JeCh's dashboard

JeCh replied on February 06, 2009 20:46 to the idea "Suggestions for improving the Now Playing List" in Songbird:

Hi moshy,

that sounds great. But I would maybe revise following points:

1) The tracks are displayed in the order they are going to play in

I'm not sure if this is a good idea. In fact no players I know do it this way. I would rather make it as an option. Personally I prefer to have the tracks sorted and in shuffle mode skip through the list up and down.

2) Change sort on the now playing list

Please make it work. One of the sorting parameters might be playback order in shuffle mode.

3) Switching between "Now playing" and "Custom playlist"

When will the Custom playlist switch back to "Now playing" and start synchronizing with main window? It might be useful to make a preference to disable it and add a button to switch it manually.

Please consider these changes.

A comment on the update "Album art fetching unveiled!" in Songbird:

Any idea how to use variables for album art name? Or is it not possible yet? – JeCh, on January 27, 2009 12:50

A comment on the update "Album art fetching unveiled!" in Songbird:

Hi,
thanks for the link. It explains most of my questions and I can see most of what I suggested is implemented. But it seems that I can't use any variables for local albumart. I tried to put "%album% - front" in songbird.albumart.file.base_names but Songbird can't find my cover images (which use this naming scheme).

Also please include the option to store the album art in folder as image instead of writing it to file tag. – JeCh, on January 20, 2009 21:48

JeCh replied on January 19, 2009 22:25 to the update "Album art fetching unveiled!" in Songbird:

Hi,

let me express some comments to the Album Art fetching feature and how I would like it to work. For a lot of albums I have stored the cover locally in the same directory where the track is located. The naming scheme I use is %album% - front.jpg, %album% - back.jpg etc. If I don't have cover image for the album, sometimes I have an %artist%.jpg image. I would suggest following:

1) Let the use specify what is the naming scheme and location of locally stored cover images. Of course allow multiple sources with priorities. So in my case it would be:
a) look for %song_path%\%album% - front.*
b) if not found, look for d:\audio\_covers\%album% - front.*
c) if not found, look for %artist%.*

If any of the 3 images is found, make it primary cover image. Next if %song_path%\%album% - back.* and/or %song_path%\%album% - CD.* is found, add it as next images.

Have a look at Album Art Panel for foobar2000 which implements it perfectly.

2) If the cover art is not found in tag or stored locally, then use preferred internet fetcher(s). If the album art is found, store it in tag/local file/cache (make a preference for it)

Also make a switch to decide if tag or local file is preferred cover source.

Currently there are no options for Album Art fetching. Or am I missing something?

I think my suggestions should be quite easy to implement. And they will make a lot of people happy. Especially foobar2000 users like me.

JeCh replied on January 07, 2009 21:21 to the problem "GStreamer is unusable in Windows" in Songbird:

You can't. It is not possible to convert a Linux library to Windows and vice versa. You have to compile the library from source. But unfortunately I don't know how to do it. In fact I haven't tried it yet.

It probably isn't easy. You can find some information here: http://blog.csdn.net/imliujie/archive...

JeCh replied on January 03, 2009 17:09 to the idea "Suggestions for improving the Now Playing List" in Songbird:

Why it is not a good idea to have such an important functionality in addon can be seen right now. One month after the official release of 1.0 this component hasn't been updated. So no user of Songbird 1.0 can actually use it.

If the functionality would have been in the core, this couldn't happen.

JeCh replied on December 18, 2008 15:52 to the problem "GStreamer is unusable in Windows" in Songbird:

This is a how-to for creating addons. I know about it for quite some time. But I'm wondering how do I compile a GStreamer plugin for Windows (on Linux you usually have all the plugins in you repository, so you don't need to compile anything). Where do I copy the DLLs?

JeCh replied on December 10, 2008 16:29 to the idea "Suggestions for improving the Now Playing List" in Songbird:

@moshy
Thanks for the update. I'm looking forward to see your plugin updated and working with 1.0. Have you ever talked with the developers regarding integrating your addon into the core? As you can it is very often requested here.

The idea to modify the current or create a new playlist is a very good one. Maybe a dropdown switcher for the playlists as I already suggested would be nice.

