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Spoon
09-19-2003, 04:59 PM
I did a little bit of thinking on the plane back from Prague, these were my thoughts:

dMC - Release 10 has been a very long time in beta (over a year), time has come to release it. Mp3 files are getting APE2 tagging abilities, final bug fixes are being done. AccurateRip is now seperate from dMC, so dMC can be released and AccurateRip can plod along at its pace.

dAP - A new default skin is half way to completion, it looks very good (at least I think so). Anyhow back to my plane thoughts, most of them went on dAPs My Music Collection - taking ideas posted and my own I think a new MMC will have tabs at the top:

[Tracks] [Artists] [Albums] [Genre]

Tracks is as MMC is now, Artists has a list of Artists down the left side, select an artist and the listing to the right only shows that artists tracks. Albums, will have a listing again on the left (with the option of displaying ALBUM art), selecting an album will show the tracks in it. Genre: list of Genres down the left, select a genre and it will show tracks with that genre.

At the bottom of MMC right now is the que list - this will change into a massive playlist - it will display 100 items constantly updating (last 50 and next 50 - even in random mode - what is to play), it will be easy to remove and move tracks around.

dAP will get a new Sequencial playback mode, to play tracks in order, or albums in order. The Randomizer will get a random album mode, where an album is randomly selected to be played in its entirity.

General usablity upgrades - ie dragging stuff around, making things generally simpler.

Finally 'Selective Play' will have more selection criteria built in, as well as easy wizards that will create selectives based on such things as 'Newest 50, most popular 40, etc'.


Sveta - will be geared to be more friendly with large music players (it will have the same features as MMC from dAP - ie artist album tabs) as well as dAPs very quick search text box for just finding stuff quickly.


Finally I plan to kick all the nice stuff trough beta tests asap (ie dAPs synchronize), and drawup instructions on how well dBpowerAMP can integrate together - ie Rip from Audio CD Input straight into dAP and Sync with a portable player - that is the holy grail :)

Razgo
09-20-2003, 09:05 AM
that's good news. can't wait to see the holly grail :thumbup:

Wayne
09-20-2003, 09:10 AM
I can hardly wait. As my namesake would say, "Spoon, we are not worthy".

Wayne

OldCoder
09-20-2003, 09:30 AM
Spoon,

Please consider these additional ideas for your master plan for MMC.

Adding another tab - playlists. This would look like albums, with the playlist name in an explorer window on the left, and its contents in a main window on the right.

Also, an option to put the queued selections on a tab. While this isn't as good in normal PC only mode, for people using your remote control capability and their PC next to the stereo, it might allow using a 640x480 large font screen to be seen across a room.

Of course, it would be great to have total MMC control from the remote.

I'd love to replace my stereo's CD, cassette and turntable with dbPoweramp, and relegate those devices to dbPowerAmp input sources. Then "MMC" really becomes "My Music Collection", and all CDs go to a closet somewhere.

Finally, add a clear "Help" tab. This would provide topics on the left, and content on the right. Your ideas on integrating the modules would be a great "Spoon's Tips" entry, and eventually, a complete help facility could be built (possibly using the user submissions discussed other places on the bulletin board). You could also "harvest" the bulletin board for FAQs, etc.
And include your dbPoweramp and AccurateRip websites if you want "commercial" content.

If this seems like too many tabs, you can always have an "options" screen where users toggle which ones they want to see, and which should be omitted.

donny
09-20-2003, 12:41 PM
Well this should about cover everything that people were asking for... Can't wait...

dbample
09-21-2003, 03:54 PM
My Music Collection - taking ideas posted and my own I think a new MMC will have tabs at the top:

[Tracks] [Artists] [Albums] [Genre]

Tracks is as MMC is now, Artists has a list of Artists down the left side, select an artist and the listing to the right only shows that artists tracks. Albums, will have a listing again on the left (with the option of displaying ALBUM art), selecting an album will show the tracks in it. Genre: list of Genres down the left, select a genre and it will show tracks with that genre.

