MusicBee - a Music Manager Options

[stevenmmm]

MusicBee is a music manager and player i have written - its already got a fairly comprehensive set of functionality and has some features I hope people will appreciate. While I have spent a fair bit of time testing and use it on my own collection, it is still in beta so treat with caution for now.

The full install is on www.getmusicbee.com or if you have installed at least once, copy all the files from http://www.mediafire.com/?amn2nzmmjty to the MusicBee program folder

Any constructive feedback is welcome even if you just have a play with it

This post has been edited by stevenmmm: Dec 28 2008, 20:54

[HotshotGG]

I like the GUI it's quite fancy and pretty looking. Consider making a part of it open-source per GPL or LGPL liscense so that it can be ported to Linux and Mac OS/X.

One thing I would appreciate comments on is whether its worth including a basic CD ripper ie. so its in the one application, even if its not up to the standard of specialised rippers out there.

Keep in mind if you are going to write a CD ripper from scratch make that it's a "secure ripper". This can be very difficult to do (Which is why many CD rippers optionally use cdparanoia in conjunction with their software).

This post has been edited by HotshotGG: Dec 6 2008, 22:45

[Canar]

Rippers are quite trivial these days, now that AccurateRip is around. Burst rip once and then repeat the process until you get a valid AccurateRip result.

[shakey_snake]

Very impressive for a first beta. I like just about everything. Any chance of adding native themeing so it matches the rest of my windows?

[spoon]

Rippers are quite trivial these days, now that AccurateRip is around. Burst rip once and then repeat the process until you get a valid AccurateRip result

This is true if a track only has one or two errors, but if there are 50 the chances of getting them all to correct on one pass is low.

This post has been edited by spoon: Dec 7 2008, 00:03

[~*McoreD*~]

Impressive for a first beta. I see much of the popular features such as folder monitoring are already included in this release.

Have you considered supporting Album Artist as well as Artist, in the browser?
http://www.getmusicbee.com/images/MusicBeeMainLarge.jpg

I have explained this feature request here http://mcored.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!...7!225.entry

I cannot test MusicBee at the moment because I think I may have a software conflict:





Cheers,
McoreD

[shakey_snake]

Have you considered supporting Album Artist as well as Artist, in the browser?

click the little "upside-down eject button" arrow on the header...

This post has been edited by shakey_snake: Dec 7 2008, 03:22

[stevenmmm]

hotshotGG: no immediate plans to open-source this but i won't rule it out further down the track

shakey_snake: the themeing is basic at the moment - just 2 themes. I was planning to look more seriously at that aspect further down the track after beefing up other functionality. I'll think about what can done sooner as perhaps its more important than what I had thought.

McoreD: i have never seen that happen before and to be honest i am completely baffled based on what i see in your screenshoot and what is happening in the code at that point. Did you click 'Choose Folders' or 'Start Scan' when it happened? Are you using XP SP2/3 or Vista, and not 2000 or 2003?
There is a stack dump file produced which could help me - its located in 'C:\Documents and Settings\<your id>\Application Data\MusicBee\errorLog.dat
Alternatively i've updated the software version downloadable on the website so you can easily view the error log from the View menu (as well as fix a couple of small bugs i noticed yesterday)

[HotshotGG]

You know what I really like about your organizer? You can synch to devices other then the IPod. Now that's a nifty feature that I haven't seen anywhere else.

[DonP]

Nice while it lasted...

I tried synching my music player (Sansa E200) and it spend a looong time scanning the player. I had to leave, so clicked cancel and it hung up.

Eventually I aborted the program, and now it says it can't start.

Tried reboot computer, do uninstall/reinstall, which APPEARED to work ok, but still an initial banner comes up, then an error message that just says "Unable to start Musicbee"

[Brent]

Looks like its based on MusikCube/wxMusik. Is that correct? Looks nice, but wouldn't you need to put up the source somewhere?

[~*McoreD*~]

stevenmmm

This is Windows XP SP3. It happens as soon as the program is loaded.

