Facets is a flexible media library viewer for foobar2000, based on linked lists.

It's a UI Element to be added to the new Default User Interface 0.9.5.



Please read the manual and the roadmap before asking questions or making suggestions.

After the big disappointment of foo_browser i tried to forget that this type of library viewer is in fact my favorite. I am so eager to test it in the next hours.

So much thanks, Frank!

Another example of Facets in use right here:





It's a wonderful component, IMO. Great job, Frank!

This is sooo much faster and cleaner than foo_browser. Thank you so much! I was just looking at the roadmap page on your site, though, and I was wondering why you listed certain features under "not going to be implemented." Some of these are things that I would love to have and have been using in foo_browser fo a while. For example:

-Options to hide the summary item, to hide scrollbars or column headers, to change the item height, or to disable alternate row colors.
-Dynamic Facet playlist name based on title formatting.

Is there a technical reason why these will never happen, or do you just not find them to be useful features?

I'd also like to request the option to disable the cascading selection behavior (so that the facets are always completely populated except when using a search filter). Last, could you maybe put a small "Clear" button next to the search box to reset the search and facets.

Sorry for bitching, I'm just excited about all the new interface stuff and its put lots of ideas in my head.

I aim to conform to the concept of the Default User Interface, which:

Maybe as an additional note, this component has been in development and active internal testing for almost a year, and is thus considered as finished for the most part. You can rest assured that I have thoroughly read the forum during this time and considered a huge number of possible implementations and options, as proven by the long feature list, but please understand that this process also includes to reject several features. Otherwise a component ends up with no clear concept and chaos, and is likely to be complicated to use and will eventually be abandoned, as seen in popular examples.


You can use multiple Facets UI Elements containing only one single Facet for this purpose.

Just activate the Layout Editing Mode (menu View, Layout), and right-click on the unnecessary Facet views to remove them, as seen in this screenshot.

Good idea, thanks. A shame about those other features, but I have a feeling this interface refresh is gonna attract some new developers and lots of new components will come to fill in the gaps.

I did some testing and i am really impressed: you have not forgotten nothing!

In the next days i will try to phrase two bigger suggestions/requests - so far i have only two questions:

1. What does "prevent playlist update" in the Layout Editing Mode make?
2. Why doesn't the facet plugin doesn't handle empty fields like Album List so that it shows an "?" if a special tag doesn't exist. I even tried titleformating without success: $if2(%date%,<no date>). It is very irritating not to have access to such items

It disables sending the current selection to the playlist, overriding the "Selection change" setting at the preferences.

If you for example had three Facets with genre, artist, and album, and enabled this option for the genre Facet, selecting a genre would cause the artist and album Facets to be updated, but not the playlist. Only a selection change in the artist or album Facet would cause the current selection to be sent to the playlist.

If you can think of a better status bar description for this menu item, please let me know.


Thank you for reporting this. I have reuploaded the component to fix this problem.

A new FAQ entry explains the different column patterns to deal with missing tags.

foo_browser done right... now I can finally look through my 60,000 plus collection at lightning speed. I love the option to browse via folder, but this doesnt actually use real time folders it only uses the folder media library has in its current list... not sure if that makes it slow down if it uses real folders but either way I love it...

As everyone has said this component is almost perfect, the only thing I can see missing is some kind of clear button on the search bar so that one doesn't need to delete the whole string before going back to the whole playlist.

Your roadmap states


I don't know why people would need folder icons and there is already a component that allows browsing the library using albumart. Just stating this cause I really agree with the new idea of keeping everything simple.

Thanks for the component!

Frank, this component ist absolutely brilliant.

There is only one thing i wish: The possibility to exclude certain filetypes, like the option under preferences > general.

Explanation:



Thanks for this great component


//edit: seems that i had tomatoes on my eyes:


Now it's perfect

Hello Frank,
your component is one of the greatest I've ever seen (so useful, so fast, so easy and so configurable).
But I noticed one bug. My library is currently very small (it's a new small aac one I've just start building) so it was easy for me to see that a complete entry was missing :



I've tried to scan, rescan and rerescan the library; I've manually add the folder into a playlist, I've add the separate subfolder entry into the database:



foobar2000 was restarted several times, but nothing works. Audio filenames have aren't unusual.
Any idea?

Could it be that you have selected "All" in the genre facet, while the affected files have no genre tag?

If you use [%genre%] (with brackets), the summary item excludes tracks without a genre.

