GoneMAD Music Player 3.0 Alpha Feedback

[MotleyGord]

Nov 21, 2019 11:29:49 GMT -5 thesplund said:

Nov 20, 2019 14:56:21 GMT -5 GoneMAD said:

could also use something like musicbrainz picard to auto tag your music. its a great tool

Thanks for the suggestion but despite being one of those people that has a general dislike of all things Apple/Mac I actually find iTunes near perfect for my needs and it 'supports' limited scripting in jscript/vbscript/C# that suits my desire to keep up some form of coding (after 40 years of dabbling) - the Smart lists in it are great. Just a sghame that the tagging isn't quite the same as 'standard'.

I did try Picard, and several others like MediaMonkey (and WinAmp went some time ago), and I actively use FooBar but only for advanced features like Replay Gain for ALACs, measuring Dynamic Range and checking with Accurip. I recently installed/uninstalled Picard again but I may give it another look.

Part of my choice to stick with iTunes is based on the fact that I still have a custom 240GB 5th gen iPod ( ) that stays in the bedroom and a smaller 160GB Classic for the car (iTunes downsamples(?) tracks for that to get more on it) - the 240GB was 'Rockboxed' but I didn't get on with it. I keep my Android-based FiiO for 'best' with the majority of the music on it as CDs ripped as lossless ALACs, and I can sync iTunes to it with the free 'iSyncr' desktop app (I bought their RocketPlayer by way of recompense).

Update: All music retagged and now re-synching, ready to test out Alpha 17

I am in a similar situation. I have several iPods and Apple TVs at home that I use iTunes to support. It even runs as my main home music server. But it really doesn't have much support on the tagging other than the basics.

I use mp3tag as my main editor. With new tracks, I do everything in mp3tag prior to importing them into iTunes. Works great. If I do any editting once in iTunes, there is an update script from Steve MacGuire (turingtest2 in forums) that forces a rescan of your selected or even all tracks.

But to the point @gonemad is making, good library management is the key to having your music show up as expected. Give this package a try, it will make things much easier!
G

[thesplund]

Good point MotleyGord. I already use MP3Tag (even for my ALACs*) and I've used a few of the scripts on Steve's samsoft site (which I see has grown somewhat over the years) in the past, and written a host of scripts myself (including a very over-the-top nested & rated playlist builder that I've ditched). The scripting interface, albeit hidden, is what I like about iTunes (the turingtests scripts I've looked at all seem to call the iTunes COM interface), but it
seems to be so lacking in many (all?) other Windows media utitlies** so it get's
my vote.

Anyway, I've now just rebuilt the whole of my library to a) remove the year prefix in the Album Title, and b) use an 'approved' Artist/Album Artist combination (which TBH was never really needed for iPods) in an attempt to get things playing nicely with GMMP - and it seems to be working well. It taken a while to reorganize things but I'd agree with doing things correctly (and getting ove r past bad habits )

Paul

*NB mp3tag cannot access all of the tags available in iTunes/ALACs - I think Grouping, Kind, Media Kind, and Lyrics are all missing for starters - so it's not perfect (hence my previous comment re 'standards' ) but it is a great utility and has some very neat features including organising and moving tracks around your HDD(s) as well as simply renaming and tagging.

**I've not looked for ones in Linux and I don't have a Mac

[MotleyGord]

Dec 1, 2019 18:54:06 GMT -5 thesplund said:

*NB mp3tag cannot access all of the tags available in iTunes/ALACs - I think Grouping, Kind, Media Kind, and Lyrics are all missing for starters - so it's not perfect (hence my previous comment re 'standards'

**I've not looked for ones in Linux and I don't have a Mac

You can add any tag for mp3tag to look at, I use all of these and have no issues seeing them when I am editting. See their forum for details.

[MotleyGord]

@gonemad for a future card can you add a switch to scale the album art on the Now Playing screen to fit the width, and start below the status bar? I know these aren't a priority for the alpha, but it is a peeve to not see the full artwork, with the sides trimmed and top under the notch.

On a separate note, your last update adding the sort features has really made huge difference for me. Thanks for this!
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[GoneMAD]

Dec 7, 2019 12:46:39 GMT -5 MotleyGord said:

@gonemad for a future card can you add a switch to scale the album art on the Now Playing screen to fit the width, and start below the status bar? I know these aren't a priority for the alpha, but it is a peeve to not see the full artwork, with the sides trimmed and top under the notch.

On a separate note, your last update adding the sort features has really made huge difference for me. Thanks for this!
G

yea there will be a few layout options for the album art in now playing. i dont have cards for everything on trello

Also the default is going to show the whole thing.. it does on most phones but some with different aspect ratios get clipped because i havent tweaked the UI much yet

[GoneMAD]

3.0 Alpha 18 (2019-12-08):

New:
-Added additional album art sources
-Added loading progress indicator to album art selector when search for art
-Added setting to determine when to auto crossfade 'Auto Crossfade Mode": Smart Crossfade, On Shuffle Only, and Always
-Added artist art search/downloader
-Artist/album artist details will now show art if present
-Added grid view to artist and album artist list
-Added view modes with no art to the album list
-Added new letter placeholder for items with no art
-Added Grid: Compact view mode to artist/albumartist/album views
-Added view mode checkbox to turn on/off the 3 dot context menu. If off, a long press will bring up the context menu options
-Added initial tablet ui (split mode)
-Effects/EQ standalone UI now has a mini player

