Yet Another Jukebox Program

[JackTucky]

I might add something for the next version.  My version also lists anything that is not 500 * 500 (my preference), so that comes in handy.

what is 500 * 500?   

Art

[SalmonKing]

I might add something for the next version.  My version also lists anything that is not 500 * 500 (my preference), so that comes in handy.

what is 500 * 500?   

Art

The X & Y pixel size (width & height) of the image.  I like mine at that resolution, as it gives a good balance between quality & resource usage (my jukebox PC is a P3 800 with 512mb of RAM).

[lustreking]

My version also lists anything that is not 500 * 500 (my preference), so that comes in handy.

[SalmonKing]

I was also wondering if you have ever considered adding a simple cd player to your jukebox program.  When I build my jukebox, I'd like to have a cd-rom drive accessible from the front so it will play cd's as well as mp3s.

It's definately something to think about, and I know I can do it using the control I currently play the MP3's with.  That would be the ideal option, as it wouldn't require anything other controls.  However, I can't do it with the VERSION of the control I currently have, so would need to upgrade (which means quite a few $'s more.  I have thought about upgrading for things like being able to present the user with an equalizer, or perhaps crossfading, both of which I could do if I could upgrade the control).

Of course, there would be ways to do it WITHOUT any controls at all, but that means I would need to 'talk' to something else for things like play, stop, pause, get the song lenth & current position, etc.  Then, how to incorporate that into the application.  Just show it as an extra album with a nice picture of a CD as the album art, or have a seperate dedicated section for it?

All food for thought!   

[Chris]

Of course, there would be ways to do it WITHOUT any controls at all, but that means I would need to 'talk' to something else for things like play, stop, pause, get the song lenth & current position, etc.

[clonestar]

It's definately something to think about, and I know I can do it using the control I currently play the MP3's with.

[SalmonKing]

The standard thing to talk to in this case would be Media Player.  I'm working on doing the same thing in WinCab, although more for legal reasons than technical reasons. (In the US at least, MP3 decoding algorithms are patented, and the library I'm using is a freeware one that hasn't paid the licensing fees.  By using WMP, we're not shipping any MP3 code in our apps and thus not infringing the patent.

The other alternative (and the way I would probably go) is to use the winmm.dll through its mciSendString function, but things could get really ugly that way.  I'm sure someone would have written a nice layer on top of that, though, if not, I'd write one.

Of course, that would be a moot point if I could upgrade, as the 'Pro' version of the MP3 control has CD playing built in.

However, I don't want to start a 'charity drive', I'm just stating facts!

That's trickier, because you have to go out to FreeDB or something to get the track names, or just show them as "Track 1", "Track 2", etc.

That's what I was thinking.  It will be easy to just display the number of tracks on the CD as 'Track 01', etc.  However, I know that won't be good enough.....lol!  That's not a bad thing, I suppose, as it helps the program develop nicely, but it would be nice to see less of the 'hey, I love the program, but......' messages   

[JackTucky]

If Chris' solution doesn't work, I can put together some sort of excel macro to do this type of thing, but it will be a couple days until I can get to it.  But I need to get to it so I can figure out what covers I'm missing too.

GadgetGeek:

I'd love to see an excel macro.  My computers must be too slow to use the wincab function properly.  I have 1100+ albums, and I've never had the patience to let it finish.

Thanks.

Art

[GadgetGeek]

[GadgetGeek:

I'd love to see an excel macro.

[JackTucky]

We will see what this weekend brings...I've not thought this through too far yet.  I'm probably going to assume that the albums are laid out in artist/album/track directory structure with the covers under the album directory with track.  Did my id3 tag info macro work ok on your machine?

I've never tried your id3 tag macro.  I'm artist/album/track directory.

Work this weekend.  You've got something better to do?   

Thanks, Art

[GadgetGeek]

Work this weekend.

[Dire Radiant]

One more feature request! (Pain in the butt aint I? heh) Would it be possible to have a key mapped to remove the last song from the playlist? I know you can do it with the playlist editor but it would be nice if users could push a button instead of me having to haul out the mouse.

[rgecko]

SalmonKing just wanted to let you know I got around to reinstalling windows and everything installed OK this time.... my issues a couple weeks ago must have been with an OS problem, thanks for the help and the awesome program.

