked. so i did some thinking and did a little better in my opinion.

i also fixed (hopefully!

) the issue with the volume reseting when starting a new song, as well as changed the mute/ATT button's icon.

also i did some testing in windows today, and realized some problems. the biggest one is that the iTunes album art decoder that i wrote (and works great in OSX) does not work at all in windows. i have no real idea why, since NAS is running in the flash player which is essentially separate from the OS. if you guys have any ideas please let me know what you think the problem could be, i have been

trying to figure it out.

****UPDATE****
so i have been doing some testing in windows vista with a much larger album art database from itunes, and it all worked! i don't know what was happening earlier to make it not work. i would really appreciate anybody using windows with a large itunes library with artwork downloaded using itunes, to try and test this function. it is in the preferance pane under where you select your music folder. it will be labled "decode itunes albumart" after clicking this (you may have to wait for a minute or so depending on how many albums you have) then go to your documents folder and there should be a folder named "NAS artwork". please let me know if the pictures are all showing up and if they are acutally displaying. once again thank you all in advance for all of your help.

once again do what you guys do best and try to break it for me!

Mobiuslogic · 05-23-2008, 07:29 AM

With pleasure...

*cackles cruelly whilst rubbing hands together*

Bugbyte · 05-23-2008, 09:35 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by natedawgg

****UPDATE****
so i have been doing some testing in windows vista with a much larger album art database from itunes, and it all worked! i don't know what was happening earlier to make it not work. i would really appreciate anybody using windows with a large itunes library with artwork downloaded using itunes, to try and test this function. it is in the preferance pane under where you select your music folder. it will be labled "decode itunes albumart" after clicking this (you may have to wait for a minute or so depending on how many albums you have) then go to your documents folder and there should be a folder named "NAS artwork". please let me know if the pictures are all showing up and if they are acutally displaying. once again thank you all in advance for all of your help.

once again do what you guys do best and try to break it for me!

Don't think this is just a Windows bug. I tested on two Macs and the NAS artwork folder shows up in documents with all of the album art in it, but NAS does not display the artwork. I just get the broken artwork symbol and an outline where the artwork should be.

Mobiuslogic · 05-23-2008, 09:46 AM

Okay, errors:

1) it seemed to have loaded much quicker, and seems to be running quicker. That's a plus! For testing, I selected one artist (Cake) as my music folder. It showed that artist's albums, and I clicked on the coverflow button. This rendered as nothing. Blank. I went back to album list, double-clicked on each album, each one came up blank, as if there were no songs in it. i'm not sure if this is a screen image render issue or if it's not reading the data.

2) With above issue, can't play a song. The play button becomes a pause button (I assume it's trying to play something) but won't revert to a play button when clicked again.

3) I like the new UI with the volume, only, it appears not to work. Volume change buttons bring up the pop-up window, but there's no indication in the window of the current/change in volume level

NEXT ATTEMPT:

Cleared saved settings, selected entire music library, scrolled to "Cake", selected an album, and DID get the list of tracks. The track progress indicator overshot it's boundary off the right side (that was an earlier issue we were having), but volume indicator worked just fine.

But...

BUT...!

The volume pop up won't go away now! It covers all of my words!

Also, when I back out of the album listing, and click next track while looking at my list of artists, it does nothing. It appears not to remember what album/track order I am or doesn't see it while I'm looking at a list higher on the hierarchy. If I go back down through another artist to look at the tracks on... say, 3 Doors Down... the "next track" selects the first on the new list of tracks I'm now looking at.

This is fine if I want to use the NAS as essentially an awesome, unlimited CD changer without the ability to randomly jump tracks between CD's. I think the fix in that is having the ability to sort by Artist, or Album, or Song. As iTunes currently sorts it, it's by Artist>Album>Song, and NAS is only seeing it in that order. In other words, it is keeping it's "next" function within the album only.

Hmm. Now my Next and back and shuffle buttons are misbehaving. Either not doing their function, or the shuffle button appears to glitch the ability to choose the next track.

Keep up the good work! (NOT sarcastic. You are still doing great work. It's hard to send you a bunch of errors and not feel like I'm just going to make you feel bad. It's getting better and better each update.)

