i see - so if i understand this correctly, panel's author has to explicitly do something to allow use of $get_global() in its formatting, right?

i thought it would work right away for most places of foobar (using these hooks in foobar 0.9).

could you maybe provide example what has to be done for track info panel to support this?

anyway, i really appreciate all the love and stuff you put in columns_ui, i would have never thought it would get that good .

ooops ...it's not my pc
But even with 32bit the ColumnsUI-buttons are far beyond the standard-buttons... not a matter of taste

@Squeller: People were asking for a maximum of flexibility and now they got it at the appropriate price of an increase of complexity. I don't know a better way as manually dragging panels in the UI itself would become a mess (it already was in the sidebar imho and I'm very happy about it being axed finally).

Yea, it can be a bit of a challange, but it's not that hard once you begin to understand how the splitters work.

don't worry

Yes

No, I don't believe it would be possible using the global hooks.

Well, something like this:

I didn't try and compile it, so its probably bugged. And you'd use whatever format_title function you are already using I guess.

Ok
The bug should be fixed in v4 too.

wow you work fast music music awesome work indeed..

I understand this. I think I understood the layout page, but I've got a problem handling it.

Current problem:

I have a layout like this:



Now I may want to have an additional track info panel on top or bottom of it all. I think I need this:



So how can I easily add a vertical splitter and make the previous stuff a child off it?

And a question: The playlist (as a child of the playlist tabs) is not configurable. Why? I could put the playlist tabs on the same lavel as the playlist, but then the tabs look horrible, they have a thick line at the bottom.

I'm suffering from crashes. Any time I start the task manager (sysinternals process explorer) foobar crashes @columns ui. Anyone else? Win2k sp4 ur1.2

@musicmusic. I'm pretty sure this is support intensive. It may be helpful if there was a way to copy the layout to clipboard (as text).

You need to reprogram your layout in order to add that supplementary track info panel.

Also, upgrade to the latest columnsUI. You probably have build 1.

Hey musicmusic, please add tabbed panel stack natively. it very useful for many people, please made their happy.
all in your hands.

Firstable, to be clear - wine is not an emulator. It works as a complete API rewrite, i.e. more less it's like you are running foobar on some other unique version of Windows, rather that under an emulator. Secondly - as I said, it's not the wine bug itself, i.e. wine quits clearly without eny errors. It's the foobar that reports bug. I am always running wine from console to see its messages and/or errors. Again, there are no wine errors at all when foobar crashes.
I though you will be interested in fixing this bug anyway, since a bug is a bug, at least in my opinion.


But how comes under default UI I won't experience any latency? That's why I assume this is somehow ui_columns fault.


As I said, it's not wine that crashes, it's foobar. I know your point that this bug won't appear under stock windows, but again, it's the ui_columns that crashes, not wine. I know that your plugin is not meant to work under wine, but why not fixing the bug? It could be that this bug could be causing some other bugs that _would_ happen to crash foobar under Windows, too. I _also_ know that it could just be wine that is triggering this bug in ui_columns, though ui_columns should handle this bug exception somehow and not crash badly

Please, mind that I don't want anybody to treat this as a flame war. I want this to be just a pure technical discussion. Consider, that I just want to use this plugin here, too. Some of the bugs that were causing foobar 0.9 unusable under wine were fixed in the latter's recent release, and thus I'd like to make foobar working as the 0.8.3 was. We all want to use foobar, don't we?

Not very easily at the moment. But the ability to copy and paste nodes will make it quite easy to do.


I guess you're referring to the options on the right side of the page. What exactly do you need them for in this situation?

"Not here". But can you post crash log please. Thanks

Is there any way the option to add a "toggle zone" to the left would be possible with adding a zone at the top? That way, I could hide my menus and my search zones, easily.

Well I consider it an emulator. From wikipedia: "A software emulator allows computer programs to run on a platform (computer architecture and/or operating system) other than the one for which they were originally written." You may disagree, I don't think its particulary important anyway.

Right.

There are plenty of ways it could crash in my code and be Wine's fault. "It doesn't prove anything."


Well I am telling you 100% second crash is from unimplemented RealChildWindowFromPoint. If you look at the second crash you can see some odd exception code. Do you know what that exception code is? I don't. My guess: Wine specific. And when I run Wine from terminal I get the second crash too. Accompanied by a message in the terminal saying something about "unimplemented user32!RealChildWindowFromPoint called ... aborting ... passing to debugger". So there you go.


By the same logic: It doesn't happen under Windows, so its Wine's fault.
If I had to guess, I would say its maybe caused by the visualisation. The Columns UI one runs at a higher framerate. And the rendering code is probably quite different and maybe turns out slow on Wine. Plus default UI stops updating when minimised.


Yes, but I explained that above.