Improvements:
-Condensed card view mode options into a single card check box in the view mode menu
-Minor scrolling behavior improvements

Fixes:
-Sorting album list by 'Artist' will now sort by artist first and then album name
-Fixed issue where widget would be invisible until gmmp is launched
-Fixed crash with the filter menus
-Ignore case when using 'Ignore Prefixes" sort modifier
-Fixed seek bar preferences not showing selected value
-Fixed preloading of art in lists
-Fixed album details text color when using light theme with a light primary color
-.nomedia is now created in cache folders to keep imagary out of the android media scanner
-Fixed issue where audiobook and podcast tab would show every album/song when selecting an artist
-Fixed now playing when no song is loaded (now treated like no album art)
-Fixed issue where some of the effects UI was cut off

Downloads:
mega
mediafire

[GoneMAD]

if anyone has issues downloading artist art.. trying using a file manager app to create a folder in /storage/gmmp/artistart If that fixes things please post on here. I saw some error reports about failed downloads due to being unable to create a file on disk and im wondering if that folder isnt getting created correctly

[GoneMAD]

3.0 Alpha 19 (2019-12-17):

New:
-Added folder search for artist art (folder must contain artist name to be searched)
-Album art will now be used if no artist art is found
-Added options in the settings to download missing art (album and artist)
-Added 3 app shortcuts: Play, Shuffle All, and Search
-Added album shuffle (available in library menu)
-Added play next/prev album in queue when in album shuffle mode
-Scanner will now auto search for artwork for newly scanned artist and albums

Improvements:
-Added additional logging for file read/write errors
-Art selector "none" option now shows the letter placeholder
-Improved how multi selected items are highlighted
-Art selector UI will now incrementally load search results instead of waiting for all results to return
-Improved rxjava related error handling / reporting
-Letter placeholder background color is now a random interpolation between the primaryColor and primaryDark
-Updated libraries
-Art searches now filter out "feat whatever" from the artist name

Fixes:
-Fixed crash when trying to remove context menu on folder view
-Fixed other various crashes
-Fixed case insensitive sorting issue that some users experienced
-Removed gifs from image search results
-Removed now playing from side navigation menu in split view
-Fixed letter drawable not resizing correctly when grid size is changed
-Toolbar back arrow should no longer revert to the drawer menu icon when resuming the app
-Other various fixes

Downloads:
mega
mediafire

[thesplund]

Just downloaded 19 (saw this issue in 18 too)
It may have been noticed already but I'm seeing some odd behaviour in the big letters that are shown whilst scrolling though Artists and Album Artists: I see '1' then 'A' but then 'T' and then 'C' - but it's all fine after that. Removing the Modifier 'Ignore Prefixes' fixes the issue.
It's the same with the 'Album' list, however it is slightly more unusual when applying a complex 'Album/Artist' sort with many of the letters shown being 'shuffled around' and none of them aligning to the first letter of the Album being displayed (I hope that made sense). Adding/removing the 'ignore prefix' modifier makes a small change but I guess the letters shown are probably matching the Artist rather than the Album(?).
FYI I wiped and rebuilt the database to see if that affected it but it doesn't seem to fix it in v18 but I'll try it again in v19 shortly.
(A big 'thankyou' for adding the Modifier though :-) )

[GoneMAD]

Dec 18, 2019 13:47:14 GMT -5 thesplund said:

Just downloaded 19 (saw this issue in 18 too)
It may have been noticed already but I'm seeing some odd behaviour in the big letters that are shown whilst scrolling though Artists and Album Artists: I see '1' then 'A' but then 'T' and then 'C' - but it's all fine after that. Removing the Modifier 'Ignore Prefixes' fixes the issue.
It's the same with the 'Album' list, however it is slightly more unusual when applying a complex 'Album/Artist' sort with many of the letters shown being 'shuffled around' and none of them aligning to the first letter of the Album being displayed (I hope that made sense). Adding/removing the 'ignore prefix' modifier makes a small change but I guess the letters shown are probably matching the Artist rather than the Album(?).
FYI I wiped and rebuilt the database to see if that affected it but it doesn't seem to fix it in v18 but I'll try it again in v19 shortly.
(A big 'thankyou' for adding the Modifier though :-) )

The fast scroll letter pop up or the letter placeholders when there is no art?

[thesplund]

@gonemad - the fast scroll pop-up ones.

[GoneMAD]

thanks

[MotleyGord]

So far on alpha 19 all is working as expected for me. For the artwork search will you be adding some kind of indicator to show that it is running? For the artist artwork in particular, I was able to see it update around once per second, but at points it did appear to stop. But then it would pick up and continue. Not a big deal once it has completed, but I think some users may complain that it isn't working when they don't see instant updates.
G

[GoneMAD]

probably. it'll do 1 per second to not overload the search providers (it its found local it'll just immediately go to the next one). the beta will be basically all customizations and UI improvements

[MotleyGord]

Thanks for the access to the Alpha stage. I have the Beta update installed now, and will post any issues to the new thread. Happy New Year, and wish you the best for 2020!
G