One comment for your screenshot: The options "Remove it from the queue" and "Scroll the list to the next track" should be able to work at the same time. Imagine you made a list which you want to play randomly. After playing a song you want to remove it and you also want the list to scroll to the next track. So please make checkboxes for these options instead of radio buttons.

One more thing. Let me insert here Winamp screenshot with a short description of it's behavior:


I think this is what most people (including me) are looking for.

A comment on the idea "Cue sheet support" in Songbird:

I would suggest to treat the audio file with CUE sheet as if they were multiple files (tracks). Any other behavior would be very confusing and IMHO much more difficult to implement.

Do it exactly as foobar2000 does. Also treat Matroska files with chapters the same way. – JeCh, on December 10, 2008 06:29

JeCh marked one of joux's replies in Songbird as useful. joux replied to the idea "Cue sheet support". JeCh and 7 other people think it's one of the best replies.

JeCh started following the idea "Cue sheet support" in Songbird.

JeCh replied on December 10, 2008 06:07 to the idea "please make enque system, like in winamp." in Songbird:

Why does it say "The company implemented this idea"? There is no queue support in Songbird. There is the Now Playing list which allows it partially but the addon is not available for 1.0.

Anyway the Now Playing list needs a lot improvements before it gets as usable as for example Winamp's playlist.

JeCh started following the idea "please make enque system, like in winamp." in Songbird.

JeCh replied on December 10, 2008 05:57 to the question "Songbird 1.1.0pre crashes" in Songbird:

Another interesting thing is that Songbird doesn't crash anymore after profile is created even if I revert back to the old libgobject. But I have another problem then - I can't import any music, so Songbird is still useless for me. :-(

A comment on the idea "Suggestions for improving the Now Playing List" in Songbird:

iPod support certainly shouldn't be in the core of Songbird. In the core should only be the feature that mjority of users will use or the features which simply can't be addons.

I certainly wouldn't want iPod support in core. I don't own an iPod and I never will. And I believe most Songbird users are like me. If you're looking for an open player, you're certainly not a big fan of proprietary solution (such as Apple's products).

But what most users want and what they certainly will use is a now playing list with the ability to quickly create temporal playlists and with the ability to queue tracks. This should be in the core. – JeCh, on December 09, 2008 23:11

JeCh replied on December 09, 2008 18:50 to the question "Songbird 1.1.0pre crashes" in Songbird:

I discovered that the crash is in libgobject-2.0-0.dll. So I tried to replace this file with a version from latest GTK+ 2.14.5 and suddenly Songbird started to work.

So I believe that upgrading GTK to a new version should fix the crashes I have. Are there any serious reasons why you are still using the old version of GTK+?

JeCh replied on December 04, 2008 11:08 to the question "Songbird 1.1.0pre crashes" in Songbird:

I still get the crash even with 1.0 final. It happens on 2 computers I use. I'm not sure if the reason is the same. I always send reports of the crashes.

JeCh replied on November 20, 2008 06:20 to the idea "Suggestions for improving the Now Playing List" in Songbird:

@moshy

Yes, I understood this from your previous post. But please consider to associate this with doubleclick (of course optionally) in a future version. There's nothing worse then deleting a queue you've create with an accidental doubleclick. :-)

JeCh replied on November 19, 2008 17:06 to the idea "Suggestions for improving the Now Playing List" in Songbird:

Hi moshy,

thanks for your update and reply. I'll try to clear up some things:

"A lot of the other suggestions such as changing the interface of Songbird are outside the scope of the extension." - I've started to create the interface I suggested as an addon myself. I posted it here to show how I would like Songbird look like and behave.

"I know you and lots of others said that double-clicking should add the track to the queue instead of just playing it but this would be a huge departure from the expected behaviour. I'm not sure what the behaviour in Winamp is though" - In Winamp the default behavior is to clear playlist and start playing the song you double clicked. Most people I know don't like it and change it to queue the double clicked song as last. So Winamp has an option for this.

JeCh replied on November 19, 2008 16:55 to the question "Songbird 1.1.0pre crashes" in Songbird:

Hi, I just tried 1.0 RC2 and Songbird still crashes right after starting it. But it's just my home computer, on other computers I tried Songbird works fine.

I can't imagine what might be wrong...