Question for anyone in the know...

How can I activate the "va" mode if i am using the BAND Tag for mp3s (so that it comes up in windows media and itunes) and not "album artist"?

Can somebody help me how to display information about album length? I would like to see this information in Album Mode column in the area where Format and RG info is displayed. Maybe it can be displayed in the row under Format and RG info. Or can RG info be replaced by album lenght info (I don't use RG)?

I usually have more albums in playlist, so if I want to see album lenght I have to select all album tracks and than album length is displayed in status bar. It's a bit uncomfortable.

Thanks for help.

I don't think that is currently possible. When processing items in the list, It goes over them one by one. It has no recollection of previous items and as such, You can't count the time for each track in the album like that.
You might be able to display that with another plugin such as foo_cwb_hooks.

I think that upgrading to the latest columns UI has messed up this config a little bit. It seems like some of the columns in my playlist are running into eachother and it seems that the leading zeros have vanished from the playlist numbers. Is there some code i can change to make it look normal again?

It seems to me that there is a problem with handling alignment for tabbed strings in column ui.

For now just add spaces at the end of every line. Config is heavily commented, you won't get lost.

PS: Will share my edited config somewhat later.

upd: Ok, here is mine Navigator. Do not forget to backup your config.

Random gossip:

When i was using columns ui and coding Nav, i was thinking all the time how nice and more clear album headers ABOVE albums would look like. Now i've switched to single-column playlist and played around a bit - and have come to the conclusion that while it it looks cool, it actually looks less clear if album-headers are on top. And if you work with mixed playlists and move tracks around, it is absolutely irritating how the lines jump around adapting.

I guess, in the long run i will return to the classical "album info left, track info right"-layout.

- Lyx

Ah, thank you very much

Does it mean that we have chance to see single column style Navigator in future?

Probably not. I'm just doing this layout for myself. It may be useful for some people when its more mature (especially since its one of the rare(or the only?) layouts where colors can be set centrally in the globals). However, it is by far not as feature-packed and modular as navigator was.

So, yes i will probably post a new layout for SCPL some day, but it unprobable that it will be similiar to Nav - because i'm just creating a config which is useful for me - not one which is useful for as many people as possible.

- Lyx

Hi, I'm new here. I've just started using Navigator and find it really great -- a great space-saver. However, I've noticed a problem with the "Age" column. No matter how old a track is, it registers as being "1 days" old. I've checked the "last played" field in track properties, and there's no problem with that. Can anyone help?

I'm using the official play count dll in the 0.9x foobar. I can't understand it, but here's the code in the "Age" edit column screen:

plum, problem is probably in system_d-2000. Try looking into it in the globals tab. Or try downloading my modification of Navigator. I've had somewhat similar problem in the begining. Though it was with older columns ui, so I'm not sure.

Lyx, as for me the main feature of Navigator is it's usefulness. So I'm eagerly waiting for the moment you'll share your config

Oh, by the way. I was wondering for a while. What is the way to handle playlists like "%Rating% IS 5" without using album-/single-mode switch? Such playlists contain album tracks that should be displayed as singles, because no full album usually appear in there. You said that Navigator2 will have no need in "-s-" switch. That was the first time the question arose. But then you abandoned the Navigator, so I decided to stuck to old Navigator fixing it whenever foobar changed behaviour. And now I'm trying to do something on my own and so I wonder.

Thanks slotos. I've copied your mod to the components folder, but nothing's different so far. Will it modify the settings retroactively, or will I have to wait at least 24 hours for the mods to work through?

Open foobar2000 properties dialog.
Go to Display - Columns UI.
If you have made any changes to your config and want to save them - use Export button to do so.
Use Import button to import modified Navigator from the fcs I've posted.

Thanks sloto, that worked perfectly. Awesome work!

I had no plans to support such features in "single/albummode", mainly because i think that the single/albummode approach is fundamentally flawed and a hack - so trying to support such playlists amounts to writing a hack for a hack. In a hybridmode-playlist which works via contentgroups, all such problems dissappear, because you no longer need to "fake it".

