[WIN8] [APP] music | mode - the fast innovative music player app for windows 8

[luke_f]

Wow, thats an awesome app.

I really mean it, its good that I've registered here xD.

Thanks, glad you like it! Let me know what you think once you gave it a good try. Any feedback is very appreciated!

 

[luke_f]

A new version is available in the store! It fixes a problem in the FLAC decoder. If you use the PlayTo function to stream music to a different device: You can now start streaming more easily by clicking the speaker icon besides the volume bar!

So the rule should be, "{album name} - disc # - {subtitle}...

This is included in the latest update! Please note that it will only be used for new albums. If you do not want to completely reset your database, you can rename the folders to get them re-scanned (and perhaps change the name back afterwards).

 

[Pablo Montilla]

Hi Luke, I was about to report to you that the app no longer played albums that were separated in discs, but its probably due to the library needing a reset, so I just did that and will try it and see if it works.

Thank you!

 

[Pablo Montilla]

I did the reset, but it still working the same way as before...even worse than before, it is now selecting second discs for play instead of starting with the first disc in an album...

If you need more information, I'll give it to you, but I think it was better before...=(

 

[luke_f]

Hi Pablo, can you give me some more details on this? I am not sure I understand you problem completely. Is the multi disc album correctly detected, do you see the "Disc 1", "Disc 2" headers in the track list? What happens when you click on the first track of Disc 1?

I cannot see any issues here. If an album has disc number tags, it will be grouped and sorted by disc, and playback works well and starts at the first track of the first disc. I also did a library reset and still see no issues.

 

[Pablo Montilla]

Umm...you speak of disc tags...my albums don't have that set explicitly. They have an album title with the " - Disc #" suffix. Are you saying there is an ID3 tag that specifies that the file is in a given disc?

If that's the case, I'll revise my software so I include that information!

Thanks,
Pablo

 

[luke_f]

The player uses different sources for the disc number. There are explicit tags for that for all audio formats. If the album does not contain disc number tags, the player will also look at the album name and the folder name. So usually, an album named "... Disc #" should correctly be found and shown as a multi disc album. It should also work if the tracks are in subfolders names like "CD #" or "Disc #". But having the disc number in the file tags is the safest and best solution. I still do not know what your exact problem is. Can you describe what you see when opening the album and what happens when you try to play it?

This is how a multi disc album should look like in music|mode:

 

[Pablo Montilla]

This is what I see when I click the Live At Budokan album (I see we share musical taste )

As you see, it does have the ' - Disc #' suffix. And I'm sure it worked fine in a previous version...maybe something to do with the update of the regular expression you must surely be using to detect this stuff?

Thanks for your support,
Pablo

 

[luke_f]

Hi Pablo, you were right, there was indeed an error in the latest regular expression! The new one works with the "Disc # - Subtitle" format but I accidentially broke the normal "Disc #" parsing. One character in the regex was wrong, damn... Gonna fix this with the next update!

Nice coincience with the music! ;-)

 

[Pablo Montilla]

You know what they say "You solved your problem using regular expressions...now you have two problems..." ;o)

Thank you!

 

[luke_f]

Regular expressions are a real monster. So much power, but so hard to handle... :shocked:

I'll let you know when the update is out, it will come with nice extra features as well! ;-)

 

[luke_f]

Oh man. My SSD just died, and with it not only all the latest changes, but also most of the changes of the last update...
Now I need to re-implement everything (plus buy new hardware). What a downer...

 

[Pablo Montilla]

Ugh. Sorry to hear that. One suggestion...if you have an MSDN subscription, you can easily setup a VM on Azure and use BTSync to have an offsite backup of your sources...

Anyway, the second time you write it, you do it faster...:wink:

 

[luke_f]

I was already thinking of moving to VisualStudio Online or GitHub, not only to have the sources saved online, but also for the change tracking capabilities. Sometimes I lose track of that I have done since an update, and sometimes it even happened that I accidentially left test code in a relase, causing problems. A good source control system would allow me to much more easily review my changes (even at a much later point). I will definitely set this up, once I am back running.

 

[Pablo Montilla]

Ahh...I thought you already had a VCS in place! Yes, you should definitely use a version control system. My idea is useful only for changes that still are not in the master branch...

Good luck!

 

[Mozerfok]

First of all KUDOS to you for this player right here... its way better than the Xbox Music one...

Some issues i have so far:

1. Removing folders generate an error message even if the action is completed
2. Adding does the same
3. If Music is on a different partition, the music does not show up unless you add manually each folder one by one.

