Spoons MasterPlan

[Spoon]

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

[Spoons]

Re: Spoons MasterPlan

that's good news. can't wait to see the holly grail

[Wayne]

Re: Spoons MasterPlan

I can hardly wait. As my namesake would say, "Spoon, we are not worthy".

Wayne

[OldCoder]

Re: Spoons MasterPlan

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]

Re: Spoons MasterPlan

Well this should about cover everything that people were asking for... Can't wait...

[dbample]

Re: Spoons MasterPlan

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]

Re: Spoons MasterPlan

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]

Re: Spoons MasterPlan

Wow that all sounds so good :D I can't wait, the best MP3 player is about to get even better

Paddy

[Unregistered]

Re: Spoons MasterPlan

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]

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]

Re: Spoons MasterPlan

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]

Re: Spoons MasterPlan

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]

Re: Spoons MasterPlan

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]

Re: Spoons MasterPlan

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]

Re: Spoons MasterPlan

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.