Unfortunatelly, AFAIK Columns UI still does not support contentgroups. Single-Column Playlist does support them, but has no straightforward way yet to group singles. So, to put it simply: currently, there is no sane method available to implement hybridmode playlists via contentgroups.

- Lyx

Hmm...I loaded album.fcs but nothing changes:



What's wrong with that? Once I loaded it, it worked. I am confused

Hi I use your fsc but i`don`t have any rating... tag-matrix, Where is a problem ? I`have playcount unofficial.

http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/7554/73836505ta9.jpg

As I see tag-matrix is working quite good. You have properly tagged files and all fields of tag-matrix are highlighted.
Navigator uses %rating% tag for rating display, both file tag and custominfo field works.
If you want to see your playback statistic in the playlist (though it is quite space consumptive) - go to Preferences - Display - Columns UI - Playlist View - Columns (tab) and check the Show Column checkbox for Daily plays/Total plays/Last played. Alternatively you can right-click at the playlist column titles and select playcount statistic fields to display.
Also I don't understand the reason for using unofficial playcount plugin, because official one has everything you need IMHO - %first_played%, %last_played% and %play_count% and is able to write statistic to file tags automatically. If play count is not displayed - possible reason is that unofficial component uses %play_counter% tag instead of %play_count%. If it is the case I can modify config so it will allow setting play count field in globals tab.

PS: It is Navigator-Suite developed by Lyx. I've only updated it to latest foobar2000 and added some specific "fixes" for foo_dumb and official playcount component. Those minor fixes do not make this config mine in any way.
PPS: Now I'm using Navigator-Suite 2 Alpha (very) slowly modifying it to satisfy my needs. So I beg you pardon if I'm slow in understanding your problem. Things may have became messed up in my head.

Official playcount was not supported because:

1. even though the community spent about a whole month deciding on a standard for playback-stats, and there was already a plugin out which honored that, official playcount ignored that and used its own scheme. So i continued to support what was decided by the community, not by a single person.

2. Official playcount does NOT have everything which Navigator needs. It lacks first_played support.

3. Official playcount was originaly only meant as a test for peter.

edit: nevermind, i saw that you wrote that official playcount now supports first_played. At the time i wrote Nav, this was not the case.

Ok thanks for your advice. I back to using Navigator_1.4.3 - albummode default, with play_count unofficial and now I have switched on stats (last play,age...etc), but for the whole time the rating dosen`t work Doesn`t mater if the song was played 10 times or 2 times field rating doesn`t change

i use album mode, where it says Format: MP3 / VBR2 or VBR V2 how do i change it to display the average bitrate for the album so it says something like Format: MP3 / 255kbit VBR ?

I am not certain if i changed the position where it is defined in the 2.0.0 alpha release.

Anyways, it is either defined in the globals in the "metadata detection core" at the position where the "quality" var is defined - or it is defined directly in the column.

- Lyx

I can't figure out how did you manage to make it display strings within brackets in different colour? I'm not very bright in coding, can you just point it out for me?

$replace is your friend :) Just (ab-)use it to inject colors before the opening bracket and after the closing bracket.

P.S.: Even though $replace is very useful, it is also one of the slowest functions. If you need to do multiple replaces, then you can save resources by stacking them all into a single $replace, instead of multiple ones. A general rule of thumb when estimating code-efficiency is to count the number of $$$ in your code - the more $'s, the more "expensive" your code is, lol.

P.S. 2: if columns ui could just finally get contentgroups, i may get interested in returning to columns ui coding. I'm fed up with the mess which SCPL and the like are.

what do i change here to get the average bitrate for the album?

Nothing. It is technically impossible currently.

Hi there,

Sorry for the newb post but I've got a fairly simple problem that I havn't a clue how to fix. My PC crashed and I lost my config which had looked like this: http://www.zen85473.zen.co.uk/foobarconfig.jpg - I know I must have just copied a string in somewhere since I've seen that look on other peoples foobar installs. I'm just hoping someone can provide a link to what it is that I need to get this look back, since foobars gone back to black on white basicness since I lost my config in the crash and I really havn't a clue how to get back to where I was.

