DOSCab/WinCab Jukebox 3.0 beta 7 released

[Chris]

DOSCab/WinCab Jukebox 3.0 beta 7 released.

[Dermbrian]

Chris,

I think I've set up the files correctly.  But I seem to have a problem in that when the program goes to display album art, the program bombs out.

If I open so that the first four albums displayed are albums (folders) that do not have album art, then the the default art displays correctly, the song lists display correctly, and I can play songs from those folders.  If I page down and get to a folder that has a jpg file in the song folder, that's when the program shuts down and wants to send an error report to Microsoft (Windows XP).

My artwork is named, for example, "Let It Be Front.jpg" if the album/folder is the Beatle's "Let It Be".  The .jpgs are various sizes, as many are scanned in, photographed, etc, depending on what I had for the albums (LP's) that I ripped.

I hope I'm being clear.   Any quick suggestions?

It looks great in CD mode...hope I can work this out and use it in both modes.


Brian

[Dermbrian]

Chris, I tried a smaller set of folders/albums and came did find that specific album art JPG's are causing WinCAB to abort.  If I move those out of the folders, the CD skins comes up and works fine.  Great, actually.  Very nice work!!!!

Anyway, there apparently can be something about specific JPG files that can cause problems that terminate the program.
One such album cover jpg is

92kb
321 x 285

yet the following sized file works...

77.2kb
305 x 300

But yet I created a test JPG using Microsoft Paint that was >150K, and VERY rectangular, and it worked fine.

Any particular requirements on the JPG's that you're aware of?


Brian

[Chris]

No...  I use JPGs for the background, and they're much larger.  More likely it's some error in the memory allocation for the cover art cache.  Can you set DebugLevel = 5 in jukebox.ini, run it till it crashes and send me the jbdebug.log file?

Thanks!

--Chris

[Chris]

I shouldn't do releases at 3am...

I found a stupid alignment bug on the default skin.. can't imagine why I didn't see this last night.  I've fixed it in the archive; if you've already downloaded it and your artist name is too high on the default skin, get the fix from http://webpages.charter.net/celamantia/jukebox/wincab.zip and unzip the wincab.exe inside it over the version you have.

Sorry about that!

--Chris

[froggerman]

Great job Chris! Is there any way to control the shape of the CD album image? It would be nice to be able to keep the CD image square and allow the rest of the space to be used by the song display.
Sorry. It helps if I set the monitor ratio correctly!   

[Dermbrian]

No...  I use JPGs for the background, and they're much larger.  More likely it's some error in the memory allocation for the cover art cache.  Can you set DebugLevel = 5 in jukebox.ini, run it till it crashes and send me the jbdebug.log file?

Thanks!

--Chris

Done. 

I also sent you one of my jpg album covers that the CD skin apparently doesn't like. 

Thanks,
Brian

[Chris]

Great job Chris! Is there any way to control the shape of the CD album image? It would be nice to be able to keep the CD image square and allow the rest of the space to be used by the song display.
Sorry. It helps if I set the monitor ratio correctly!

[froggerman]

I bought a DELL UltraSharp 2405FPW 24-inch Wide Aspect Flat Panel LCD Monitor. Using single jukebox strips I get 60 (6x10) title strips / 120 songs. The same as some smaller real jukeboxes. The monitor has a 1.6 aspect ratio (1920x1200). Once I set that and changed FixedDimension = Height from Auto everything worked perfectly. CD covers are nice and square now.

This is a really nice option you have added. I have a large number of albums ripped and this provides a very nice way to access them.

[Chris]

Once I set that and changed FixedDimension = Height from Auto everything worked perfectly. CD covers are nice and square now.

Kind of a shame, though; you'll have a letterbox effect on the sides of the screen.  I'll see if I can whip up a widescreen version of that skin for you...