2008-12-07 08:50:43 - System.AccessViolationException: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.
at System.Windows.Forms.UnsafeNativeMethods.CallWindowProc(IntPtr wndProc, IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wParam, IntPtr lParam)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.DefWndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.DefWndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ListView.WndProc(Message& m)
at #=qk3o0YZesRB1c0vcNC38$4bG4ckFsZjMsKRWEBuWutZEfvrvHaxVXYyxAcLEoC_WA.#=qzEvRAkQHdyBlYYCt6oOINQ==.WndProc(Message& #=qDc5JWWGmff4S6BLFpw_mZQ==)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)

If I double click on a song to load MusicBee, it would play the song fine. The error still shows up and the rest of the GUI remains inaccessible.

Cheers.

[stevenmmm]

DonP: i believe the file cache got corrupted while writing data when the application was killed. I'll make some changes so the application starts up and recovers if the cache is corrupted, should be done either tonight or tomorrow night.

MCoreD: i will put some extra debugging code in the same release. To activate just set <SystemDebugMode>true</SystemDebugMode> in the file MusicBeeSettings.ini located in the same folder as your music library (by default its \My Documents\My Music\MusicBee\MusicBeeSettings.ini) before you start MB. You will need the new release (0.1.3264)

Brent: no plans to open source this for now - if you strongly believe in that sort of thing, SongBird is a good open source app - its where i got some of the ideas for the web integration from. I hadn't heard of MusikCube/wxMusik before so its not based on that.

[shakey_snake]

shakey_snake: the themeing is basic at the moment - just 2 themes. I was planning to look more seriously at that aspect further down the track after beefing up other functionality. I'll think about what can done sooner as perhaps its more important than what I had thought.

Honestly, it's probably not the most important thing but htat was just my initial impression.

Anyways, I've been using this intermittently for a few days. And I must say I'm still rather impressed.

A few things seem to be missing, or maybe I'm missing them:
1. Embedded cuesheet playback.
2. Gapless playback for mp3s (although I imagine this is why the winamp engine can be used, and is largely out of your hands. I don't have Winamp installed, however. )
3. I'd like to be able to resize the searchbar.
4. It's not immediately clear in the Properties Tab of the Edit Window/pane which fields are editable.

[stevenmmm]

A few things seem to be missing, or maybe I'm missing them:
1. Embedded cuesheet playback.
2. Gapless playback for mp3s (although I imagine this is why the winamp engine can be used, and is largely out of your hands. I don't have Winamp installed, however. )
3. I'd like to be able to resize the searchbar.
4. It's not immediately clear in the Properties Tab of the Edit Window/pane which fields are editable.

1. i dont see any issue if what's needed is reading an embeded cuesheet for a single album file, and then presenting the tracks as individual items in the GUI. Perhaps with some tag editing restrictions. Are you thinking this would be for FLAC files? From what i can see the practice is to use the CUESHEET vorbis comment which is more metadata friendly than the native FLAC CUESHEET block
2. i thought i was already supporting gapless for LAME encoded MP3 (and other formats except AAC) but it seems a late change i made is adding 0.3+ sec when the song starts playing. Its very easy to fix, so i will include in the next release
3. the track finder on the left bar is resizable by dragging the top of that panel up/down. Or are you refering to the other search box on the top menu bar which you want to be able to widen (or reduce)?
4. i'll do something for the next release

[shakey_snake]

1. i dont see any issue if what's needed is reading an embeded cuesheet for a single album file, and then presenting the tracks as individual items in the GUI. Perhaps with some tag editing restrictions. Are you thinking this would be for FLAC files? From what i can see the practice is to use the CUESHEET vorbis comment which is more metadata friendly than the native FLAC CUESHEET block

Yeah, for FLAC. I have a number of albums this way, which I have ripped/converted with foobar2000.
I believe foobar saves the cuesheet as tags in the vorbis comment, but don't don't take my word for it.

2. i thought i was already supporting gapless for LAME encoded MP3 (and other formats except AAC) but it seems a late change i made is adding 0.3+ sec when the song starts playing. Its very easy to fix, so i will include in the next release

Awesome to hear.

3. the track finder on the left bar is resizable by dragging the top of that panel up/down. Or are you refering to the other search box on the top menu bar which you want to be able to widen (or reduce)?

Yes, the top one. I was hoping to make it bigger.


Thanks for considering my suggestions.

This post has been edited by shakey_snake: Dec 9 2008, 19:24

[vlada]

Hi,

It looks very nice. It reminds me of Songbird. Maybe it's because both players use XUL for GUI.

