How About...A Virtual CD Changer

chuckster · 05-12-2006, 03:54 PM

I was driving my wife's vehicle the other day and messing with her CD Changer when I was thinking it would be great to have the same type thing in a carpc.

You could have a configuration page that shows 6 or 12 virtual disks. You select (hypothetically) Disk 1 and choose the MP3 CD Directory. You can then select the next disk and do the same.

On the music player screen you change disk on the fly or shuffle between all of them.

Just a thought.

Chuck

Chuck · 05-12-2006, 04:12 PM

Good Idea

I am in the middle of making a random play between my preset buttons

The setup skin will have a selection of how many songs to play in each preset button and what preset buttons to shuffle thru.

So it will

1 picks a preset button from the list you selected.
2 Shuffles.
3 Play say 10 songs or what ever song count you selected.
4 Go to next preset button and start over.

scott_fx · 05-12-2006, 04:27 PM

that was my favorite feature in CF. i hope RR can implement this as well since it will be my new front end when the new install is complete

liquid_smoke · 05-13-2006, 01:57 AM

great idea, ive been wanting something like this for a while. The ability to easily skip through albums as if they were tracks.

chuckster · 05-14-2006, 11:07 PM

Can this be officially made an actual request?

Guino, Something new to add to the ever expanding list I'm sure?

chuckster · 09-07-2006, 09:06 AM

Hi, Wondering if this feature has ever made it into RR?

Would be great to add virtual CD's into the system especially when one has MANY complete MP3 albums in the car.

I was thinking the number of disks could be programmable for instance I want a 6 disk virtual changer. I can then load disk one with any MP3 folder I want and then load disk two etc...

You could play one album, shuffle within one album or shuffle play all your virtual disks. Would be like having a CD Changer in your vehicle.

Not sure if this makes sense but it sounds cool to me

Chuck

liquid_smoke · 09-07-2006, 09:35 AM

every few months i make a request for this in some form ever since FP

if you search you'll find a few write ups on various forms of my request.

im not sure if anyone ever looked into doing this etc, but its the one feature i dont think many if any mp3 playing software has actualy done or done right.
I have multiple ideas of ways to do this, from simple to complicated.
I think the hardest part about it is dealing with the dir structure someone may have, but i think most people who want this feature have there dir setup as Artist/album/.mp3 with multiple albums under one artist.
It could probably be scripted outside of RR by loading playlists, where one playlist would be one complete album. For that to work you would need some kind of way to scan your music lib and create playlist files for each folder. If i could find something that did that, you could actuallly modify a skin to do it without scripts.

RoyN · 09-07-2006, 10:53 PM

Couldnt you just make simple winamp playlists of each "CD" and then make a load playlist button for each?

kamikaze2112 · 09-07-2006, 11:40 PM

I keep all my music in folders, each folder is a whole cd, except for a few mixed folders. The front end that i'm writing shows the folders by the album cover, so it does in fact work like a changer. I just haven't bothered to set up a shuffle system for all the folders, only shuffle for the currently selected folder.

liquid_smoke · 09-08-2006, 12:29 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by RoyN

Couldnt you just make simple winamp playlists of each "CD" and then make a load playlist button for each?

sure you can do that, if you want to spend a few weeks making playlist and buttons for each list. I have over 600 albums

RPM_VR4 · 09-08-2006, 05:57 AM

RR's media browser sucks. CF's one is better but it sucks too. I would kill for something that functions like the PhatBox.

All music is loaded all the time (now-playing = all-songs).
You can re-sort the list via 4 mode buttons (Playlist/Album/Artist/Genre)
There is a next/prev-mode-item in addition to next/prev track.
There is also a next/prev letter of mode item.
There is also random within current mode-item.

Simple and awesome!

Say I am listening to music and I decide I want to hear Korn. I press [Artist] then [Next-Letter] until I get to "K", then [Next-Artist] until I get to "Korn". Now it will play all Korn songs and then continue on to the next "K" artist.

Then say I want to hear more of that type of music, so I press [Genre]. Now it will continue playing all the "Korn" songs, but then it will play the next alphabetical artist with the same genre. I can also turn on "random within genre".

Then I decide I want a different genre so I just press [next-genre] until I find something I like.

This "axis-rotation" scheme of sorting and jumping through your music rather than loading a limited playlist by traversing a static tree is really vastly superior. Of course, I may be a bit biased since I work for PhatNoise and helped develop the system. It is based on a CD-Changer interface, but with infinite discs, infinite tracks, and 4 different "magazines" all containing the same songs, just grouped in to different disc/track combinations.

chuckster · 09-08-2006, 06:58 AM

I'm looking for a more intuitive way which I don't have to look at the screen for too long while I'm driving.