[JLR2000]

Wow, you've done some great work here, always liked DOScab, but now the CD player skin is awesome.  Is there any way to disable numbering of songs? All of my music is sorted by artist, subfolder album with a subfolder of songs, including the song number in the name.  If I use the CD skin now I get "01 01 First Song, 02 02 Second Song....etc.". Just wondering if you can disable numbering.  Thanks, I'm really enjoying playing with the latest beta!

[Chris]

Wow, you've done some great work here, always liked DOScab, but now the CD player skin is awesome.

[Chris]

I shouldn't do releases at 3am...

I found a stupid alignment bug on the default skin.. can't imagine why I didn't see this last night.

[JLR2000]

Wow, you've done some great work here, always liked DOScab, but now the CD player skin is awesome.  Is there any way to disable numbering of songs? All of my music is sorted by artist, subfolder album with a subfolder of songs, including the song number in the name.  If I use the CD skin now I get "01 01 First Song, 02 02 Second Song....etc.". Just wondering if you can disable numbering.  Thanks, I'm really enjoying playing with the latest beta!

No, unfortunately, at this time you can't disable it.  If your songs were titled 01 - First Song, 02 - Second Song, etc., then SmartCrop would remove the numbers, but if the dash-space isn't there, it doesn't do the crop.  Otherwise, songs like 99 Red Balloons would get cropped.

--Chris

Gotcha...Okay that makes sense.  I like your example song, that was popular when I was in high school. The first version wouldn't have a problem displaying since it was "Neun und Neunzig Luft Balloons"......

[Thenasty]

PM'ed you Chris for a bug I found.

[Chris]

Once I set that and changed FixedDimension = Height from Auto everything worked perfectly. CD covers are nice and square now.

Kind of a shame, though; you'll have a letterbox effect on the sides of the screen.

[Chris]

PM'ed you Chris for a bug I found.

This is more serious than I originally thought...

The bug he reported was that selection 000000 crashed the system  Well, that's not a valid selection anyway, so I wasn't too worried about it.  But now I'm discovering that none of the absolute selections work properly now, and I know they did last night. In addition, relative disc numbers no longer show up.  I'm working on it to figure out what's wrong...

[Chris]

PM'ed you Chris for a bug I found.

This is more serious than I originally thought...

The bug he reported was that selection 000000 crashed the system

[froggerman]

Once I set that and changed FixedDimension = Height from Auto everything worked perfectly. CD covers are nice and square now.

Kind of a shame, though; you'll have a letterbox effect on the sides of the screen.  I'll see if I can whip up a widescreen version of that skin for you...

You are correct, there are black bars on each side. But if I leave it in Auto a lot of the top and bottom are missing. But that is fine for the moment. I am sure you have more important things to work on. I may have to look into a touch screen. The CD skin would be very cool with a touch screen interface.

[froggerman]

Once I set that and changed FixedDimension = Height from Auto everything worked perfectly. CD covers are nice and square now.

Kind of a shame, though; you'll have a letterbox effect on the sides of the screen.  I'll see if I can whip up a widescreen version of that skin for you...

Okay, I built a widescreen version of the skin.  You can find it at http://webpages.charter.net/celamantia/jukebox/cd6-1-ws.zip .  UnZip the two files from this ZIP to your skins folder and set your skin to cd6-1-ws.skn.

Wow! You are quick. Thanks Chris.

[froggerman]

I have found something that I didn't expect. I have all of my music in folders by artist. I have the following two folders, Air Supply and Alabama. Air Supply has only one folder Greatest Hits. Alabama has 5 albums, American Pride, Christmas Volume II, Greatest Hits, Greatest Hits II and Greatest Hits - Vol. III. If I allow the database update to continue past the end of Alabama I end up with a Various Artist CD with the songs from Air Supply's Greatest Hits combined with Alabama's Greatest Hits. If I stop the database update after Air Supply and before Alabama's Greatest Hits, I get the Air Supply's Greatest Hits CD correctly displayed, including picture.

