SKG Jukebox Updated to ver 0.81

[skepticalgeek]

A new update of the SKG Jukebox is available. Version 0.81 contains several bug fixes and enhancements.

Fixed bug in Playlist screen that would crash app when trying to add tracks. (Windows version)
Made adding tracks to Playlist faster and more responsive. (Linux version)
Fixed bug that would crash app if pressing letter button that was greater than any Artis in your library. (All versions)
Added new feature, onscreen volume control. While track is playing, click the lower center part of the screen, where the current track information is displayed.  Check the user manual for more information.

Go to www.skgsoft.net for more information, and to download.

[egosbar]

looking forward to it ill test it out tomorrow

played last night for a couple of hours , had to go back to sk juke for the sessions as skg just wouldnt play a lot of songs  ,  id make a list of ten songs or so and there was at least one that wouldnt play and sometimes three or four , i percervered for a while but it just didnt get any better , not complaining mate as i know how hard your working to get it right im just letting you know , hopefully a new download will fix the probs

[egosbar]

tested the playlist option , took about a minute from when i pushed edit egos playlist to the add to playlist screen , when in there it was no problem took about 3 or 4 seconds to add the songs , good work mate

have you an idea on how to fix the track numbering , the ones that show up as say 01-12 - track title the search feature wont find the song so it is a problem , most of my albums have tracks numbered this way and with 3700 albums i dont want to rename them yet again

sk picks up the same directory and numbers then as they should be numbered , is there a way to have skg only pick up the track titles not the track number , im not too sure on why they are numbered this way as i used media monkey to sort my collection and that was how it done them ,

heres a screenshot of what i mean

as you can see aaliyah is the only album with the correct track numbers and the only album on this page that the search feature will find tracks

[egosbar]

still shuts down occasionally , im going through my albums looking for problems

there are some that in the directory look fine but the juke finds the album name and art but no songs show

pink funhouse album plays fine on sk jukebox , but when i play on skg the songs are all there but no sound on any song

[egosbar]

for some reason when scrolling through the k section with animation  is slow , you press the button and it takes a second or two to respond , ill be looking at the art sizes but 90 percent of my art is 500x500 so i dont think that will be the problem

came across about 15 albums from a large collection , the software picks up the album but not the tracks , sk has no problem picking them up , i cant see any difference in them then any other album i have , they are all mp3

occasionally shuts down but rare now , great work now mate , skg is on the whole time now

is there any way of making the scroll without animation even quicker , about the same speed as skjuke with the fastest speed set , large collections take a long time to get through to the middle of the letter

loving it now i can make playlists , easily the best juke around mate you should be proud of it

[skepticalgeek]

Hey ego, sorry it took so long to get back to you. Life kept getting in the way. Those albums where the track search function doesn't work, I noticed you had single digit track numbers as part of the file name. That is why SKG Juke is renumbering them, and why the track search isn't working. Single digit track numbers aren't a good idea, primarily because they don't sort correctly. When sorting file names alphabetically, 10 comes before 2, 20 comes before 3, etc. With 2 digit track numbers, the tracks sort, so that they appear in the juke in the same order they appear on the album. If you like, since you're my boy, and since I have a 3 day weekend coming up, I can write you a small app that will go through your music directory, and rename the tracks with 2 digit numbers.

I'm a little intrigued by these albums that SKG Juke sees, but doesn't list the tracks. Could you zip one of them up for me, and e-mail it to me, so I can test it. Thanks again for all your help.

Anyone but Ego have any feedback on the jukebox? It looks like about 90-100 folks have downloaded it so far. Any suggestions, comments, words of praise, words of condemnation? I am especially interested in the experience of any Linux users. I have had a couple of reports in the past of the package not installing correctly, but I have tried it on 2 Ubuntu and 1 Fedora machine, and it installed fine. I would like to hear from anyone who could/couldn't get it installed and running on Linux.