For debugging info, running lastest iTunes on MBP running OS X.5.

natedawgg · 05-23-2008, 11:27 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by Bugbyte

Don't think this is just a Windows bug. I tested on two Macs and the NAS artwork folder shows up in documents with all of the album art in it, but NAS does not display the artwork. I just get the broken artwork symbol and an outline where the artwork should be.

yeah i think this is a different issue. in windows the pictures are not even showing up in the NAS artwork folder (and if they are they are corrupted). the issue you are seeing is something that i am working on right now to fix. the problem is that when itunes associates an album with a particular piece of artwork, they don't tell anybody how they are actually associating it (all of the artwork is encoded into a .itc file and stored in a seemingly random set of nested folders). From what i can tell there is supposed to be an Album Id number, but nobody has been able to locate it (unless you are doing something like NBB using the correct apple frameworks). so now we are stuck with a folder full of usable artwork and no way to associate it to a particular album. What NAS does when you give it your music folder it goes through folder by folder looking for an artist, then all the albums for that artist and all the songs for that album. while looking for the songs it is also checking to see if there is a picture in that folder. if so then it will use that picture in the coverflow and the now playing section. currently the only solution is to go through the "NAS albumartwork" folder and copy the pictures out of it and into the actual album's folder (inside the folder along with the songs). then NAS will use those images as artwork.

now i know that is a pain and so i have been brainstorming on how to make this easier. one solution that i have been pursuing is creating a GUI within NAS that will bring up an image out of the "NAS artwork" folder and give you a list of albums. from there you select the album that you want to associate with the artwork and then save it, working your way through the list. at first it sounds somewhat tedious but this is exactly what itunes does if you dont want to/can't download the artwork. which leads me to my next thought, there are serveral server scripts that can take the artist & album name and return the artwork for download. i have been contemplating implementing this, but obviously the user would have to have an internet connection and most people don't in the car. obviously the best solution is to have both and this something that i will try to do. but again i am the sole developer so it may take some more time, but thank you all for your patience and giving me and NAS a chance.

Quote: Originally Posted by Mobiuslogic

Okay, errors:

1) it seemed to have loaded much quicker, and seems to be running quicker. That's a plus! For testing, I selected one artist (Cake) as my music folder. It showed that artist's albums, and I clicked on the coverflow button. This rendered as nothing. Blank. I went back to album list, double-clicked on each album, each one came up blank, as if there were no songs in it. i'm not sure if this is a screen image render issue or if it's not reading the data.

yeah you should always select your entire music folder for NAS to load otherwise you will get missing data. currently the way NAS works is you give it a folder and it goes through every item in that folder. the first folder it arrives at it assumes will be the artist folder. it then looks inside of that folder, and if it runs into another folder it regards it as an album for that previous artist. of course then it looks inside that folder searching for the songs and album artwork. the only other way of doing this is to use the itunes pre-made xml file (NAS currently writes out its own xml file base on what it finds within the folder you give it) the problem with the itunes xml file is it is laid out horribly (i personally think apple did this on purpose to try and flatten attempts such as mine to use there stuff) and thus takes a lot of code to access the correct piece of data(literally 20 lines of code to access a particular song using itunes xml, 3 lines of code using my own xml file). so if you hand NAS only one album or artist then it will try and go 3 deep looking for music and if your music is in the second folder then it will bypass it. currently you should give it something like this

CURRENTUSER/MUSIC/ITUNES/ITUNES MUSIC

i will eventually go back and try and make the search algorithm smarter but once agian it may take some time.

Quote:

2) With above issue, can't play a song. The play button becomes a pause button (I assume it's trying to play something) but won't revert to a play button when clicked again.

this is because there is no data to play

Quote:

3) I like the new UI with the volume, only, it appears not to work. Volume change buttons bring up the pop-up window, but there's no indication in the window of the current/change in volume level

yeah if a song is not playing then no vol info will show

Quote:

NEXT ATTEMPT:

Cleared saved settings, selected entire music library, scrolled to "Cake", selected an album, and DID get the list of tracks. The track progress indicator overshot it's boundary off the right side (that was an earlier issue we were having), but volume indicator worked just fine.

But...

BUT...!

The volume pop up won't go away now! It covers all of my words!

yeah i was afraid of this. while developing i kept running into the same issue, although i thought i had resolved it. everything was working fine on my machine, but i was a little wary of how it would behave on others. i will push up a fix for this quickly.