I would imagine that this is not the correct behaviour. 

Cheers.

[Chris]

Is that combination CD titled Singles?

[chipsdad]

Chris,

Did you ever put any more thought into adding serial LCD support?  Would these work:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=4661&item=7513462280&rd=1

As always thanks for your efforts.

Bill

[Chris]

Chris,

Did you ever put any more thought into adding serial LCD support?

[Chris]

Wow, you've done some great work here, always liked DOScab, but now the CD player skin is awesome.

[Johnny]

Chris,

I'm dying to test the new version, but where
do I download the beta 7 (not just the fixed .exe)?

- Johnny

[Chris]

Go to http://webpages.charter.net/celamantia/jukebox and click on Download.

--Chris

[Johnny]

Thanx Chris,
I found it. (In the download link it's listed as beta 6)

- Johnny

[Chris]

Thanx Chris,
I found it. (In the download link it's listed as beta 6)

- Johnny

Yet more evidence that 3AM releases are a bad idea. 

[Thenasty]

I have been playing around iwht Wincab/Doscab and I say that I am amazed how the Jukebox program is coming along. Anyway, TIA for all hard work in this Chris.

I do have a couple of questions that had came up during my adventure. I had hundreds of songs/album when I started your program and I have this delimma that i can't figure out.

So I just put this 2 songs for testing and remove everything. This 2 songs are in the same folder (Greatest Hits), both has no album names and yet it displayed into 2 separate albums. I just want those 2 songs to be in on Album (the First one) and i have edited the ID3 tags on them to be similar in all except for the Song Name. The wording "The Big Prize" on the second one, where is it taken that from ? I can't see it on ID3 tag editor. The First One "Greatest hits" I assume it took that from the Folder name.
Also take a look the blank ones, it uses the FIRST ARTIST name, this happened also when I had all my songs/album in there. It uses the First one on the list, is there anyway to just make it BLANK with no Artist/Song/Band name ?

here is my folder/dir tree

e:\Jukebox
e:\jukebox\artist
e:\jukebox\artist\honeymoon suite
e:\jukebox\artist\honeymoon suite\Greatest Hits
e:\jukebox\artist\honeymoon suite\Greatest Hits\  (2 songs, Art.Jpg)
                                                                     

[Chris]

The wording "The Big Prize" on the second one, where is it taken that from ? I can't see it on ID3 tag editor. The First One "Greatest hits" I assume it took that from the Folder name.

Yes, Greatest Hits came from the folder name.  Is it possible that the other song has an ID3 v1 tag?  Perhaps your tag editor is only looking at v2 tags?  Or maybe the other way around?

Also take a look the blank ones, it uses the FIRST ARTIST name, this happened also when I had all my songs/album in there. It uses the First one on the list, is there anyway to just make it BLANK with no Artist/Song/Band name ?

Yeah, this is a bug, I'll have that fixed on the next update...

--Chris

[Thenasty]

I use Tag&Rename 3.1.7 and another program too. Even the Winamp I tried. I also STRIP all the TAGS and still comes up like on my snapshot.

I can send this 2 songs to you and you try it, cuase its driving me nuts.

I just tried this, I rename my Greatest Hits to "The Big Prize" cause thats whats showing on #2, and Now both of the songs are in the #1 with "The Big Prize", now I gonna changed it back to "Greatest Hits" and see what happens.


Ok, I rename it back to "Greatest Hits" and remove the files under DATA and sure enough, its back on 2 Albums. I rename the "Greatest Hits" to "CRAP" and it shows 2 albums, but if I rename the "Greatest Hits or CRAP" to "The Big Prize" and it works the way it should. It looks like, it only wants the Folder name to be "The Big Prize" WTH

[Thenasty]

Now I looked at the jukebox.db

{648257HONE}{Bad Attitude}{Honeymoon Suite}{The Big Prize}{1}{0}{331}{0}{}{0}{1}
{084274HONE}{What Does It Take}{Honeymoon Suite}{Greatest}{0}{0}{254}{0}{}{0}{0}

and I change the "The Big Prize" manually to "Greatest Hits" it works the way it should, but I I delete the DB and start from scratch, it puts back everything like above again. Where in the heck is "The Big Prize" coming from ?