Spoon, all sounds great!!!

Just to clarify - with these new tabs (if you call them modes, or regimes), one would still be able to click on columns and sort stuff by the column clicked on, right, the way it is now? No matter which mode (i.e. tab "regime") one is in?

Thanks!

KZ

Spoon
09-22-2003, 05:31 PM
Yes, for example on the Artist tab, all the columns would be present except artist (it would in a fixed list to the left), selecting an artist would only show the tracks for that artist.

Paddy
09-25-2003, 11:41 AM
Wow that all sounds so good :D I can't wait, the best MP3 player is about to get even better :thumbup:

Paddy

Unregistered
09-26-2003, 10:04 AM
All sounds great Spoon, a lot of it is stuff I'd thought would be nice too so well done on reading my mind!!! :)

Ailean.

MasterOfPuppets
10-05-2003, 03:37 PM
This might belong in the wishlist, but it seems appropriate here.

One part of MMC that seems to show much promise is the User Highlight State. As of now it's nice for visually organizing MMC, but doesn't have much of a real function. Donny once mentioned in a thread (http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?t=2241) about the idea of linking the User Highlight State with Selective Play, and I think that it would also be really great with Arrange Music. Right now, Arrange Music arranges all of the songs in MMC to a single filename arrangement. I think it would be great to be able to 'Arrange User Highlight State X', which can give users more functionality on how they want their songs arranged. Although I'm not sure how easily it would be to implement this, another idea would be to have an 'Arrange Selected' option.

Good luck on your master plan, Spoon, we're all waiting to see how it goes.

donny
10-12-2003, 04:36 PM
Speaking about the new mmc...
(this could also be a wishlist post)
could there be an option to directly edit the data such as the artist,track and such by pressing F2 or something. Something similar to what WMA has in it's library - it would be simpler to edit tags this way instead of right-click->edit tag->clikc_where_you_want->type corrections... as far as I know these edits are only in the mmc data until you do a "rewrite id tag"... so this would be something like direct acces to mmc data...

also I would like to remind you about the keyboard shourtcuts we already mentioned....

MasterOfPuppets
10-13-2003, 10:20 AM
as far as I know these edits are only in the mmc data until you do a "rewrite id tag"... so this would be something like direct acces to mmc data...

I thought that was true for a long time, but it's not. If I'm interpreting that sentence right, then try this:

Go into MMC, change the tag of a track (no rewrite id tag), and then go into Explorer and use 'Edit Tag' to see that the tag has actually changed (unless you don't have write permissions to the track or it is read-only). As a reverse test, go into Explorer to change the tag, and then use 'Refresh from ID Tag' in MMC and see how the tag changes to what it was.

Using my limited knowledge, the most useful time that you use 'Rewrite ID Tag' is when you add a track to MMC that has no ID tag, then MMC automatically displays the Artist and Track in their respective columns (assuming the filename is the [Artist] - [Track] format), then you have to use 'Rewrite ID Tag' to add it to the tag.

If any of this is wrong someone feel free to correct, I'm kind of interested in this aspect of MMC.

willmeyer
10-18-2003, 08:04 AM
Thanks for sharing design ideas, any ideas when we might be looking at some new software?<br><br>Anything that would enhance navigation of the track set as you describe would be a huge plus for me -- being able to drill down by any of the categories of data that are available for each track. I actually used to like MusicMatch's simple tree view for this kind of thing, though I hate it for everything else.<br><br>As always, thanks for a great tool. If you're interested, I put a description of my FLAC and DBPowerAmp-based 2-channel system on Audiogon's Virtual Systems pages.

donny
10-18-2003, 12:45 PM
after some experimenting I've found that you are right, anyway most of the time... there are a few situations that are not covered, for example I had a few Enigma songs, and I they had no tag, and then when i added them the artist (for all at the same time) dAP has just written the artist part of the tag, not the song titles he has finded out righly....
I know these stuff because my mmc got deleted so i lost quite a few song titles that were only in the MMC, so now I have to manualy get them, one by one, and it takes time....