Quote:

Also, when I back out of the album listing, and click next track while looking at my list of artists, it does nothing. It appears not to remember what album/track order I am or doesn't see it while I'm looking at a list higher on the hierarchy. If I go back down through another artist to look at the tracks on... say, 3 Doors Down... the "next track" selects the first on the new list of tracks I'm now looking at.

yeah what it is doing is when you click on the album and display the songs NAS stores a list of the song's locations, when you click "next" or "previous" it goes to the next/prev song in the list. if you go to another album and look at it's songs then the previous (currently playing) list of songs are overwritten. i will add it to the list of things to make smarter

Quote:

This is fine if I want to use the NAS as essentially an awesome, unlimited CD changer without the ability to randomly jump tracks between CD's. I think the fix in that is having the ability to sort by Artist, or Album, or Song. As iTunes currently sorts it, it's by Artist>Album>Song, and NAS is only seeing it in that order. In other words, it is keeping it's "next" function within the album only.

this is part of the fix. the other part is to have a "playing" list and a "looking" list of songs. having a sort function will make everything more intuitive for sure and i am working on that as we speak.

[/QUOTE]Hmm. Now my Next and back and shuffle buttons are misbehaving. Either not doing their function, or the shuffle button appears to glitch the ability to choose the next track.[QUOTE]

if shuffle is turned on then when you click the next/previous button it will go to the next "shuffled" song. if you turn off random then you should be able to go to the immediate next/previous song

Quote:

Keep up the good work! (NOT sarcastic. You are still doing great work. It's hard to send you a bunch of errors and not feel like I'm just going to make you feel bad. It's getting better and better each update.)

trust me i do not mind hearing about the errors. that is just part of being a developer. they say that 90% of developing time is spent on debugging, so dont feel bad for telling me something doesn't work. i love getting feedback on the app so keep it coming!

once again thank you to everybody for your feedback

natedawgg · 05-23-2008, 11:51 AM

i just uploaded a new version of NAS. this just has a quick fix for the vol pop up box. now you can click the box to make it disappear, in the event that it will not fade away on its own. this will be the last update for the weekend i will be on vac and be without internet access till Monday night. have a good Memorial Day everybody!!!

Mobiuslogic · 05-23-2008, 02:08 PM

Thanks! Have a great weekend!

natedawgg · 07-17-2008, 11:32 AM

hey everybody. I wanted to apologize for the lack of updates in the last month. I just got a promotion at my job and with that came more responsibility. NAS is by no means dead. I have been working quite a bit on it trying to iron out some of the major bugs, as well as adding some major features and enhancements. unfortunately while trying to fix on bug you create another, so at time being i have an unstable build that i am not willing to release at this time. i will how ever be working very hard to get this build stable enough to let you guys have at it. if you have any question you no how to find me

Bugbyte · 07-18-2008, 11:00 AM

Good to hear. The cross-platform nature of this FE makes it unique!

natedawgg · 08-20-2008, 01:57 AM

just thought i would update everybody (if anybody) that is actually following the progress of NAS to let you know that the next iteration of the app is soon to be ready for public release. I apologize for the lack of communication and progress over the summer, but i assure you all that development is happening and that i am committed to making this a solid FE for the mac. below is a list of things that i have been working on to give you an idea of how i have been killing my summer being lazy sitting by the pool

visualizations - i have been working on some visualizations to have running while listening to a song. they will move to the beat, however at the moment i don't have any creative juices flowing so i have only come with the basic sound spectrum bar. the good news is that the formula is down for making these types of things move and dance to the music, i just need some good ideas of what to make that would look cool while driving (not that you should ever look at the screen while you are driving because you will die and everybody will be sad). So if you have some ideas feel free to post them here or send me a pm. i would love the help, because i just don't have the graphic artist in me.

while i am on the pretty side of things, i updated the daytime skin to be a little more aesthetically pleasing. now it is not so in-your-face white. hopefully it is still bright enough to work in the daytime. also now when you change from to day skin to night or vise versa, the app saves that info for the next time it loads.

i have added a user interface for the whole decode your itunes album art thing. now you can decode and then associate that album art with an actual album all from within the app. the only problem with this is it can be quite a pain to manually associate all your albums with the artwork, so i am looking for a way to do this automatically. i found a nice php script that will sit out on a server and scrape urls to return the correct album artwork. i was thinking of using this to help auto-populate the album art. the only problem with this is hosting the file so that the masses could use it. i don't have a web server and currently it is not in the budget to pay for one, but we will see. if anybody knows of some free hosting somewhere i would love to check it out.

there are many other things on the list that need to be addressed and i will get to them in time. as soon as i get the app with the above updates, stable and ready i will post it for all your downloading pleasure in the next couple of days.

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