[SalmonKing]

One more feature request! (Pain in the butt aint I? heh) Would it be possible to have a key mapped to remove the last song from the playlist? I know you can do it with the playlist editor but it would be nice if users could push a button instead of me having to haul out the mouse.

I don't see a problem with that at all, leave it with me!   

Don't expect it at regular 'SK Speed', though, other projects are keeping me more than busy at the moment!   

Give it a couple of weeks, I should be able to put an update online in that time.

SK.

[SalmonKing]

SalmonKing just wanted to let you know I got around to reinstalling windows and everything installed OK this time.... my issues a couple weeks ago must have been with an OS problem, thanks for the help and the awesome program.

Good to hear!  I hate those strange ones that don't make any sense.....experience makes me put them down to the OS / confilicting software / bad hardware.....couldn't be MY code at fault, at least in this case it was!  lol 

[BASSOFeeSH]

 

Wow, great software!  I'm hoping to test it out at our block party is a couple of weeks. 

My only problem is that all of my .mp3's are named <track#> - <Artist> - <Album> - <Track Name>.mp3  I've used 2 different rippers that named files this way, but it's not exactly supported by your software.(The song titles almost all scroll off the screen).  If things go well at the party I might consider a mass renaming of my files to work with your software(& will paypal you some $$$), but a nice feature would be a more flexible way to parse the file names.

i.e.  Here's how realplayer(I know) works:

[allroy1975]

rename them!  I had to do my whole 60+ gb collection.  It took a while but with tools like Tag & Rename it goes pretty quick and it's not too bad once you use them in the new format for a while. 

Allroy

[BASSOFeeSH]

What do you all do for tracks that don't really belong to a CD?  For instance, I have a whole folder dedicated to one-off remixes that I've collected.  If you generally use the <track#> - <track name> format do you just put a dummy value in front of it?

i.e. "Don't Make Me Destroy You(Mix).mp3" becomes "XX - Don't Make Me Destroy You(Mix).mp3" ?

[allroy1975]

eh...I only have records!  I guess you can make a fake CD out of it and give the tracks numbers...I dunno.


Sorry.   

[billf]

What do you all do for tracks that don't really belong to a CD?

[BASSOFeeSH]

Yup, thanks!

[destr0y]

Hail to the (Salmon) King - Brilliant app, many thanks for all your hard work (yep, I'm a donor)

Is it possible to tweak the screensaver?   I'd love to be able to set the album artwork and song/album/artist test a bit bigger (about twice its current size)..

Cheers,
Brett

[allroy1975]

I was just thinking about the screen saver...I was wondering if (as a screensaver option) instead of saving the "whole" screen, it could just start shuffling through albums.  you know?  kind of like an attract mode for a video game. 

I think that would be cool.  But...maybe I'm the only one who thinks that.   

Allroy

[SalmonKing]

Hail to the (Salmon) King - Brilliant app, many thanks for all your hard work (yep, I'm a donor)

Is it possible to tweak the screensaver?   I'd love to be able to set the album artwork and song/album/artist test a bit bigger (about twice its current size)..

Cheers,
Brett

One of the things I'm looking at is this very thing.  I wanted to get the visualizations into the screen saver as well, but it doesn't look like that's possible, unfortunatly.

[destr0y]

Sweeet 

Re: the visualisations - I guess another approach to that might be calling a 3rd party app (eg WinAmp or WMP) as your player, from SK Jukebox.  No idea how much effort that entails though.. I'd be more than happy with the tweaked screensaver thing

Cheers,
Brett

[SalmonKing]

Sweeet 

Re: the visualisations - I guess another approach to that might be calling a 3rd party app (eg WinAmp or WMP) as your player, from SK Jukebox.  No idea how much effort that entails though.. I'd be more than happy with the tweaked screensaver thing

Cheers,
Brett

Been there, done that    

I used WMP 7, 8 and 9 before giving up on it.  I looked extensivly at WinAmp as well, but decided against it.  Call me old fashioned, but when writing a program, I like to have as much control over what is going on as possible, and I just didn't feel like I was in control when using these programs.  It might do for some people, I just didn't get along with it. 

Changing engines would take at least a day or 2 solid effort, and I did that 4 times.  I'm not going through that again, either, unless I have no choice.