Spoon
10-18-2003, 01:22 PM
It depends upon the Audio Type, all tags are written, but for an Ogg file, or FLAC file, if the file is playing when being edited in MMC then the tag cannot be updated. I need to add some sort of delayed tag writing.

Razgo
10-19-2003, 02:28 AM
It depends upon the Audio Type, all tags are written, but for an Ogg file, or FLAC file, if the file is playing when being edited in MMC then the tag cannot be updated. I need to add some sort of delayed tag writing.

it seems that's a small nit pic? i must be from the old school of thought?

1. before each album rip it is best to defrag for optimal ripping.
2. when ripping, no other programe should be running, as it can decrease the potential performance of an accurate rip in the first place.
3. when tag editing, that's all you should be doing, is editing the tag. why play and edit and rip and convert all at the same time.??

have we all lost the plot? to me it's only common sense when using audio apps one must be carefull when editing and ripping and taging.

i know Spoon is trying to cater for dbpoweramp to be able to perform all these functions when doing other tasks at the same time, but i think one only has to use a little more common sense in understanding audio needs to be treated carefully for it to all work properly.

it's just there is know way i would ever have wanted to edit a tag whilst playing the track? are we living in such a fast lane we want everythiung to happen and happen now? :p :p

RossRoy
10-19-2003, 10:38 AM
Well I personnally like to edit my tags right in MMC, but I also like to listen to music because let's admit it, editing tags is time consuming and without music, it's quite boring! So what I usually do I edit the music genre to "tagging" and start selective play! No problem with the track being edited being chosen for playback and I can still listen to music! :D

Unregistered
10-19-2003, 05:58 PM
Spoon, you must be a god among men to be so diligent, hard working, and proactive. You have added pretty much all of my wishlist stuff to your master plan, so now I must sit back and wait with baited breath as you work your unique magic.

The only thing I wanted that you didn't mention is the Md5 checksum stuff. (As I said before, I use Md5 Summer for this now)

Anyhow, glad to hear that you have been enjoying your vacations. Prague is a really cool town... Mysterious and picturesque. I was also there about the time that you were. (I was staying between the Stare Mesto and the old Jewish quarter)

Spoon
10-20-2003, 06:12 PM
You might have unknowingly seen me staggering along the street, from strip club to strip club ;)

rij73
05-06-2004, 10:46 AM
These changes you mentioned for MMC sound completely awesome and would turn the MMC into my ideal music manager. Can you give an ETA on when this would be implemented and also when you will release the new default skin for dAP... (maybe just give us a screenshot???)

I used to use dAP with MMC for quite a long time, then changed to WMP9 for god knows what reason. Well, a year later I am back to dAP, but it sure would be exciting to see these major enhancements to the interface... After trying all the software out there, yours is definitely the best.

Spoon
05-07-2004, 06:49 AM
ETA is difficult, it was hard coding those mods into Sveta Explorer, MMC will be even harder (more relies on the track in the display, if you mess the track listing the whole MMC needs to be looked at).

The new default dAP skin has sort of fallen to the side, I will pick it up before dAP makes the next release.

ToolNut
05-25-2004, 06:58 AM
I was wondering...this new skin....can it have a tab in the options so that within a given skin the clour can be changed? and if so a gradient type thing where you can go grom say white to blue or something be put in. i just hope that what i'm suggesting isnt stupid

Hyrize
12-10-2005, 07:35 AM
It depends upon the Audio Type, all tags are written, but for an Ogg file, or FLAC file, if the file is playing when being edited in MMC then the tag cannot be updated. I need to add some sort of delayed tag writing.

or even just work it like winamp where there's the short gap as a new file with updated tag info is written and playback swapped to this file at the correct point. (sometimes the gap is un-noticeable, prehaps this could be completely eliminated with a buffer):smile2: