DOSCab/WinCab News

[Chris]

After a very long hiatus, I am back to getting a least a little work done on the jukebox every day.  I'm hoping to have a release this week, which is a miracle since it has almost been a full year since the last release.

There aren't going to be a lot of exciting new features in this one.  Because of the way the jukebox from what was originally a quick and dirty hack, the code is a huge tangled mess, and I've spent a lot of time recently just untangling things so I can add new features.

The biggest change in the upcoming version is a huge fix to the way Unicode is handled in ID3 tags.  This problem has caused a lot of weird, inconsistent-looking issues: tags not appearing, albums not sorting properly, songs being scattered about, world hunger, that sort of thing.  I know a lot of people have been champing at the bit for this fix alone, so if you just can't wait you can pull my test executable at http://webpages.charter.net/celamantia/jukebox/wincab.zip , although I can't guarantee its stability.

Another change which will be big to some people is a little more control over the way text appears on titlestrips/titlecards.  This was one of those areas where any decent programmer would take a glance and say "What the #$@%!&*! was he thinking?"  This was a result of the original assumptions that were made that the jukebox would always be in classic mode and the hacks it took to extend that functionality to CD titlecards.  In pulling it apart and rebuilding it, I can now add attribute to turn on and off song addresses, disc addresses, swap the order of album and artist on the CD header, set fonts and colors individually, change font alignments, etc.  Some of these options will be settable on a per-StripGrid or even per-Strip basis, so you could, for example, always have the song numbers toward the outside edges of the screen, or turn them off entirely for touchscreens.  This is the part I'm working on right now.

I intend to fix the sorting bug that currently causes split CD's to show out of order, and peek to see if I can fix the problems reading high-order characters in filenames.

Finally, I'm thinking of adding an "orphan control" option.  Right now, if you have 15 songs on a disc and the skin set to show 14 tracks per disc, you'll end up with a split disc with a single song on it.  With orphan control enabled the disc would instead split to eight tracks on one disc and seven on the other.

So not a big update, mostly bug fixes, but hopefully will set the stage for bigger things to come.

--Chris

[rumackay]

...So not a big update...

...But a good one! Most of the niggly little issues I have had with your amazing-as-it-is jukebox it seems you are fixing. Particularly can't wait for the cd splitting and orphan fix. Great to hear Chris! 

[Ralfx]

The biggest change in the upcoming version is a huge fix to the way Unicode is handled in ID3 tags.  This problem has caused a lot of weird, inconsistent-looking issues: tags not appearing, albums not sorting properly, songs being scattered about, world hunger, that sort of thing.  I know a lot of people have been champing at the bit for this fix alone, so if you just can't wait you can pull my test executable at http://webpages.charter.net/celamantia/jukebox/wincab.zip , although I can't guarantee its stability.

--Chris

Thank you very much

I tested it with my mp3 files and it worked very well (german WinXP). Also language specific Umlauts (such as

[Chris]

Great news!  Thank you for checking this out!

I apologize to everyone for the delays getting a new version out. Yeah, I know that sounds familiar, but in order to fix some of the outstanding issues I had to rip out a lot of the underpinnings of the GUI and rebuild them.  I got a lot of good work done over this past weekend, though, and I'm moving forward at a decent pace.  Thank you for your patience!

[trilljester]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for such a great product. I believe I've tried every jukebox software out there, and yours is the one I find has the most amount of features and works best with my MAME cabinet.

My request:
Are there any plans down the road to include more appealing visualizations instead of the screensaver mode that is included now? Possibly integrating something like Milkdrop or maybe a slide show of album art or a user-defined pictures folder?

Edit:
Also, will there be any crossfading/silence removal options in the near future?

[Chris]

Are there any plans down the road to include more appealing visualizations instead of the screensaver mode that is included now? Possibly integrating something like Milkdrop or maybe a slide show of album art or a user-defined pictures folder?

With the library I'm using now I don't have ready access to the sound data to get visualizations that are related to the music.  A slide show is something that's been planned, just haven't gotten to it yet.  I don't know what Milkdrop is, I'll have to look it up.

Also, will there be any crossfading/silence removal options in the near future?

Not likely.  A) These wouldn't be found in the mechanical jukeboxes I'm emulating and (more importantly) B) I don't know how to do it.  (If I ever solve B, A won't really be an issue...)

Thank you for the good words!

--Chris

[The Deacon]

Hey Chris!

How's the new version coming along?  As you know, my problem has been fixed, so I'm just more curious than anything... 

Hope things are going well for you!

-Rick

[Chris]

How's the new version coming along?  As you know, my problem has been fixed, so I'm just more curious than anything... 

I'm still working on it.  I think I'm going to have to back out some of the half-finished features and just release what I have, or at least make that alpha executable that I posted "official" since no one's reported any new problems with it.

--Chris

[Lave Laar]

[I'm still working on it.  I think I'm going to have to back out some of the half-finished features and just release what I have, or at least make that alpha executable that I posted "official" since no one's reported any new problems with it.

Well, as Ralfx mentioned,  there is still the problem with filenames that contains non-english letters.  The tag-info from these files are not read at all.  So you end up with "Various Artists" as the artist and the last word after the "-" in the filename as the song name. 
I also would like to be able to make the titlestrips scroll vertically in addition to horizontally.

Other than that, great work as always.  I'm really impressed with what you have done so far. 

[Chris]

Well, as Ralfx mentioned,  there is still the problem with filenames that contains non-english letters.  The tag-info from these files are not read at all.  So you end up with "Various Artists" as the artist and the last word after the "-" in the filename as the song name. 

I think I've found the source of this problem, actually; I'm working on it now.

--Chris

[pascal]

Great News. Thank you x1000. Let me know if you have a version that you want me to test on a French WindowsXP machine.

Regards
Pascal

[Chris]

I'm going to make this the last problem I fix for b9 and put all the improvements into the next release, which may be 4.0 beta 1.  (I should probably recognize that I'll never have a "final release" and drop the beta numbering, huh?)

--Chris

[dibb1er]

i think we would all understand if you dropped the "beta" part of the versioning (erm... versioning, is that a even real word?)

hhmm.. maybe stick a line in the readme file or somewhere that mentions "work in progress" or the like ??

[RacerX]

I need to download the latest version and check it out.

It's been on these boards since December of last year, but I wanted to say keep it up Chris!  You do great work.

And don't feel bad about having a long time between releases.  The jukeboxes that I started to build two years ago are still sitting in the garage all drawn out ready to be cut.  I just haven't had the time.

 

[FlatCat]

Just tried your new 'beta' version and whilst it seems to work fine, it doesn't need to enter coins to work.
It seems to be set  for unlimited plays.

Keep up the great work, I've been using this for ages and put several other onto it.

[Chris]

Just tried your new 'beta' version and whilst it seems to work fine, it doesn't need to enter coins to work.
It seems to be set  for unlimited plays.

Keep up the great work, I've been using this for ages and put several other onto it.

Is the "RequireCredits" setting broken now?  I hadn't noticed...

[Lave Laar]

It's working for me.

[Chris]

FlatCat,

Look in JUKEBOX.INI in the Settings section for the RequireCredits setting and make sure it's set to True.  The default is False, so if the setting is missing, misspelled, or commented out, it will not require credits.

--Chris