[destr0y]

Heheh you fascist   
Nah seriously, I agree its not worth the effort!

Cheers,
Brett

[Bumblebounces]

First off, I have to be the next to tell you how great this progam is...  Absolutely BRILLIANT!!

A little history and then a question:

I was duped by the flash of VMJ and actually paid for it twice by accident (still have never received a refund for that one  ).  The program did what I wanted it to but was so damned buggy that it just wouldn't run reliably without crashing (even on my higher spec machine so I doubt it would have ever run on my juke).  I also wasn't real impressed with the way the option screen was presented.  Just seemed really amatuer.  So, I had to move on...

And move on I did, to JB Sim.  This was (and still is) a GREAT jukebox program.  It does what it says it does, very reliably.  The program is very simple and super stable and only has one bug I am aware of (not even a bug, really).  It won't play a song that has a comma in the file name due to the scripting the author uses to control the mp3 decoder (or something like that).  Easy enough to work around so I was using it and very happy with it until my wife started to show real interest in my jukebox (once completed).  It was missing one feature that I was really after that the author said he was planning to work on.  Genre sorting.  My wife (and daughter) really wanted a way to seperate their music from mine.  I was patient, for a while...  I was still waiting, hoping I could remain a loyal JB Sim user, when I decided to heed the advice of some of posters in this topic and try SK Jukebox.  Man, am I impressed!  Sorry Lawrence, I am moving on again.  I registered JB Sim with the author and still have great faith it that programs abilities.  It just works.  It's not very feature rich, but I still think it might be THE BEST choice, maybe the only choice, if your jukebox has a "low spec" PC installed in it.  By design, it requires very little resources.  Which brings me to my question(s).

The PC I have installed in my jukebox is a P3 550 with internal video and only 128MB of RAM.  JB Sim ran just fine on this and SK Jukebox does run but I am noticing some performance issues with regard to the animation (kinda jerky).  My initial testing of this program was done on a P4 3.2 GHz with 512MB RAM and an ATI 64MB video card.  Man, does it sail on that.  I especially liked the "animate jump" feature on that machine!  Talk about some flying images.  I know SK has stated that he has a P3 800 with 512MB of RAM.  That is not much faster than my machine but it is considerably more memory than I have.  He also has stated in this thread that he has a pretty good video card installed.  I am wondering if, in the authors opinion, I would get any better animation performance by adding a better video card to the mix than the onboard video?  I think I have a PCI ATI 16MB card that might do the trick laying about.  Or am I going to also need to increase the amount of RAM I have?  I should also mention that I am running Windows XP Pro.  I was also thinking I might get better performance by switching to Win 98SE.  Didn't really want to do that as I like XP's stability and superior networking abilities, but I do have a copy of 98SE I could use.

Just as a side note, I was getting an occassional crash when using 2.5.0 on this setup.  It seemed to happen mostly when the end of one song and the beginning of another was starting.  Also, when I hit O to get the options screen, it would crash everytime.  I was thinking it might be because of the low spec on the machine but I applied the update to 2.5.3 and it hasn't happened again yet. 

Any thoughts or ideas on the above would be appreciated.  Thanks very much for providing us all with a great program, free of charge, no less.  This program ROCKS!

Bumble

Attaching a pic of my juke for reference...  Thanks again!

[allroy1975]

is that a clean XP install?  Like..how long have you been using it?  is it your old dektop that was just cleaned up and thrown in the Juke, or did you format and reinstall?

I've been running it on a Sempron for a while (obviously pretty quick Processor) and and old Geforce 2 video card (again, not really skimpy) but the program is rock solid.  I've never had it crash when it's running.  I've made settings changes to the app that caused it to wig out and crash, but that was reported and SK fixed it. 

Anyway, seems to me that a crash is probably something else on the box and not SKJ or hardware.  But I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Allroy

[SalmonKing]

I would deifinitly put a better card in there.  I was using a 2mb video card, and the animation was terrible.  I put in a nicer card (64mb AGP), and after a little tweaking of the animation timing, it works great.  I can't get the full screen animation working at a reasonable speed, though, which is a shame.

If all you have is a 16mb PCI, I would absolutly pop that in.  Put the animation speed way up to the top & let me know if it works well enough!  I can't really do much, except make it so you can set the animation timing higher than currently allowed.