Here are some of my suggestions for your Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 releases:

1. Allow users to add or get automatically from an online source Artist Image Background (Similar to Xbox Music app)
2. Allow that same image to appear in the live tiles along with the track details of the song playing

Keep up the good work, this is promising.. I cant wait for the Windows Phone version and would like to enroll for the beta testing if you need it

 

[luke_f]

Thanks, glad you like the player!

About the music folder configuration, this is strange since this worked for me (and some others have tested this as well). As I have just lost the sources for that during my SSD crash, I need to re-implement this again from scratch. I will then do more intensive testing of that area. Just to understand your scenario: You have a separate partition where your music is stored, and you try to add the complete drive to the app? Usually this should work well, I had a similar setup on my tablet. But I will test this as I re-implement.

Currently, the app only uses album art (local and online database), and shows the album art plus track info on the live tile. A large square tile will be added in the next update, this was already completed few days ago but also these sources got lost. I also plan to add artist images at some point. You would prefer to have the artist images on the live tile instead of the album art? I think I would prefer the album art there, but I can make this optional of course.

A WP port is planned but will take a while. The music playback works radically different on the phone, and the UI needs to be re-done of course. I will announce it here when a beta is ready. I already had a very very basic prototype running, but it got completely lost since I did not create a backup of that one at all.

Man, that crash came really as a shock. I need to setup a good online source control system asap, for that to never happen again...

 

[Mozerfok]

Hey there

I will then do more intensive testing of that area. Just to understand your scenario: You have a separate partition where your music is stored, and you try to add the complete drive to the app? Usually this should work well, I had a similar setup on my tablet. But I will test this as I re-implement.

Yes that is the case. Weird thing that i did not notice before is that some folders from the desktop are not added and some yes...

The folders are stated as "in the list" when you try to re-insert them in the folder list but are not appearing in the said list Here are some screen caps of me trying to take something out to add it back afterwards :

1. Removing the folder

2. Failed

3. Adding whole partition

4. Navigating.....

5. Failed


I tried uninstalling and reinstalling to no avail...

Currently, the app only uses album art (local and online database), and shows the album art plus track info on the live tile. A large square tile will be added in the next update, this was already completed few days ago but also these sources got lost. I also plan to add artist images at some point. You would prefer to have the artist images on the live tile instead of the album art? I think I would prefer the album art there, but I can make this optional of course.

Here is my suggestion :

Make what Microsoft has done with the Xbox Music app BETTER :



What they did is :

1. first picture, take the artist image they have and place it at 75% to the right, keeping a 25% to the left with a black gradient from left to right fading on the picture.
2. Flip the tile to show the Now Playing details...

What i propose, but this is just my two cents here, is to do something better -

1. take the artist picture as background and place it in a way that i slowly moves in some directions in the tile as background,
2. add a semi transparent overlay at 75% from the left
3. add the album details text to the left on that overlay
4. add the album art to the right so that it starts on the gradient but ends where there is none.

On the windows Phone version, the album art can be dumped as there won't be enough space to have all these details i guess, but the artist image background is definitely a must have for the windows Phone (again, according to me).

A WP port is planned but will take a while. The music playback works radically different on the phone, and the UI needs to be re-done of course. I will announce it here when a beta is ready.

Will be glad to help in the tests

Hope that you will be able to get back on track ASAP man, your app is VERY promising...

 

[luke_f]

Cool, thanks for the detailed info and screenshots! I have been looking into this a bit already. I dropped you a PM, it would be cool if you can provide me some additional info.

About the live tile, the tile system is not really flexible on Windows 8. There are only a bunch of predefined templates you can use, so stuff like custom animations or special layouts are not possible. It is however possible to render stuff to an image yourself and then store it and show it on the tile, some apps use this technique. I was absolutely sure that they would improve the tile system for Windows 10, allowing interactive tiles and more animation stuff. There were also rumours that this will come with Win10 (exploding tiles and what not). I was very disappointed that not a single innovation was shown on the Win10 event regarding tiles. Still hope that something will come but I am not sure if that will be the case anymore.

The next version of the app will come with a "big" tile, which looks quite cool with huge cover:



For the wide and small tile, I think I will stick to the standard templates for a while and wait what Windows 10 will bring. Still hoping for improvements there. If cool tiles are possible with Win10, I probably won't bother with making custom tiles for Win8.

 

[Mozerfok]

Hey !

Sent you the requested file this morning