In contrast, if no item is selected in the genre facet, the next facet would also display tracks without genres.


Thanks, that's a good idea. Added to my planned features list.

That's it! I forgot to fill genre for this box set. Thank you very much

Would it be possible to add mouseover activation? What I mean is to be able to scroll the facet under the mouse pointer, without clicking into it.

Thanks Frank .... awesome component

This plugin seems great so far! Keep up the good work!
One feature request: possibility to have multiple rows instead of multiple columns

While I like the idea as well, there are two problems:

1. It violates Windows standards.
2. Facets would be the only UI Element to behave like this.

I'll have to think about this before I can give you a definite answer.
Meanwhile, you can use the middle button to scroll. If it's not assigned to any action, that is.


There will be multiple rows per item as soon as I add album art support.

(No need to worry for existing users, there will be two separate views.)

Hi Frank, This is one great panel that helped me get iTunes like interface quite easily and much faster too! Thanks for absolute brilliant panel.

I think that's what was requested .... just move your mouse and use the scroll button to ... scroll.
The volume control already behaves like this.

Edit: BTW .... I have discovered a small annoyance .... the results in the facet playlist seems to be sorted by file path ... which may be a different order from the facets. Is there a way to control the sort order in the playlist view? Thanks.(Saw ... Preferences --> General)
Edit2: There is still a small discrepancy with the ' character which does not get sorted the same way between the facet and the playlist.

There's a privacy issue with Facets:

When exporting a foobar2000 theme that contains a Facets element then the quick search history is saved in the theme file.

So either this should be purged when exporting the theme, or it should be made possible to manually purge the history (via a button in the preferences and by pressing CTRL-DEL when text cursor is in search field).

About the mouseover scroll:

I like that, too. Opera does this and I have gotten used to it to an extent that I have thought about proposing it for foobar2000, too.

But yes, ideally it should work application wide, means also for the playlists, properties elements, and so on... otherwise it can bring confusion to the workflow. So maybe it's an optional feature to be considered for the core.

The former is not an option, since the UI Element cannot tell where its settings are exported to.

You can manually purge the history:

Ah, thanks. All's fine.

Oh, I've encountered a crash when changing one Facet from Folder view to Album Artist view. There are 775 folders.


Thanks for your report. I have saved the crash logs and sent you a PM about how to proceed.

Please use PMs or IRC for future crash reports, to prevent the thread from becoming unnecessarily cluttered.


Edit: The issue has been fixed. Thanks again.

Steps to reproduce:
1. fill a facet with many entries with this little triangle on the right side
2. adjust the heigth of the facet so, that the scrollbar disappears
3. minimize the height slowly until the scrollbar appears
4. minimize a further until only the up most pixel of a triangle is visible
5. use the scrollbar
-> the result is as above

I guess this always happens, when the height of the inner part of the facet is not a multiple of the height of a single entry. The occurrence of this glitch is not related to the windows theme and it does not depend on the selected font. The system is XP Pro SP2

Redrawing issues of subfolder indicators in Folder Structure columns should be fixed now.

Reuploaded. Thanks for reporting.

I might be blind or something, but how do I add a column to a facets pane like the Date column in the opening post?

TIA,
a3aan.

Right-click on the column header and enable "Multiple Columns."

Now you can add the date column.

Would it be possible to combine queries, for example having a list with both album artists and artists? I don't mean multiple columns, I just mean something that works like %<tag%> syntax but for separate tags.

You can use KatMouse for this, but it is a separate application (runs in the system tray).
http://ehiti.de/katmouse/

The rating stars are a nice touch, and they look very good.



I hope the Default UI and Columns UI incorporate the same for the %rating% tag.

Hmm...just tried adding a rating column and instead of stars I'm getting little box characters. I'm using the default system font (tahoma, I think). Do I maybe have a bad copy of the font?

You can combine multiple column patterns with a vertical line:


Note that %<album artist>% already falls back to the artist if no album artist tag was found.


Edit: Please do not add further reports about rating stars not being rendered correctly. I'm aware of this issue, but it's not a problem of my component but rather of your Windows configuration. If anyone has a working solution, feel free to post it.

Thanks for this wonderful component. I have just one small problem (a bug or a feature?):

If I set my code for 'Album' to Only %album% is displayed. Without the space between date and album it works as expected.
The reason I am doing this is because using 'Multiple Columns' means that when foobar2000 is maximised or restored the column headers don't autosize and scroll bars appear.