If it is still really bad, I'm afraid there's not much I can do, so animation may have to be turned off   

[Bumblebounces]

is that a clean XP install?  Like..how long have you been using it?  is it your old dektop that was just cleaned up and thrown in the Juke, or did you format and reinstall?

I've been running it on a Sempron for a while (obviously pretty quick Processor) and and old Geforce 2 video card (again, not really skimpy) but the program is rock solid.  I've never had it crash when it's running.  I've made settings changes to the app that caused it to wig out and crash, but that was reported and SK fixed it. 

Anyway, seems to me that a crash is probably something else on the box and not SKJ or hardware.  But I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Allroy

Yeah, it was a totally clean, minimalist install.  This machine has no CD-ROM drive or floppy.  Has only one 27GB hard drive which will be swapped to a 200 or 250 when finances permit. 

Regarding the crashes, the Windows event log made reference to a module that was part of the SKJ executable.  I screen capped one of the event log errors in case Sk wanted to see it.  As I said, this error has not bothered me again since I upgraded to 2.5.3  Error attached if interested.

Bumble

[Bumblebounces]

I would deifinitly put a better card in there.  I was using a 2mb video card, and the animation was terrible.  I put in a nicer card (64mb AGP), and after a little tweaking of the animation timing, it works great.  I can't get the full screen animation working at a reasonable speed, though, which is a shame.

If all you have is a 16mb PCI, I would absolutly pop that in.  Put the animation speed way up to the top & let me know if it works well enough!  I can't really do much, except make it so you can set the animation timing higher than currently allowed.

If it is still really bad, I'm afraid there's not much I can do, so animation may have to be turned off   

SK-

No worries about what you can or cannot do for me.  You've already done us all a big favor by making this software and making it available to everyone who wants it for free.  We all owe you a big hand for that alone.  And then you go and throw in great tech support in getting problems solved.  I couldn't ask for anything more.  I was just looking for opinions on what might make this thing perform better with the hardware I have.  If it comes to it, I will save up and buy something better to toss in there.  I am just a strong believer in putting older hardware that's no longer useful elsewhere to work before discarding it just because it's old or slow.

I just checked the specs and model of the built in video on that board.  It's an 8MB nVidia Riva TNT, which is better than I expected it to be.  Was expecting 4MB.  I lowered the color depth to 16bit instead of the 32bit max it was set at and that seemed to help a little.  I also found some more PC100 memory that this board uses so I am now running 256MB of RAM.  That seems to have helped as well.  The animation is a lot smoother than it was.  I am thinking if I can find that 16MB ATI card, that might just give it the mojo it needs to make the transitions fluid.

Oh, and regarding the error I posted in the last response.  Don't feel that you need to jump right on that or anything.  As I said, it's running fine now with the update installed.  I put that up in case you were curious and wanted to take a look-see at what it was doing.  I know how you programmers are about your code...

Thanks for the responses.  I'll advise if that 16MB card makes the difference (if and when I can find the darn thing).

Cheers!

Bumble

[Bumblebounces]

Well, I never did find that 16MB card.  I know it's around here somewhere (unless I gave it away and forgot - anyone else do that?).  But I did make some headway.  I mentioned in the last post that I added 128MB and decreased color depth to 16bit.  I also thought I had increased the animation speed to max but I was fiddling with the controls the other day and noticed that it was set to default.  I must have tried that before adding the memory & decreasing bit depth and found it not to work so I put it back and forgot I did.

Anyway, I cranked it to max and now it's very passable on the 8MB that the card has available.  The "animate jumps" option still won't fly as too many pics are moving too fast for the card to keep up but I feel that it's working for the typically uses good enough until I can scare up funds to upgrade.  This probably won't happen for a while.  The next upgrade to this thing HAS TO BE A BIGGER HARD DRIVE!!!  27GB is just not enough for all my music plus my wife and daughters music.  Not even close.

So, for now, it's working great!  Thanks again, SK.

Bumble

[allroy1975]

I was just thinking last night how someone needs to bust SK's chops about getting out a new version.   

Not really, but any time frame?

Allroy

[SalmonKing]

I was just thinking last night how someone needs to bust SK's chops about getting out a new version.   

