Many problems with audio player

[Unregistered]

I downloaded the player a few days ago and am having many problems with it. I'm using Win 98 SE.

Cannot find a volume control bar on the top level of the program.
Random play does not work, I click the button but the songs keep playing in alphabetical order.
The help file says there is a volume normalize button on the volume boost column but I don't see one.
I made a playlist before realizing that it's redundant with the My Music Collection thing, now I can't get rid of the playlist and it appears at the bottom of the Music Collection pane.
The program is playing my music collection automatically when I start it and I can't make it shut up. Sometimes I start the program to play links from language software and I don't want it to play music.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

[xoas]

Re: Many problems with audio player

The program is playing my music collection automatically when I start it and I can't make it shut up.

You can stop the program from starting up automatically by going Start>All Programs>dBpowerAMP>Configuration>Install Options and unclicking the box that says "Load dBpowerAMP When Windows Starts". When the program is playing you always have a number of options to turn off the player. The default skin and most every skin will have a power off button which closes the program. If you right click on a non-active part of any skin (quickest) or click on the button for the Options Menu, there will also be a power button which will close the program. Finally, if you right-click on the button for dBpowerAMP Audio Player at the very bottom of your screen there will be a menu item for closing the program.

The help file says there is a volume normalize button on the volume boost column but I don't see one.

The Help file for the Audio Player states:

tracks can be set to normalize by clicking in the Volume Boost column, or even better any new tracks can be set to auto normalize by ticking Auto Volume Normalize on the New Track Preferences page (Add Music menu)

To reach the volume normalization area of the My Music Collection screen you have to scan right (the section is not visible onscreen when you first open MMC (My Music Collection), but if you scan right you will find a lot of extra info there-take some time to get acquainted in case you ever want to access this info). Personally, I find it easier to set auto volume normalize by selecting the files I want to normalize within MMC, rightclicking and selecting Edit Tag and then clicking on the green A button by Volume Normalization. Please be aware that tracks will not volume normalize until they are completely played one time. When this happens the green light that lit up will go dim again (the way it was before you set it to Auto Volume Normaliz but the square slider in the middle of the boost scale will be replaced by a circular dot (the slider may still be there if volume has had to be normalized up or down).

[/QUOTE]Cannot find a volume control bar on the top level of the program.

If you are using the default skin, the volume slider is located by the speaker icon just above the Track Information display. Is this what you are looking for?

Random play does not work, I click the button but the songs keep playing in alphabetical order. [QUOTE]
I believe you may have to have to tell the random selector what tracks to Select from. Try clicking on the Selective Play button and select the Genres or Artists categories you wish to have randomly played (if all, click on Select All). Exit and now with both Selective Play and Random Play selected you sould be playing all your selected tracks in a random order.

If you haven't figured out the Playlist thing after you have straightened these other issues out, please post back.

Best wishes,
Bill Mikkelsen

[Unregistered]

Re: Many problems with audio player

Thanks Bill. I will try your suggestions. The problem isn't that the program starts when i start Windows, it's that when I start the program it automatically starts playing my music collection. I was playing some audio files from a language program through DB Power Amp, and every time after it played a language file it went back to playing my music collection. I just want it to stay quiet and just play when I click on a language file!

About the volume normalize, I have about 800 music tracks and they are not categorized or anything...I just want the program to automatically normalize all of them, and not make me set each one manually. Maybe it's already doing this, there seem to be numbers next to most of the tracks that say +1 or -1 or something (I'm not at my computer now so don't recall exactly)

[kweller]

Re: Many problems with audio player

Sounds like you've got Random Play selected.

Near the left-hand side of the menu control bar in MMC (the screen showing the list of tracks in your library) there is a button with the legend Random Play. Click that and the behaviour you are seeing should stop.

Kevin

[xoas]

Re: Many problems with audio player

What Kweller is saying applies to your issue of dAP going on to play from MMC when you were listening to something else (like your audio files) through dAP and you don't want dAP to start playing from MMC.

As for volume normalize, you certainly want to have this done automatically. This can be done using the auto volume normalzie feature which you can use through the methods outlined in the previous posts. Easiest overall is to set this as an active option for all tracks you add to MMC. Please stay reminded of the other factors regarding this feature so that you won't expect this feature to kick in until the tracks has been fully played once and so that when tracks have been normalized you don't get confused over which tracks have been normalized and which have not.

Best wishes,
Bill mikkelsen

[Unregistered]

Re: Many problems with audio player

Thanks to you all. Well, some of the problems have gone away. I found the volume slider (I was confused because it seemed to have an "equalizer" label or something next to it that I thought was referring to the slider). Random play is now working, though I didn't do anything to make it work. The program is not playing anymore when I don't want it to. I'm still a bit confused about volume normalize. When I checked, the "edit tag" dialog box had volume normalize checked by default, so I assume that all the files I added to my music collection were tagged in this way. I guess that I will see normalization occur after they all play one time?

I did notice that my midi files don't seem to normalize at all. They all play much louder than the other types of files. Is this a characteristic of midi files?

Thanks again for the help.

[Spoon]

Re: Many problems with audio player

Midi cannot be normalized by dAP.