[egosbar]

thanks mate , i do need to get the albums numbered correct , i have media monkey but inevitebaly when i do a full retag it stuffs some of them up , especially compilation albums that have different artists in an album ie hits of the eighties

if you could write something that fixes them it would be awesome , if you could just make sure that it does the compilation albums right as media monkey ends up putting each individual track from different artists into their own folder with one song in it

ill zip up an album that doesnt show songs and also the pink album that plays on media player and sk juke but silent on skg

still intrigued about why the k section is very slow scrolling

other then that mate youve done an awesome job and im loving it

still shuts down a few times , one is when i hold down the scroll button , the software might go smooth for thirty or fourty albums ( remember i have arrow momentary buttons to do this mapped to left right) then it freezes , by holding it down it saves me clicking a thousand times to get to a album i want

great job cant say enough how much im loving it

regards

ego

[egosbar]

just doing a session , i have a collection of the best australian songs over 5 cds , so i thought id make a playlist of best aussie songs , went into the add new playlist , takes about a minute before it opens ( not a problem but quicker is better    )   as i was adding entire albums ( five of them ) each with 20-30 songs i had to individualy click on every song , a select all feature would be good here

here a few ideas that i still think need to be added at some time

a random (shuffle) button when you open the track list screen that can be pushed , this is helpfull for say the five australian albums i added in the above statement , as its like 100+ songs it would be good to select the playlist then shuffle the songs as it will always play them in order of songs added

one ive mentioned a lot is the track list is very messy , only song title and it could be smaller is needed here ( compare to skjuke with only song title at a smaller font and you will see ) you can have at least ten upcoming songs here if you only use one line and make song titles that are long go behind the now playing  album picture

this leads me into the track list option screen , the same is only needed here , there is no need for album numbers or even track numbers , track and artist here would be enough and it needs to be widened so you can see the entire song and artist

a bluetooth remote  cmon mate make the playstation 3 remote work with it , now that would be a feature

loving it though , i have my playlists working , just need to get the track numbering worked out so i can use the search feature more

next on the list will be to make a album list of only the best of cd of each artist and classic albums ie pink floyd the wall or bob marley legend

dont seem to have any problems with songs not playing , think you might of nailed that bug

long time to load about a minute or two but i can live with that , but as stated above speed is good

as i said mate absolutely loving it , hope you keep working it , not seeing as much comments here as i would of liked , come on fellas give skeptikal the help he needs and the praise he deserves

how did you go with the renaming of the track numbers application?   i can try to use media monkey again but have trouble as mentioned in the above post with renaming compilation albums the software puts each song from a compilation album in its own folder with artist and i end up with a thousand albums with one song in them

funny thing i loaded one of the albums i said showed no songs and they are there and playing now , i have about ten or so like this but havent tried them all, the thing was the art wont come up now , is there any way a jpg might be causing a problem here

[egosbar]

mmm seven hour session , the old dreaded play song no sound but time clock is moving , happened in a playlist , i should of taken more notice of what song and tried again ., ill look for it but most times when it happened i shut down re started and the song played fine

no one was near the jukebox when it happened so its random if there is such a thing lol

[egosbar]

dont mean to be the only one posting but i do love my music and my jukebox

sorry to tell you skeptical after about a 7 hour session the software really started to play up , it took ages to load , a lot of songs froze , tried to add a playlist took ages , there is nothing wrong with my computer it isnt on the net and i keep it very clean , sk worked no worries and loaded more then 2000 albums in about 3 seconds

when i get time ill zip up some of the songs or albums im having trouble with , cant see anything different about them

[skepticalgeek]

Hey ego. Can't say I ever tried it for 7 hours straight. Mostly because I can't remember when I had a block of free time that long. I'm a little jealous. Anyway, when performance starts to degrade over time like that, it usually means a memory leak. I'll look at the code and see if anything jumps out. In the meantime, is there anything you can tell me about the songs that wouldn't play on an extended session. Were they repeats of songs you had played before, or from albums you had played before? Were they the first or last songs on an album? Did you pick the tracks individually, or load the whole album using the "00" track? Anything that could help me pin it down.

As for other issues, did you know you can randomize a playlist when you load it? There is a check box for it on the Load Playlist screen. Or were you talking about selecting a bunch of tracks manually, then going into the track list screen and having a shuffle option for them?

Usually when the album art isn't displaying it is because it is the wrong file type, for example the file extension is "jpg", but it is really a bitmap file. Try opening the artwork in Paint, explicitly saving it as a JPG, and see if it loads.

I'll get to the applet to re-number the tracks as soon as I can. I just need to go through my collection and change some of the filename, mine are all "correct", since I used EAC to rip all my discs and set the option for 2 digit track numbers.

Some good feedback. I'll look at some of the stuff you mentioned. Thanks.

[egosbar]

a beer music and pool session for me somtimes can be 24 hours lol

7 hours of music while having some beers , cooking a pizza in my outdoor pizza oven and a couple of games of pool is something i do once a week , lets me unwind from a busy week

cant exactly tell you much more info on what was happening when the program started playing up , all i can say is it seemed to get progressively worse , so a memory leak sounds about right , for the first couple of hours it played flawlessly , then a couple of songs wouldnt play ( although the time clock worked but no sound) and then after that it just got worse and every few songs it wouldnt play , the songs that didnt play were in the middle of a playlist and seemed random

yes i did know about the random play a playlist , but what i find especially in a playlist as long as some as mine ( 300 songs in my personal playlist) when it loads id like to  look at the first five or six songs and if im not in the mood for them i just hit a shuffle button and check out the next order until i get a few songs i like to hear
i use this on sk a lot , sometimes i shuffle four or five times until im happy with the start , and also a bunch of songs selected manually would still be a good option to shuffle them up if needed

i dont think the songs were repeats , the album was loaded from memory using the 00 add all but i havent had trouble with that before , i think the trouble occured from a playlist i created ( five albums australias best songs) although it did play about 30 or 40 songs before it started to play up i think ,  as i said i do have a lot of sessions which is why im able to give you informed feedback , next time ill take a note book and write everything down including how long it took to start playing up , what songs etc .
might pay you to select a bunch of albums and just have it playing softly for 5 hours and see if the same thing happens over time

im wondering if the slow scroll through the K section has anything to do with it , maybe i was playing a song from an artist starting with K , actually come to think of it there were a lot of problems occuring when my daughter started playing kesha , ill keep an eye on that one , but there is definitely a problem in the K section somewhere , i dont think its my collection as i have collected it and named it meticulously and 90 percent of album covers ar 500 x 500 . I will check the album art in the K section but i dont think that is where it is coming from

when i finish work ill try some songs from the k section and let you know

the album art not showing have a jpg extension but ill try to save them as jpg from paint and see what happens

[egosbar]

just finished a quick session about an hour , played two albums no problems , played two playlists and had the dreaded song playing no sound after a couple of songs , i think the first played about 5 and the second time about 3

taking forever to load , about 3-4 minutes now used to be about 20 seconds , the edit playlist also takes ages to load , and also the add playlist

also i added a new directory to look in called no copied albums , i use this for my new stuff until i back them up on ext hard drive , i thought that might of been a problem so i deleted it , again that took like 3 or 4 minutes

there is definitely a bug somewhere in the playlist options

not sure on all the benifits of loading the whole collection each time , but i guess one is you pick up any new albums , i guess sk just picks up from memory somehow and it is nearly instant probably about 4 or 5 seconds for 2000 albums, maybe you can write something like that and have the program search for new content once a week and also have a manual add new content

ill continue tomorrow playing only albums and see if i have a problem

[skepticalgeek]

Ego,

Made some modifications based on your suggestions. I think I fixed the memory leak. Loaded a dozen full albums the other day and ran it for 10 straight hours, not a hitch. Also removed track numbers and such from the lower left of the screen, and the track list screen. You were right, it looks cleaner with just the track names. Also added a Shuffle button to the track list screen. Looking at one or two other issues, should be a new update in 1-2 weeks. Still working on the applet to renumber your tracks that have single digit track numbers. Turned out to be trickier than I thought, but I should be able to e-mail it to you this weekend. Just didn't want you to think I forgot. Could you e-mail me one of the albums that is numbered wrong, so I can test? Later.

[egosbar]

sounds great mate knew the track list would look good  i think ive got a pretty good eye for juke software now mate ive trialled nearly all of em   , cant wait for the update , so there was a memory leak , have you tried playing it from a playlist , if not add 5 or 6 albums into a playlist and play for 5 hours straight from there and see how she goes

great work , ill try to email you an album tomorrow , i want to add them back first and see if they work or not , ill keep an eye out for the track number aplication , is it possible to build it into the jukebox software so it does it for all music collections

i hope one of the other issues your trying to fix is the loading time , it was over three minutes to load , im not sure of the benifits of a full load of how skjuke loads but it loads in about 4 seconds , im happy to add albums the same way skjuke does it if it means that much quicker to load

have you found any problem with the scroll in the K section

this will be the best jukebox by far

regards

ego

[Encryptor]

Would it be possible to upload the application for renumbering tracks to the file repository here? I'm sure there would be other people that would be very grateful for such an app.

Encryptor

[skepticalgeek]

I can do that. I'll try to upload it this weekend. Right now, I'm only looking for single digit track numbers, followed by a space and a dash, followed by the track name, like "1 - Hell's Bells". What other patterns should I be looking for?

[egosbar]

mine are tagged     01 space - space track

01 - american pie etc

some are tagged with no track number

[EVEGames]

I can do that. I'll try to upload it this weekend. Right now, I'm only looking for single digit track numbers, followed by a space and a dash, followed by the track name, like "1 - Hell's Bells". What other patterns should I be looking for?

Skeptical - I'm very excited about your project, as I'm a long-time SK Jukebox user myself.  One question though, is that true that you're only looking at single-digit track numbers?  10 or more tracks per album is very common, I'd go for a 0-padded two-digit system, like egosbar shows above.  As for track name, album name, artist name, I'm sure there are a dozen different ways the various CD rippers organize that information, but maybe at least we can agree on the common ground of, first two digits should be track number, followed by a space and a dash...

-EVEGames

[BadMouth]

Hey Ego, for the compilations and soundtracks, here is what I ended up doing....

In media monkey, view by albums in the file tree on the left.
Right click on a soundtrack or compilation, click properties, and change the "album artist" field to the name of the album.
After you've done this for all of them, rebuild your library as <album artist>/<album>/<track>
The compilations will now show up under the album name in the jukebox.

If you want to avoid messing with all the other albums, you can "reorganize based on tags" (or something like that) for each album as you do them and have media monkey save them to a different path, so they're sent to a different folder from the rest of your collection.  I ended up with some stray folders with nothing but album art left in them, but it's easy to spot the folders with no tracks by scrolling through skg juke.

Yeah it's a PITA, but once it's done, it's done.

[egosbar]

i have them all sorted just a lot of albums are picking up two sets of track numbers , the ones media monkey named and what the software program is seeing so im getting albums with the track numbers like


07 - 12 - horse with no name , it doesnt look good and the search feature will not find that track

07 - horse with no name is how it should be obviously

ill wait and see what app skeptikal comes up with , dont really want to muck around with my albums too much as ive done so much work retagging them to artist / artist / track from      artist - album /  track (skg wont find songs tagged like this)

[skepticalgeek]

Eve,

Slight miscommunication here. My program actually expects song files to have a 2 digit number as part of the file name. You see, the software has no way of knowing what the correct track order is for any song, so it has to sort them alphabetically. With 2 digit track numbers, this works out, i.e. "01 - Hell's Bells" shows up before "02 - Shoot to Thrill". I wrote a kludge in the jukebox itself, to deal with tracks that aren't numbered at all, it appends numbers to them when it displays them onscreen, with the caveat that they appear in the wrong order. The problem with my boy Ego, is that he has approximately 10 bajillion albums in his collection, and some of them have single digit track numbers in the file name. These don't sort correctly. When sorting alphabetically, Windows considers 10 to come before 2 so the album Back in Black is displayed this way

1 - Hell's Bells
10 - Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution
2 - Shoot to Thrill

I'm writing a small applet for Ego to go through his collection and correct his file numbering, and I'm trying to find out what patterns I should be looking for. I ripped all my albums using EAC, with that option turned on, and the integrated ripper in SKG Juke numbers the tracks that way too. Anyway, as soon as I've finished the applet, I'll post in this thread, and provide a download link.

[JohnEDollar]

skepticalgeek:



Thanks for writing such an excellent piece of software!     