Franck this is an excellent component!

I've just noticed that when I set 'Prevent Playlist Update' for a facet, and restart the foobar, I have to do it again, the setting is not saved.

Thanks!

Current behavoir:
doubleclick in a facet -> 'facet selection' is updated -> the first song starts playing (regardless of the song order)

Wouldn't it make more sense that a 'random' song is played instead of the first one, if the song order is set to 'random' or 'shuffle (x)?




edit: typos...

#1> my bad.. should've checked string better

#2> why is there a (sort ascending/descending) arrow on the 2nd and following facets, but not on the first one? (can you remove them, or have it aligned to the right of that column?).. they overwrite the field description atm (they seem to be hardcoded at a certain distance from the left border)

^

i see.. shame, that. odd thing though, the sorting indicator didn't show on the first aspect at first, but has shown up after i restarted foobar since then

Can't reproduce it, neither can other users. Are you sure the date is not just dimmed? Please add a screenshot.


Thanks for reporting this, will be fixed for the next version.


Makes sense, I will change this.


Please read the FAQ.

About sorting indicators, that's standard Windows behaviour. Neither will there be any options for this, nor is the current behaviour going to change.

Just wanted to chime in and say, this plugin is awesome: simple, fast, and very usable. This plugin combined with the new UI may finally get me to upgrade from 0.8.3. Thanks Frank!

I just found this:

(Hint: notice the black area above 'All (8Folders)'

If I (double)click in this area, then the same thing happens as if I click on the 'All (8Folders)' entry.

This happened to me only once. I think at the moment it occured I was resizing the main window but I'm not sure. I will try to reproduce it...

Known, also a bug in the Windows listview.

I have already tried to somehow prevent this, but to no avail.

small bug: if you delete a facet column from preferences before disabling it, you can't really remove it anymore from the facet, and it doesn't disappear automatically :-)

Hello Frank,

I just noticed that there are different auto-playlist-naming-schemes in facets and in album list. If I, for example, create an autoplaylist with the query "artist HAS chicane" the playlistname with facets ist "New Autoplaylist" and with album list the name is "artist HAS chicane".

IMO the scheme from album list is better arranged. I think there should be a consistent naming-scheme. What do you think?

an easy question i couldn't find in the faq: is the rating column supposed to display anything without installing any additional addons?

It is just my opinion: I wouldn't start to leave the way to have an unique way for each component in foobar - i really love the global settings. Why was that feature removed from the foobar core?

I have a feature request, Frank: I would like to display the rating as a number with one digit after the point, f.e. "rating = 4.1". That would give some more detailed rating based on the average

Stars work fine with Arial Unicode Font.

One feature request more, Frank:

What do you think about another selection type for multiple tags like %<mood>%? Let's say you have a mood facet and you select three of them then the result would be: mood IS mood1 OR mood IS mood2 OR mood IS mood3.
But you also sometimes would like to have result like: mood IS mood1 AND mood IS mood2 AND mood IS mood3. The easiest implementation could be to use the ctrl-key when selecting the entries. In that scenario using the shift key would mean: NOT mood IS blah.
Not only a great feature for browsing the library but also for creating autoplaylists.

However, i am not sure what would be the best way to make the different selection types visible in the facet.

Great plugin Frank. I just started tinkering with your plugin and came up with a layout like so:

Screenshot

I used a couple splitters to achieve this look which breaks the link between the panels. Is there any way around this?

Moderation: Please do not inline images larger than roughly 800x600 and 80KB. Please use thumbnails and/or links for large pictures instead.

Thanks for your report. This will be fixed in the next version.


Queries as playlist names - I'll have to check with Peter if that is actually desired.


Yes. Just add a new field to the Properties dialog with Field name: RATING and Field value: 1 to 5.

Or use the Quick Tagger component for a convenient way to set ratings.


Unlikely. Ratings are just a gimmick in my opinion, not serious business.


No, sorry. Please read my roadmap before making suggestions.


Facets are only linked within the same UI Element. This is not going to change.

Also see the point about "Advanced arrangement of Facets" in the roadmap (it's not going to be implemented).

I think i can live withou that! Would you consider at least to display the rating as number and not with stars?

One question: How is the average rating calculated and rounded?


You asked for a better name for "Prevent playlist update". I believe i would have understood the function with a name like "Don't send selection to Facet playlist"