I just found a message and patch about the specific problem here in Wine:
http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-patch...ary/023772.html

[edit]Here is some reference for the other problem: message, reply

musicmusic/ is it possible to custmoize the menu toolbar? by that i mean not dsiplaying the help menu for example?

For the second crash: I am hardly not going to use a function because it is not implemented on Wine!
For the first: I said I did "fix" it!

Clearly not in this case.

Please stop calling it a bug in Columns UI! I have added safety check to prevent it from crashing in playlist switcher case. You will notice now ToolTips may not work in the playlist switcher panel under Wine.

Nope, not ATM.


Yes, I was considering making it do that for panels in vertical splitters. I'll probably do it for beta 2.

[/quote][quote name='Stuart60611' post='387430' date='Apr 29 2006, 04:08 AM']
I am having a strange problem with the new the beta and masstaging via buttons. I have several masstagger scripts for rating which work fine and are bound to hot keys. Now I am able to bind these scripts to a series of buttons because the scripts appear in context menu of the new button configuration, but the buttons do not active the scripts when pressed.[/quote]\
[/quote]They seem to work here. Have you checked you selected the correct "Item Group" ?
[/quote]\

I am sure that I am selecting the correct masstaging script which works when bound to a hotkey but does not work when activated by pressing a button to which the script is bound.

musicmusic, using the latest beta (0.1.3b4) I can't really use the context menu options "Move up" and "Move down" in the layout editor - the results are quite unpredictable. I tried it on a subtree on the second level, with three different items, and I ended up with 2 duplicated items and a 3rd different one ordered quite randomly after trying to move them up and down. I can provide a screenshot if you can't reproduce the bug
This thing still rocks, BTW
Thanks, Mark

Hi, actually that doesn't answer the question I asked.

Thanks for the report, reproduced, looking into it

when do you intend to add this?

and on another note: much obliged for your work on Columns UI/albumlist panel.. it's made my collection of classical music so much more organized
(and yes, also thanks to peter&team for the prog itself )

My bad. I did not have the correct item group selected. Works perfect. Thanks a lot for puting this in the new version.

Thanks again for the report. It should be fixed in v5 I just uploaded. But give it a good trashing to make sure


Don't know, when I get time I guess

Hello !
I just updated with new ColomnUI version, 0.1.3.beta v5, Trackinfo 0.8 and Album Art 0.164A. Everything is working fine, except just a stange error message when I'm closing Foobar. It's telling me : metadb_handle leaks: 2 objects.
What does it mean, and how could I remove this message ?
Thanks.

Perhaps I have been using to many autoplaylists recently, but I only now noticed that reordering tracks via keyboard or mouse in the Columns playlist is not undoable. I hope the omission of the relevant playlist_manager::playlist_undo_backup() calls is just an oversight and not due to a deep-felt aversion against the undo functionality.

metadb_handle leaks: 2 objects.
What does it mean, and how could I remove this message ?


change 0.7(track info) work fine

You're right, it is Trackinfo'fault. I have the 0.8 version, and with a previous version, I cannot see the info panel. How can I solve that ?

Thanks for the update musicmusic. My columns_ui setup never looked better and the layout improvements make it so much simpler to use!


Please consider the following feature request: enable parsing of title formatting in the custom title for panels.

The immediate benefit is to utilize the white space that extends across a horizontal title to display additional useful information. Some may even use it for a simple track_info.

i think i've found a bug with columns_ui. ok here's the deal. i have multiple splitters in my config. here's a picture.

now, if i Lock all the panels and splitters, watch what happens to the album art.



as you can see, the panel goes into the status bar but the status bar overlaps it. not a huge bug but still a bug.

also, what does "lock" do anyways?

Like this?

One of the reasons I'm backing off (for now) of v9.- is what Squeller said. I don't think of myself as being particularly, shall we say, 'figure-it-out' challenged (I think I had as much fun config'ing my v0.8.3 as actually using it...), but after trying a LOT of different v0.9 setups, I'm just frustrated enough to pack it in.

And, for whatever it's worth, I still like the sidebar...

"lock" keeps the panel the same size if you resize the window.

i see

Seems to work fine now, thanks!

0.1.3 b5 seems to have pretty high CPU usage.

It had been awhile since I have updated it. The version before this one I was using pav17 I think. I also added albumart and trackinfo but they are not the culprits as I removed them to see if usage dropped. I also removed the visualisation and cpu usage was still high hovering around 20% on my P4 3ghz.

Default UI has no such problems and I am pretty sure none of the previous versions of Columns UI I tried had such a problem either.

Yeah, it does seem to use much CPU when redrawing.

Also it doesn't appear as though the panels are fluid like they used to be? They just stick where they are and the rest gets grey when I resize or maximize.

I would really, really, really appreciate the incorporation of the must-have feature to move a layout tree within the entire layout, that is, to drag them around like I please.

metadb_handle leaks: 16 objects?