[Thenasty]

Now that I change it manually to "Greatest Hits" it works the way it should, both songs now are under "Greatest Hits".
Now if I change the folder to let say "The Singles"  it still shows "The Greatest Hits" even tho UpdateIndex = True.
Now that the Folder name is "The Singles" and it showing :Greatest Hits" and if I delete the jukebox.db, "The Big Prize" is back. 

[Thenasty]

I can just settle with editing the DB manually but, like I mentioned before, I have lots of songs and seen this problems. Sometimes, I even see the SONG 3 times on the same Album..for example:

000190 Macarena MiX
             Los Del Rio
01" Marcarena"
02 "Marcarena"
03 "Marcarena"


there is only one SONG in that folder 

[Chris]

Go ahead and E-mail me the song that keeps showing The Big Prize.  I don't need both of them.

When you changed the folder name, the album name didn't change to "The Singles" because the dates on the songs didn't change, so it decided they didn't need to be updated.

As far as the triple Macarena: Do you have more than one SongPath set?  If so, do the multiple SongPaths include the same folders?  Is your SongPath a subfolder of the jukebox folder?  Any of these could cause multiple entries.  If you set DebugLevel to 5, delete the database, run the program, and send me your jukebox.ini and jbdebug.log, I could tell you for sure.

Thank you so much for your help!

--Chris

[Thenasty]

I only got one
SongPath1 = \Jukebox\artist



right now, I am only concentrating with this 2 songs...When I put back all the songs, back in and look how it looks again, I'll set the debug=5 and send you the files.


Bad Attitude sent...

[Chris]

I only got one
SongPath1 = \Jukebox\artist

Change it to

SongPath= \Jukebox\artist

That will override the built-in SongPath for the jukebox directory.

[Chris]

Bad Attitude sent...

There are at least two sets of tags in that file... oneg at the beginning and one at the end.  The one at the beginning looks like an ID3 v2 tag with a Title and Artist but no Album.  I haven't identified the end tag yet but it has The Big Prize in its text.  Still looking...

--Chris

[Chris]

Bad Attitude sent...

There are at least two sets of tags in that file... oneg at the beginning and one at the end.

[Thenasty]

how's those Tags get in there ? Why TAg&rename, Winamp, or a regular ID3 tag program see it ? Did the ripper use a special proggie that no one has and "The Big Prize" somehow got embeded within the MP3 ? This is just one song out of my list, there are others, one that came to mind right now is " Jump jive an Wail" Brian Setzer, this paritcular one did not want to show the AlbumArt.jpg no matter what I call it. It gives me the default (defcdart.jpg) one but not in blue, but a white color, looking at the folder SKINS, I don't see a WHITE ONE  I only see the blue one (defcdart.jpg).

Is this a puzzle to you ? Has any of this ever surfaced before Thenasty got to Jukeboxing 

[PileDriver]

Hi Chris,
Great job on the CD skin.(and the Jukebox!)
Is there an option for not alowing duplicate songs in the que?
I looked in the Jukebox.ini and couldn't find one.
I don't want someone to pick a song thats allready waiting to be played.
Thanks

[Thenasty]

in the Real Jukeboxes, it still accepts it even if the song is already next for playing. Wincab/Doscab proggie acts like the real thing.

[Chris]

in the Real Jukeboxes, it still accepts it even if the song is already next for playing. Wincab/Doscab proggie acts like the real thing.

Most real jukeboxes will actually silently accept the entry without duplicating the song in the queue, happily taking your money; this works because they don't show what's in the queue.  Kind of the "dirty little secret" of jukeboxes.  WinCab really should behave in the same fashion: not erroring out, just accepting the entry and silently dropping it.