But I have a problem - no matter what directory I select, MuxicBee tries to install to C:\Program Files. Please fix this. Also I would really appreciate a version without installer, if it is possible.

According to CD ripping - I don't need that. I have no problems using other ripper such as EAC.

This post has been edited by vlada: Dec 9 2008, 22:37

[DonP]

One thing I see is Musicbee is not picking up the tags on maybe 15% of my files. I haven't checked them all, but spot checking shows Foobar and DBPoweramp reading them ok.

The files are from a mix of sources (CD and vinyl rips, downloads from Emusic) and formats.

I know there are retaggers to fix this, but it would be nice if "track order" sort was numeric. Some of my albums don't have leading zeros, so
the order comes out: 1, 10, 11, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

This post has been edited by DonP: Dec 10 2008, 13:40

[stevenmmm]

One thing I see is Musicbee is not picking up the tags on maybe 15% of my files. I haven't checked them all, but spot checking shows Foobar and DBPoweramp reading them ok.

The files are from a mix of sources (CD and vinyl rips, downloads from Emusic) and formats.

I know there are retaggers to fix this, but it would be nice if "track order" sort was numeric. Some of my albums don't have leading zeros, so
the order comes out: 1, 10, 11, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

don: i've sent a PM for some more details

vlada: no, I use .NET for the GUI - it only uses XUL Runner for the in-built web browsing. I've fixed the installation bug for the next release - thanks for spotting that

[Balthazaar]

I know there are retaggers to fix this, but it would be nice if "track order" sort was numeric. Some of my albums don't have leading zeros, so
the order comes out: 1, 10, 11, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

I had the same issue at first, but found if I selected 'Album Layout' as opposed to 'Detail Layout' the tracks
were ordered correctly.


Mark

[stevenmmm]

One thing I see is Musicbee is not picking up the tags on maybe 15% of my files. I haven't checked them all, but spot checking shows Foobar and DBPoweramp reading them ok.

The files are from a mix of sources (CD and vinyl rips, downloads from Emusic) and formats.

I know there are retaggers to fix this, but it would be nice if "track order" sort was numeric. Some of my albums don't have leading zeros, so
the order comes out: 1, 10, 11, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

donP: re: missing tags - it was making the assumption that ID3v1 tags didnt need to be read if there were any ID3v2 tags. I will change that so it should work in next release
re: track no sorting - the album layout view should show sorted by track no, but i noticed it's not doing it properly for 'disc - track no' combination so i will fix that

[~*McoreD*~]

re: track no sorting - the album layout view should show sorted by track no, but i noticed it's not doing it properly for 'disc - track no' combination so i will fix that

stevenmmm, Great job. The new build seems to work without and error on startup. There is a GUI redrawing issue for the Now Playlist Right Side bar.



I was going to post about the Disc#-Track# sorting issue too. Glad you are fixing it.

Cheers,
McoreD

[stevenmmm]

I have released an update that fixes the reported bugs and also now includes handling for embedded cuesheets (FLAC and WavPack only).
McoreD: I don't know why you are having the problem and have never seen it before, but i have made a change to remove a drawing optimisation that might fix it.

The full install is on available at http://www.getmusicbee.com , or if you have already installed previously, you can copy MusicBee.exe from this link http://www.mediafire.com/?gg4mqzwjjtm

[stevenmmm]

I've made a new release available:
- New Windows Native skin
- Fix for the Vista users who were unable to login to Last.fm
- Improve exception handling when re-organising files - previously an error dialog would popup when an exception was encountered
- Improve file watcher - now handles files temporarily locked eg. large file copy
- Fix some minor GUI bugs
- Fix device synchronisation freeze when manually copying a second lot of files that already exist on the device

The full install is on http://www.getmusicbee.com or alternatively if you have already installed at least once, you can copy MusicBee.exe only from http://www.mediafire.com/?y53n2whtntt

I'm interested to hear anyone's constructive comments about the functionality/ usability even if you only have a play with it.

This post has been edited by stevenmmm: Dec 21 2008, 20:47

[zipr]

I got an error when I tried to run it after install:
Unable to start MusicBee - An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007000B)

Using 64 bit vista.