joux's dashboard

joux replied on June 16, 2009 19:22 to the idea "Please make 'File Location' field editable in the media view window just like Album, Artist, Track Name, etc. metadata." in Songbird:

Good and simple idea.

For the moment: there is the Exorcist addon, which can find and delete broken links for you. You can then just re-import those files. But your suggestion is still better, since you won't lose ratings etc.

joux started following the idea "Please make 'File Location' field editable in the media view window just like Album, Artist, Track Name, etc. metadata." in Songbird.

joux replied on June 16, 2009 19:11 to the idea "Portable Music Player Online Database" in Songbird:

This is a great idea! It will especially be needed when automatic transcoding of files before syncing is introduced. Songbird (or any other software) could then use the database to determine the optimal file format for the attached device.

joux started following the idea "Portable Music Player Online Database" in Songbird.

joux shared an idea in Songbird on June 16, 2009 19:06:

Auto-discover media files in flashvars too

Songbird does a great job by finding and listing any playable media linked from the current website. We can then play those directly in Songbird.

But many websites bring their own flash player with them, so they embed a flash media player that plays back an mp3. Songbird should discover such audio files and offer them for direct playback, too. I think this is as simple as looking for anything that looks like a compatible file URL in the flashvars attribute of the embed tag.

Murphy's reply to "Built-in Torrent Client for Songbird" was just promoted to the most useful! joux and 3 other people think it's one of the best replies.

In case anybody following this hasn't noticed yet, another torrent add-on has been released called BirdTorrent: http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/...
I can't wait to see how they progress.

joux replied on June 07, 2009 21:46 to the question "Global Hotkeys & Minimize to Tray for Linux?" in Songbird:

Yes, please fix the command line hotkey bug! Then I guess packagers will sort the hotkeys out themselves, when it comes to Linux distribution. http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show...

joux reported a problem in Songbird on May 25, 2009 08:20:

Songbird freezes waiting for external drive to spin up

My music is on an external USB drive that goes into standby automatically after 10min without file access. But it does stay mounted to the file system. When I then access a file (i.e. start playing music) it takes a couple of seconds to spin up again. Songbird keeps crashing (=freezes forever) once I start playing a song that is located on that drive in standby mode. The FolderSync addon also fails to do its work when the drive is in standby.

What is this? Is there already a bug report? Or is it not Songbird's fault?

Songbird 1.1.2, Build 1042 (20090331141711)
Ubuntu Linux 9.04

joux replied on May 08, 2009 08:33 to the idea "Let's create translated versions of the quick start guide!" in Songbird:

There are translation guidelines for german around. I didn't know about them, so I translated one or the other thing differently. But they look good and we should use them:
http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/User:Luk...(German)

joux shared an idea in Songbird on May 08, 2009 07:53:

Let's create translated versions of the quick start guide!

Recently, the great Getting Started with Songbird guide was published in the Wiki. This seems to be a good starting point for new users, so maybe it should be available in other languages.

I started off a german translation myself. Just contribute to the wiki, if you like: Einstieg in Songbird

joux replied on March 20, 2009 13:56 to the question "Auto playlist generation based on similar tracks." in Songbird:

Yeah, try that Addon, it's great!

joux replied on March 16, 2009 13:35 to the idea "Add special URL mashup tags to refresh websites for every song" in Songbird:

Actually, it might all be even easier.

The OpenSearch standard provides simple means to integrate search engines and other web services. The Firefox search box is powered by it. There are thousands of installable search settings on mycroft.mozdev.org. And Songbird already has such a search box.

So there is no need for a special markup.

joux replied on January 15, 2009 23:31 to the question "Play *this* album" in Songbird:

Wow, cool, the "more of the same" addon seems to do exactly that. Thank you.

joux replied on January 15, 2009 23:20 to the question "Play *this* album" in Songbird:

This is a good point. I would love to have this. It should be even more general, play this genre, or play this artist or play this last.fm tag should be possible for the currently playing song.
This way, we would have a very intuitive way to explore our music library. Start off in random mode, then come across "Smells like teen spirit" and decide to keep listening to Nirvana (play this artist), and later extend our selection to all Grunge music we have (play this genre)

In short: make any metadata of the current track selectable as filter criteria with one click.

joux replied on January 15, 2009 23:06 to the idea "Integrate Processing java visuals" in Songbird:

Hi Laura.
Thank you for putting this on bugzilla.

Here are some links, if somebody wants to think about it:
The audio library used in processing is minim. It comes with some good features like FFT and BeatDetection. It has classes like AudioInput an dAudioSignal, maybe it is possible to override those to provide the Songbird audio stream.
I also found a library that provides java-bindings to the gStreamer functions: gstreamer-java, but it does not seem to work on Windows.

So: I'm not an expert, but it seems that there is already some stuff around that could be useful.

joux marked one of Michael Purses' replies in Songbird as useful. Michael Purses replied to the question "How do I synchronize Songbird's database files between two (Linux) computers using Unison?".

joux shared an idea in Songbird on January 04, 2009 13:06:

Integrate Processing java visuals

Some people like having visualization for their music.

Processing is a great, well-known java-library, that makes programming visuals very easy. The result is easily exported as java bytecode. So it is cross-plattform.

This would be cool:
Have an add-on, that provides some kind of interface to Songbird, e.g. audio stream, track change, track metadata, visuals-window size and more. Then there would be a good base for creating visualization applets.

joux replied on December 10, 2008 13:33 to the idea "Cue sheet support" in Songbird:

I agree it would be best to treat virtual, cue sheet based tracks just as normal tracks. The idea with a "+" sign to extend the media file to its virtual tracks has one major problem: alphabetical sorting. We couldn't find the virtual tracks in the track list, because the are file under the main file's artist. Also it would mean introducing a completely new concept to the GUI, which does not seem a very good idea.

I do agree though, that it's not a bad idea to make it visible that you are dealing with a virtual track. But that could be done by giving those items a slightly different color or something.

joux replied on December 09, 2008 14:18 to the idea "Cue sheet support" in Songbird:

OK, people. We kinda seem to agree that cue sheet support would be great. So let's get into the details and define what we want, so in the end somebody has all the information to write an addon for this.

Which formats are available? How do media players handle cue sheets? How would you expect Songbird to handle them? For example, should the tracks from the cue sheet be shown transparently as normal tracks in the library (and faceplate during playback)? Or do you prefer handling just the "main mp3", having some sort of extra display that gives you just the additional info from the cuesheet at playback time?

The latter would probably be simpler to implement, but the former might give you all the power of Songbird for every single cue sheet defined track: Last.fm scrobbling, rating, playback count etc. So I'd vote for the I-want-it-all version.

My suggestion:
Media files with cuesheets are handled as virtual albums in Songbird's database. When a virtual track from this album is double clicked, it plays just the corresponding part of the file. If a following track from the virtual album (=media file) is in the playlist, Songbird should of course just gaplessly continue playing that file.

I have no idea how simple this is to integrate into Songbird, but if it works, everything that is built on top of track/album/artist information can use the cue sheet data, too, like scrobbling, album art, mashtape and the like.

OK, tell me what you think about this. And if there's someone around who is into Songbird programming: tell me if this is just too complicated to integrate as an addon..

joux replied on December 03, 2008 23:45 to the idea "Auto-tag my ratings to last.fm" in Songbird:

Funny, I've just seen somebody had the same idea the other way round: get track ratings out of last.fm..

http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/t...