[Thenasty]

Most real jukeboxes will actually silently accept the entry without duplicating the song in the queue, happily taking your money; this works because they don't show what's in the queue.

[DarkKobold]

Chris- 
   Just curious - Do you know how much memory the system requires when indexing a large number of music files? To minimize the affect of damage to the flash card, I am only using a 20 MB swap file, w/ 64 MB of onboard ram.

Oh, and the large music directory will come from a network-mounted hard drive.

[froggerman]

in the Real Jukeboxes, it still accepts it even if the song is already next for playing. Wincab/Doscab proggie acts like the real thing.

Most real jukeboxes will actually silently accept the entry without duplicating the song in the queue, happily taking your money; this works because they don't show what's in the queue.  Kind of the "dirty little secret" of jukeboxes.  WinCab really should behave in the same fashion: not erroring out, just accepting the entry and silently dropping it.

This is from their mechanical roots. They used a mechanical toggle to select each song. It was reset when the song was played. Multiple attempts so select a song just ate your money as Chris mentioned.

[Chris]

Chris-

[Thenasty]

could I use HIEW to remove "The Big Prize" text ?

[DrewKaree]

Any way to use specific fonts?  I'd like to use something different and I believe if I'm reading correctly, this isn't possible.

The text is kinda small, but I can deal with that....I'm not liking the split of a CD past a certain number of songs - for instance, I've got a Dean Martin disc that splits out to THREE separate discs.  Is there a workaround for that, or something that may be addressed in the future?

[Chris]

Any way to use specific fonts?

[Chris]

could I use HIEW to remove "The Big Prize" text ?

Well, if you replace "The Big Prize" with spaces, it should then use the folder name.  But this is pretty drastic.  Let me rewrite the ID3 reader; that'll solve the problem for everyone....

--Chris

[JackTucky]

Hey Chris:

I downloaded today and tried to run wincab to check out the skins AND get a list of my missing cover art.  It was taking a LONG time, but that's understandable since I'm using Debug.

However, I kept getting errors, "Cannot create Mp3', and it listed a file name right after that.

Any reason why?

ALL of my tracks are supposed to be track# - name.mp3, the ones it errored on did match my naming convention.

I also use directory g:\music\artist\album\songs.mp3
Thanks.

[Chris]

"Cannot create MP3" is an internal memory allocation error.  I've never seen it occur in the wild before.  Can you set DebugLevel=5 in jukebox.ini, run it, and send me the jbdebug.log file?  Are you running this on a machine with less than 16 MB of RAM?

Thanks!

--Chris

[JackTucky]

It's my notebook test machine, it's got 512 meg of ram.  I'll set it and rerun.  Thanks.

It's a pentium something.  Toshiba Sateliite Pro. 

Art

[JackTucky]

Is there a way to make it run in a window?  I would use it for testing, so I can do other stuff.

Thanks.

Art

[Chris]

Is there a way to make it run in a window?

[Dermbrian]

Chris, I'm likely to re-save my .jpg's to make them acceptable to your CD skin.  What's another 50+ CD's to burn to save them all again?   (archive copy/working copy of my entire library of ripped lp's) 

Question, though.  In random play mode, do you know if the weighting is on the individual song, or album, or directory?

For example, if you have a Greatest Hits compilation with 100 songs in that "CD", do those songs have the same rough odds of being played as song from a typical 10 song album?   I'm trying to decide if I should break such folders into individual groupings.  I'd rather not, especially since WinCAB's CD skin does such a great job of presenting them in smaller bites with the same art.  That's inspired, IMHO.


Brian

[Chris]

Chris, I'm likely to re-save my .jpg's to make them acceptable to your CD skin.