Sorry if this threads in the wrong place, and apoligies for its noobyness. But I know my config was based around the Album mode of navigator - if a mod could delete it if it's in the wrong place that'd be great. Thanks

is it possible to change %bitrate% every 5 seconds or something.
// per second is very annoying but I want a little average so // per track isn't an option.

The question was about albums, not tracks - displaying average album-bitrate is technically impossible. Columns UI TAGZ can only see one track at a time, not more.

Hmm, obviously I'm running version 0.6 (foo_navigator is version 0.6 here). I've done quite some custom scripting here and there to get things displayed the way I want. The problem is, I don't remember everything I did, and now I don't know what is default and what is mine. What's the best way to upgrade without losing everything?

Edit: Nevermind, foo_navigator was something else. I have the latest version (1.4.3). On to my "bug" report then: Using totaltracks=1 as a method of determining whether a track is single is not the best idea IMHO. There are albums that only have one track, e.g. Amarok by Mike Oldfield. Is there a way to disable this check?

Should be somewhere in the globals. Though, you will most probably not like the result - if a 1-track album gets treated like an album, then the display will look weird and the album-title will get cropped. This is because the layout is designed to asume that all albums have at least two tracks - it has no logic to display 1-track albums in a sensible way - therefore the treatment like singles.

- Lyx

Found it. I still prefer it this way, with the Album Mode column not being empty.

Also, when single mode is activated in album (hybrid) mode, why isn't the artist displayed in the Title & Length column, as with various artist albums? As it is now, I can't see artists at all when the songs are singletracks.

I wish somebody continued developing Navigator-Suite...

What features are you missing? It has a load of features, you can customise it till the end of the earth, and I've never encountered a bug with it.

Well, there were new features planned for v2.0, after all. Also, I hoped developing ColumnsUI schemes would encourage further development of ColumnsUI itself.

I have no plans to continue development of Navigator myself. Others are free to pick up where i stopped. However, anyone who is a skilled and responsible programmer may want to ask himself if developing on the currently existing UIs makes sense, or if it maybe would make more sense, to create an entirely new UI. If you develop on official UI, CUI, SCPL or PUI, you may be placing bets on a dead horses.

As for myself, i'm currently involved in various projects, fb2k-related and non-fb2k-related - all of them aren't ready for public testing/consumption yet.

- Lyx

P.S.: The main features which were planned for Nav 2.0, relied on support from CUI - namely contentgroups. Those features weren't implemented and probably will never be implemented into CUI.

I just downloaded navigator and I'm really impressed. My only issue is with playcount. I get nothing in TotalPlays and the LastPlayed always shows today (once the file has been played once). I'm using the official foo_playcount. I saw that someone else has had the TotalPlays issue and posted a code snippet, but I'm new to fb2k and CUI and I didn't quite understand what to do with the code. Can anyone help? Thanks.

Actually Age and Dailyplays don't work either, but I can live without those... thanks again.

I still hope someone would pick this up. Now that PanelsUI has problems with the latest version of foobar2000, I'm going back to good 'ol CUI. And Navigator-Suite is still my favourite scheme. Too bad it isn't developed anymore. Maybe just a bit of cosmetic makeup for it to fit NG Playlist better, anyone?

Lots of changed fieldnames + adaption to NG-Playlist = complete rewrite.

Honestly, the only thing which nowadays can be "recycled" from Navigator, isn't the code, but the idea and intentions behind it. What you as a user "see" and how you use it, is what can be "ported".... but what happens behind the scenes is now quite obsolete.

I apologize if this is the wrong place to post this, and if it has been answered already...and by the way very nice work all.
I am using foobar 9.5.3 with Navigator. I have figured out how to change some of the colors for a custom look. How can I change the now-playing blink so that it blinks 'darker' instead of 'brighter'.

Thanks for any help. It is very much appreciated
RC

thanks lyx. I really like this a lot for columns ui.