I have 6 button (more or less) on my skin labeled disk 1, disk 2, disk 3 etc....and like a changer if I get tired of disk 1 playing I just push any of the other disk buttons and now my other programmed folder is playing. Just like a factory or aftermarket cd changer.

I don't care if I remember which folder is assigned to which button, I never did with my factory changer, only that I can easily change the currently playing cd.

It would not matter how you have your folder arranged only that you assign the button to whichever folder you want.

ex. Disk 1 can be \Music\Artist\Album or it can be \Music\Artist-Album (how I have mine). It just will play whatever is in that one folder. If there are 20 songs in that folder than that is how many songs are assigned to that button, it will not care if you music is sorted in any way only that you have music in the folder you assigned to it.

Not sure if this is making sense, I'm not the best at describing things in writing

Chuck

Custommx3 · 09-08-2006, 09:16 AM

I personally dont want ALL my music loaded @ once. Those of us that have lots of music and using an EPIA board... talk about a resource hog.

chuckster · 09-08-2006, 11:21 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by Custommx3

I personally dont want ALL my music loaded @ once. Those of us that have lots of music and using an EPIA board... talk about a resource hog.

I'm not talking about loading all your music at once.

I'm talking about loading music in Album folders at once.

You might have a folder called \ACDC\Back In Black or in my case it would be called ACDC-Back In Black which would have 10 songs in it but you could assign this folder to Disk 1. Another folder may be \Green Day\Dookie or again in my case would be \Green Day-Dookie which would have 14 songs in it and you would assign this folder as Disk 2. You would load the rest of the disks with which ever folder you want.

Today if I select three album folders I have to add them all to one giant browser list. My problem is what if I want to listen to one cd. I then have to go into the browser clear the playlist and load a new album all while trying to drive the car. Would be great to load separate CD folders into separate playlists assigned to a button.

Now I'm sure it could be done through scripts etc... which I could figure out I'm sure but if it was a feature then I thought many folks would make use of it. I know I would because it would be less button pressing for me while I drive.

Chuck

liquid_smoke · 09-08-2006, 12:25 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by RPM_VR4

RR's media browser sucks. CF's one is better but it sucks too. I would kill for something that functions like the PhatBox.

All music is loaded all the time (now-playing = all-songs).
You can re-sort the list via 4 mode buttons (Playlist/Album/Artist/Genre)
There is a next/prev-mode-item in addition to next/prev track.
There is also a next/prev letter of mode item.
There is also random within current mode-item.

Simple and awesome!

Say I am listening to music and I decide I want to hear Korn. I press [Artist] then [Next-Letter] until I get to "K", then [Next-Artist] until I get to "Korn". Now it will play all Korn songs and then continue on to the next "K" artist.

Then say I want to hear more of that type of music, so I press [Genre]. Now it will continue playing all the "Korn" songs, but then it will play the next alphabetical artist with the same genre. I can also turn on "random within genre".

Then I decide I want a different genre so I just press [next-genre] until I find something I like.

This "axis-rotation" scheme of sorting and jumping through your music rather than loading a limited playlist by traversing a static tree is really vastly superior. Of course, I may be a bit biased since I work for PhatNoise and helped develop the system. It is based on a CD-Changer interface, but with infinite discs, infinite tracks, and 4 different "magazines" all containing the same songs, just grouped in to different disc/track combinations.

how is it loading everything at once? Loading it into what? Surely it isnt memory. And if its not memory then its not really loading the music but probably a playlist or database of the music. Not too far off from what RR does. The "axis rotation" method sounds interesting but how does this work when your song may have wrong or empty tag data ? To me it just sounds like phatnoise creates a database of your songs and loads this database and lets you search for music based on artist/album/genre etc. This method is fine if your data is clean. Although my music lib is perfectly sorted into Artist/album/track folders the actual tags on the music files are hit or miss and even when you have perfect tags there are still issues because of the way tags are read. For example, in winamp. If i have an album that has multiple artist on various tracks, you know, duets etc. It wont group the songs with multiple artist with the album it belongs to, or i see 5 entries for th e artist DMX when i should only see one. To fix this i have to manually go in and delete extra info out of tags and make sure there is only one artist per track. annoying. Now this is winamp, i have no idea how phatnoise handles this, probably a lot better than winamp.

FrodoPlayer IMO still has the best method of accessing your music compared with other frontends, it was fast and easy.
CF has a nice way of doing it, but you have to manually add albums into the virtual cd changer(which isnt so bad), but once they are added its very easy to toggle between them. Its really just loading multiple playlist files, which is a very good idea, one i think we should put into RR

I think ive even asked for it in some form. Playing with CF right now and i must say, the multiple playlist feature is AWESOME, it even keeps track of what song was playing and postion in each playlist, so if im listening to playlist1/track5/-00:43
switch to playlist6/track13/-02:00 it dosent skip a beat. nice.
This is closer to how it should be done.