[Chris]

Hi Chris,
Great job on the CD skin.(and the Jukebox!)
Is there an option for not alowing duplicate songs in the que?
I looked in the Jukebox.ini and couldn't find one.
I don't want someone to pick a song thats allready waiting to be played.
Thanks

I've added this feature as an option; it'll be available in the next release.

--Chris

[Dermbrian]

Chris, I installed version 7 wincab on my WindowsME machine.  The mouse wouldn't move.  I searched old messages where you pointed me to a place to download alleg41.dll the last time I ran into that.  That fixed it again.  You may want to take a look at that.

Brian

[Chris]

That's related to the touchscreen issues.  Until I solve those, what I need to do is include the other DLL in the download and document the problem...

Thanks!

--Chris

[Alcohol]

Very nice job on the cd skin, ive been waiting for this to get added for ages
Ive been testing it out and its seems to be working very well, and looks just the job.

At the moment iam using it on a pc with wireless connection to my main pc that has my songs on and it works great, only real glitch ive found is that when you page over the albums when you first turn it on it jerks a bit and make the music freeze, but once youve scrolled through all the albums once it dosent do it.. iam guessing that when the album art is loaded is when it stutters..

Thanks Alc...

[Chris]

Very nice job on the cd skin, ive been waiting for this to get added for ages
Ive been testing it out and its seems to be working very well, and looks just the job.

At the moment iam using it on a pc with wireless connection to my main pc that has my songs on and it works great, only real glitch ive found is that when you page over the albums when you first turn it on it jerks a bit and make the music freeze, but once youve scrolled through all the albums once it dosent do it.. iam guessing that when the album art is loaded is when it stutters..

I'm not suprised that the album art stutters a bit on wireless.  If you have plenty of memory you may want to increase the size of the album art cache in jukebox.ini.  The setting is ArtCacheMB, and it defaults to 4 MB.  I'll look into loading the art asynchronously to avoid these sorts of problems...

--Chris

[GadgetGeek]

How tough would it be to allow (in CD Skin mode) for full album selection (in unlimited credits mode).  For example, if the album number was 0123 and I wanted to play the whole thing I would punch in 012300.  Then DOSCab would automatically queue up 012301, 012302, ... 012314  I realize this is more of a media player than jukebox thing, but if the 00 doesn't display and it can only be selected by numeric entry, it is more of a home alone feature than a party/gameroom feature.
Just a thought.  So far, so good running on my old K6-200 under DOS.

[Chris]

How tough would it be to allow (in CD Skin mode) for full album selection (in unlimited credits mode).

[Chris]

How tough would it be to allow (in CD Skin mode) for full album selection (in unlimited credits mode).

[GadgetGeek]

sweet.  I look forward to the next version then.  Thanks

[JackTucky]

It's my notebook test machine, it's got 512 meg of ram.  I'll set it and rerun.  Thanks.

It's a pentium something.  Toshiba Sateliite Pro. 

Art

Hi Chris:

I'm trying your software again and getting this error on a Dell with plenty of memory, processor, etc.

Attached is the jbdebug file.

Thanks

-J

[Chris]

I see it died on "Don't Pull Your Love".  Can you rename this file to something other than .mp3 so we can see if it's the file itself?  I notice the error happens immediately after a buffer relocation, so that may be a clue too.

Thanks!

--Chris

[JackTucky]

That was quick!  It actually died before that, but after I renamed pull your love, it skipped that song

-J

[Chris]

That was quick!  It actually died before that, but after I renamed pull your love, it skipped that song

-J

Hm.  Nothing consistent between the two logs.  I'll take a look at it.

[JackTucky]

Any news Chris?

-J

[Chris]

Not yet.  Based on some of the other reports I'm getting, I think I might have a memory leak... those are a real pain to track down.

[JackTucky]

Not yet.  Based on some of the other reports I'm getting, I think I might have a memory leak... those are a real pain to track down.

Yep.  Let me know if I can offer any more info.  Thanks!