You win. I've had only 4 IIRC.


I like the new concept, I understood it now, we're flexible as we can be. The only problem is to implement my ideas. It's too much effort for a simple adding of a panel sometimes.. Freely dragging within the tree structure would help.

@musicmusic, you asked for a crash log. I cannot use the pc this weekend and its working at the pc I'm now on. If fb2k still crashes with the latest beta at the other pc, I'll send a crash log next week.

i know this is probably easy to fix, but what in my code is making each song not playing have a question mark at the end of it.

If you would show your code, that would be much easier a problem to solve...

GOOD point, hmm, maybe its from the title code in columns *shrugs*



it only started to do that after i tried using album list though, and i didnt know what i was doing.

about availability of global vars to other components:
Currently, UI-columns global-vars are executed in a trackspecific-context. When another component does access the global vars, then in which context is this done? currently playing track? Or is the entire global-string accessed and the other component can use it for whatever purpose it wants to? Some clarifications on how this new feature works would be really appreciated.

Also, when this feature was proposed about a year ago, one of its main purposes was color-themes. So, that one could set a global color-scheme in a central place, and all other components could then automatically access it. However, AFAIK there currently is no way for a formatting string to set the exposed playlist backgroud color. It would be great if there would be a way directly in the columns ui global-vars to change this color.

- Lyx

P.S.: Personal opinion: imho color-picks via mouse should be axed completely and all colors be set via string-vars only. Most users use premade formatting strings or create their own ones anyways. I understand that the color-config in the prefs is meant to make it easy for unskilled users to make "simple" playlist-displays without any tagz-knowledge - however, this is a solution to a non-existing problem... there is no "market" for it. I have yet to see anyone who is running columns-ui with only %artist%, %title% in the columns and no style-code or global-vars at all.

I am. Just set the colors to what I want and then modify the special code for the now_playing item in the global page... But what are you talking about exactly? The color picker is good for getting color codes to go, without having to switch to Photoshop or whatever to copy a hex code. In what way is it unnecessary?

Edit: Oh sorry, I misunderstood your request. I think maybe the simple colorpicks for playlist view and switcher could be removed, if there was a very simple introduction to the style tags in clear view so that newbies don't have to look in the documentation to set simple colors.

Edit2: I have one more request in addition to being able to drag items/subtrees within the layout tree. I'd like an ability to duplicate a preset in order to just modify it slightly under another name.

Is it possible to use fields like %album%, %artist%, etc. in the playlist names at the playlist switcher? In another words: is there a way to guess the playlist name from it's content? I'm to lazy to rename my playlists manually, at at 5 opened playlits it's already quite a mess.

But using tag fields in playlist names will probably cause problems when playlist contains multiple albums/artists, not?

To do that i use the last build of playlist tree. by putting %_name% in library panel the playlist created has the name of the folder selected. not sure it is what you want

You could use something that would pick the most frequent artist/album to display as the playlist name, I guess. But I do not think this is possible right now.

Can you center text in playlist switcher? I have tried $char(1)C and enclosing the text with two $tab() without success.

No.
Playlist switcher is not trackinfo panel.

I had a play around and came up with this...

OK, so it isn't really "centred" but the effect is there...
Works best with fixed-width fonts and it won't work if you change the size of the playlist switcher. Must have $puts(width,?) equal to the width of the panel.
This TAGZ business isn't so scary after all

$char(9) works for me in playlist switcher title formatting.

Isn't $char(9) a tab? How do you get it to centre?
Otherwise I feel a bit silly for doing that

Edit: On a side note...
What would be the fastest way to interprete that code? I did $puts(repeat,[...]) so that it would only have to do the calculation once so I could call it again. I suppose thats quicker right? But is doing something like $puts(title,%title%) actually slowing down the interpretation of the code? (Yes, I know it probably makes next to no difference but I think it's useful to know if I do anything "large scale")

If you create your playlists by drag and drop into the Playlist Swicher, you can achieve this to some extent. Have a look at Playlist Switcher -> Drag and Drop -> Compare following string and use output for name if identical for all files dropped

Exerpt from my setup:
Works pretty well for my usage.

The layout system desperates me:

I've got something like this:
http://eolindel.free.fr/images/layout.gif

I want to make foo uie explorer available in a toggle area. But when I click on the extreme left of my screen (wherever) it hides the splitter containing the columns playlist and explorer.

It occures wether toggle left area is checked or not for the explorer panel.

Nothing is checked in any panel or splitter.

But the most amazing thing is that I made something exactly like I wanted which worked an hour ago, but now impossible to make it work in any way..

edit: It's likely to be a bug: I'm trying to restart from the beginning and now it works.

And by the way, as a request: be able to set a default size to a splitter or even each panel. because if we change anything, clicking on apply splits regularly the screen with each splitter. Whereas my splitters haven't the same size.