Not really, but any time frame?

Allroy

The time frame is when I get time to sit down & work on it, then get everything I've been wanting to get done for weeks working.  Considering I haven't even been able to open the code in a few weeks, who knows?  Maybe this weekend, maybe next month?

Putting down an estimated time is stupid, as all the best intentions in the world won't make me less busy   

Anyway, I have HOPES of getting something out this month, and I'll certainly do that if I get the time.  Otherwise, how long is a piece of string?   

SK.

[SalmonKing]

Just a little bit of progress info, so you know the program is not dead or abandoned!

Being the end of the financial year here, that means as the creator of accounting software, my company is extremely busy at this time.  Couple that with the fact that the start of the financial year is a time when alot of companies now have a fresh year, and a fresh budget to go along with that.  This means it's the time of the year alot of our customers look at what they have and ask for additions / changes, etc.

Anyway, that should give you an insight into why I have been quiet for a while now.  On to the good stuff! .......

I have been playing with a piece of code that has been requested several times now, that is utilizing the ID3 tags from within MP3 files.  It's working very nicely now, although the speed is obviously a drop in what I'm used to with getting the info from the filesystem.  When it's released, I would suggest ID3 be used with smaller collections or with the Static Database, so it doesn't have to open every file.  Oh, I should mention that it is currently NOT looking for album art in the tags, and I won't do this unless I get enough requests to do it.

Also, here's a list of other things I will be working on, and want to finish before releasing an update :

- Have an option to turn off the album art in the '4 album' view, and pull the song list over to the left.  This will make it easier for people with lower resolutions to be able to read what is on the album, and still have the album art showing when you bring it up in the full view.

- Add an option that makes the 2nd credit button put in a custom amount of credits, rather than hard coded at 3.

- Put in a '2 key jump', which will mean you bring up the current Scrollable Jump screen, but rather than scrolling to a letter & pressing Enter (or the Jump key, if you have that option set), if you press 'O', it will jump to that letter.

- If I get time, I would love to put in a 'Name That Tune' game that has been talked about on the boards.

- I upgraded the MP3 engine control to fix a couple of small issues, however there are still some rather bad issues in the current version.  Seems it is locking CD / DVD drives whilst my program is open (i.e. while a reference to the control is there), so I am working with them to get that all working / fixed up.

Anyway, hope that gives you a little comfort that I haven't forgotten about the program.

SK.

[allroy1975]

Thanks for the update!

[Bumblebounces]

I have been playing with a piece of code that has been requested several times now, that is utilizing the ID3 tags from within MP3 files.  It's working very nicely now, although the speed is obviously a drop in what I'm used to with getting the info from the filesystem.  When it's released, I would suggest ID3 be used with smaller collections or with the Static Database, so it doesn't have to open every file.

SK-

Will there be an option to turn off the ID3 tag usage altogether?  I am happy with the way it works now and my database is not static (yet - still adding stuff all the time so I would live to leave it dynamic)?

Also, while I am here asking...  Is there a way to disable the full screen album jump once you key in enough numbers to pick the album?  Some of my users find it annoying (it actually scared one girl) plus the art for some of my albums is not that great and making them that large, they just look like %^#$.  If the option is there, I haven't found it.  Appologies if this is a bonehead question.

Thanks a million

Bumble

[SalmonKing]

SK-

Will there be an option to turn off the ID3 tag usage altogether?  I am happy with the way it works now and my database is not static (yet - still adding stuff all the time so I would live to leave it dynamic)?

Also, while I am here asking...  Is there a way to disable the full screen album jump once you key in enough numbers to pick the album?  Some of my users find it annoying (it actually scared one girl) plus the art for some of my albums is not that great and making them that large, they just look like %^#$.  If the option is there, I haven't found it.  Appologies if this is a bonehead question.

Thanks a million

Bumble

Of course it will only be an option, and it will be OFF by default!  I'm not putting all the work I did to 'clean up' my files to waste 

As for the 2nd part, do you have Mouse Support turned on?  If so, there's an option a couple of ticks under that that will only display the full view if the album art is clicked on.  hmmmm...actually, that's not going to work.  The program will still want to display the full album if you type in the album number.  OK, lemme think about it.

SK.

[allroy1975]

Also, while I am here asking...