I've been looking around for a while, for a jukebox software app that would be easy to setup, visually appealing, feature rich, easy to use, and ahem -- free!  I'll be using your Jukebox app for a future project.

I have a few concerns/comments/suggestions to voice from my experience using your software for about two weeks, on about 400 ripped CDs:

----
Configuration options Menu: 

Is it possible to prompt a user to enter a 4 or 5 digit password before entering the configurtion options?  My 5 yr. old son was playing around with the app, and accidently clicked the '000' combination, and launched the configuration menu.  (Not good.) 

A password option would be great, to keep this from happening accidentally, or if the program was in a "party mode" being used by casual users.  (I'd suggest a 4-digit password for "999 or fewer" CDs, 5-digit password for "1000+" Cds in a collection.  In other words, password length = Maximum collection size + 1.  A simple user-defined text string comparison/validation would work.)

Album Artwork: 

Would it be possible to toggle on/off the "auto download" artwork feature, when selecting tracks to add to a playlist?  Confusing to some users who accidentally click on the album artwork window when adding a track to the playlist, and see a pop-up window attempting to download the artwork again.

Also, can the option be added to scan the current directory for album artwork (as another artwork source), when downloading album artwork?  Sometimes the online search doesn't find suitable artwork for a title, and cover artwork is contained in the CD album folder.  Just a thought.

Tracklist Display: 

Ran into a display issue, with waiting tracks in the "Track List" (See Screenshot.jpg below).  For the album "Sade - The Best of Sade", the first two characters of the track name are truncated.  "Is It A Crime", displays as "It A Crime".  Track name displays correctly in all other areas of the software, except the "Track List".

I know this may have been addressed elsewhere in this thread, but this is issue has to do with the track numbering, and formatting of the track name.  SKG Jukebox is looking for one format.  CD Ripper (FreeRIP CD Ripper) created tracks in a different format. 

(Is there a 'universal naming convention" for naming ripped CD tracks?)  Your track renumbering/renaming utility might help me here.

My last suggestion for the "Track List" area is purely cosmetic:  Could the track number displayed in the "Track List' be a different color (cyan, or yellow) from the red track name?  Distinguishing the two visually would be a lot easier to read, (IMHO).

"Now Playing" Display:

Total track time is incorrectly displayed (in brackets []), next to the elapsed time of the track.  Total track length displayed is anywhere from 50 seconds to several minutes greater than the actual length of the playing track.  (Consistent miscalculation displayed against all tracks played.)  Not sure why this is happening. 
----

Once again, skepticalgeek, thanks for writing such a great software app! 

Looking forward to the updates! 


- John

[egosbar]

My last suggestion for the "Track List" area is purely cosmetic:  Could the track number displayed in the "Track List' be a different color (cyan, or yellow) from the red track name?  Distinguishing the two visually would be a lot easier to read, (IMHO).
                        
this has been addressed by skeptikal  i think john , in the next update there are no track numbers in the list only the track names which will look a lot nicer, one suggestion here skeptikal after looking at the screen shot by john ,  i think the track list name should be red and the same font , but the track names underneath should be white to keep it in balance with the now plalying colors , (red for now playing white for album artist name) , i would also suggest to leave the font on the track list actual title but change the font to the same as in the now plalying artist album track title , this is a better font to read i think

a option to change font and color for personal taste similar to sk juke would be even better

maybe even try changing the album numbers to a red font , this might also balance up the screen

i think ive asked this question before but cant remember if you answered or not , is it possible to take the scroll bars off the main screen as they dont do anything , if you try to scroll here you just go to full album view ,obviously here you need scroll bars

[skepticalgeek]

Ego is right. In the next update, both the track list display in the lower left, and the track list screen, will no longer contain track numbers, only names.

The "correct" format for track names is "nn - Name of track" or "nn  Name of Track" where "nn" is the 2 digit track number.

Not sure what is going with the Sade track. See if it is still happening in the next update.

