Radio Playlists sure would be nice

[pmlabrier]

I am resurrecting a neglected MAME cabinet project to create a Family Media Center.  While not a dedicated MAME cabinet, it will have MAME controls. WinCab looks like it is the best option for a media player for, but I have one suggestion that I would like you to consider.

Most of the time the jukebox emulation will be what is used, but I think a "PlayList Radio" feature would be an excellant addition.  That way you taylor the random play radio to fit the needs of the moment.  If my wife was in the basement doing laundry she could choose her favorite playlist and have songs randomly selected from it.  This way she would not have one of my son's punk rock songs pop into the cue.  Or say it is the holiday season, a playlist for Christmas songs might be nice but you would not want them randomly popping up in August.

I can understand your not wanting to create a full blown media player, but imho I think that this could be a really benefitial feature.


Paul

[Chris]

This is not something that will come really soon; however, for the next major overhaul, there is a planned feature for filters.  You'll be able to create a named filter set that can include, say, songs from a specific genre, or decade, or with certain titles or artists.  In addition, you'll be able to specify a filter to use for random song selection (this is specifically to solve the Christmas issue you mentioned; the "regular" filter could be set to exclude anything with a genre of Christmas, and the Christmas filter would be the opposite).

This isn't completely what you're asking for, of course: the filters would need to be pre-created in INI files like skins are so they can be selected by name using the limited jukebox control panel.  I was not planning for a way to select the filter for random modes on the fly, but that shouldn't be difficult.  What I was not planning to do was to have playlist-management features within the jukebox interface itself; it would be a huge amount of work to make something like that work properly with all the possibilities for input, all for a feature that wouldn't even exist on a jukebox.  I could see perhaps a simple "save the current queue as a filter" unction, but then you have simple issues of navigating the file system and typing a name for the filter without guaranteeing that a mouse or a full keyboard are even available.

Another item I'm looking at is libraries.  Right now you can specify multiple song paths to load, but they all go into the same database.  "Libraries" would simply mean that different song paths could go into different databases that could be selectable... not that different from filters but far easier to set up.  This would be a really easy feature to implement if all the libraries were stand-alone (and indeed some people simulate this now with batch files that swap databases around), but of course there will be times when you want all libraries loaded, or all libraries but Christmas, etc.

All of these features, however, depend on a database overhaul; the database format was designed for the original 1.0 idea of a classic singles jukebox and nothing else, and it's just not flexible enough to do a lot of these things, so I need to replace it.

So some of what you want may come, but none of it really soon.

[pmlabrier]

I think Libraries would work the simplest.  You could then easily seperate out groups you might want excluded, like Christmas or even create subsets of a main library by creating a  directory structure like /MainMusic and then splitting it out in subdirectorys such as /MainMusic/Moms and MainMusic/Dads.  Then you could have a library for MainMusic which would include ALL the subdirectorys under it and one for MainMusic/Mom which would let her load a library of just her music. 

Then you just need a key that brings up a simple menu to let you choose which library to load with the joystick and fire button. 

Paul

[Chris]

Then you just need a key that brings up a simple menu to let you choose which library to load with the joystick and fire button. 

Except you can't always guarantee that there will be a joystick and fire button mapped.  There will be on a MAME cabinet but not a dedicated box.

I think the way I'm going to do it is to hijack the code that drives CD-based titlestrips, so it will assign addresses as if they were songs... thus, if you were using an ABCD1234 address scheme, your library menu might have:

A1 - All Songs
A2 - Mom's Songs
A3 - Dad's Songs
A4 - Christmas Songs
B1 - Those country songs we only keep around for Larry
B2 - Cancel

Then you can use the regular selection keys to select a song or use the joystick, mouse or touchscreen.

[pmlabrier]

That would work well too.  I hope this gets added soon.  No pressure though