The incorrect track time is a known issue. The Windows version of the library I use to deal with the tracks has a problem with mp3 files recorded at variable bit rates. It returns the wrong value for track running time. Weirdly enough, the Linux version works fine. I'll look at the scroll bars issue, and see if there is any way to do that.
I'll also look into what it would take to password protect the options. Your post actually made me laugh, John. One of the first things they tell you about designing a touchscreen interface, is to do it in such a way so that a 5 year old child pressing buttons at random can't screw things up, and here you go and bring along a 5 year old child who does that. Anyway, thanks for the kind words.

[JohnEDollar]

Hi skepticalgeek:

Glad I could add a little humor to you day.   

Thanks for pointing out the standard "naming convention" most Jukebox software uses, for track names.  (I'll go back and rename my files.)

Looking forward to the next update to your program!

- John

[EVEGames]

Eve,

Slight miscommunication here. My program actually expects song files to have a 2 digit number as part of the file name. You see, the software has no way of knowing what the correct track order is for any song, so it has to sort them alphabetically. With 2 digit track numbers, this works out, i.e. "01 - Hell's Bells" shows up before "02 - Shoot to Thrill". I wrote a kludge in the jukebox itself, to deal with tracks that aren't numbered at all, it appends numbers to them when it displays them onscreen, with the caveat that they appear in the wrong order. The problem with my boy Ego, is that he has approximately 10 bajillion albums in his collection, and some of them have single digit track numbers in the file name. These don't sort correctly. When sorting alphabetically, Windows considers 10 to come before 2 so the album Back in Black is displayed this way

1 - Hell's Bells
10 - Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution
2 - Shoot to Thrill

I'm writing a small applet for Ego to go through his collection and correct his file numbering, and I'm trying to find out what patterns I should be looking for. I ripped all my albums using EAC, with that option turned on, and the integrated ripper in SKG Juke numbers the tracks that way too. Anyway, as soon as I've finished the applet, I'll post in this thread, and provide a download link.

Now I got it.  Thanks for the clarification.  And thanks for writing this software.  Very excited to watch it "bloom". 

[skepticalgeek]

I finished the applet to fix the track numbers. The download link is:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/jn4ce6uf30qccpa/SKG_Track_Fixer.exe

Simply launch the app, click "Choose" to point it to your music directory, then click "Fix". E-mail me with any questions.

[egosbar]

thanks mate ill try it this afternoon

[JohnEDollar]

Thanks, skepticalgeek.

I'll check it out!   

- John

[egosbar]

downloaded the trackfixer from the link

when tried to save and run message came up app failed to start because mingwn10.dll was not found

[skepticalgeek]

Sorry ego. Simple app so I didn't bother to test it on the deployment machine. I'll fix it Saturday and re-post the link.

[skepticalgeek]

Just a quick post to let you know how things are going. The new update should be out in a couple of days. I just have some deployment testing to do for the Linux version, to make sure the installer is working correctly. Ego, I tried the track fixer program on my laptop, and it worked fine. Not sure what your issue is. However I found this link for mingwn10.dll problems.
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/findbyerrormessage/a/mingwm10-dll-not-found-missing-error.htm

[skepticalgeek]

Hey guys. Sorry for the delay in getting the new update out. Had a bug in the Playlist screen that took me forever to track down. Anyway, it is almost done so look for it this weekend. I'll post a new thread on this forum when it's up. Later.

[egosbar]

hey skeptikal

hows the new update coming along , i always wait eagarly for it lol

just tried to download the trackfixer on another laptop , same problem

mingwn10.dll was not found

the link you gave me reccommends not downloading a dll file , so what am i to do here to get this program working ?  any thoughts mate

ego

[skepticalgeek]

Ego, good to hear from you again. Thought you dropped off the face. Anyway, I tried to get the update ready this weekend, but there is a graphical glitch in the Linux version I have been unable to track down. As soon as it's fixed, the update will be posted. Sorry for the delays.

[egosbar]

nah mate love the jukebox , ill be here for the long haul , just setting up a new contract at a mine so very busy , i havent been using skg as it was still too buggy on my juke ie songs not playing , i think it was mainly from the playlists , thats why im waiting for the new update , im looking forward to the day when skg is playing consistently

have you got any ideas on the mingwam file problem

[JohnEDollar]

Hi skepticalgeek:

Any ETA on the new update? 

(Patiently waiting... Thanks.)

- John