I did that and it stayed exactly the same (as in, the same as what i had before). The settings don't seem to be updating. :/

After you make a change, shift+right click on a panel and select the format it should use (even if it selecting what you already think its using)

Oh, OK, that helps. That updates it.

I'm not sure if it's a bug or if i just messed up, but my sort string still isn't working. It does something -- it removes all the artists that begin with 'the ' from the list. This is the same sort string i'm using in the play list, though, and that works fine, so i think something's wrong with Browser. Unless, again, i'm mistaken about how the sort criteria is supposed to work. :/

I'm testing the thing a bit. Let me ask you some questions.

1) I created 8 panels presets and I list them from top to bottom:

Genre
Style
Artist
Performer
Instrument
Instruments
Performers
Title

I have this kind of a layout:



It seems to me that Style and Artist are both children of Genre at the same level.
When I click on an item in Artist nothing changes in Style and viceversa.
Am I correct?

2) In preferences, it would be nice having a column where to choose the parent panel (or the antecedent) for each panel config line).

In this way we will be able to have more than one panel at the same level with the ability to choose which ones and which their parent will be.
(This makes me think of cubism a little as we will be able to see different sides of our collections at the same time.)


3) Somewhere you talked about n panels: will we have space for storing more than 8 presets, one day?

4) Maybe could be useful being able to choose to not show "All" in some children panels...

Thanks.

Yes, thats a bug in the input control, that I have fixed in my development version.

I would strongly advise against having more than a few panels though, because speed is going to be an issue.

The order of precedence is exactly the order of the items in the edit boxes in the preferences. There is no support for sibling levels and multiple children, etc and I dont believe that adding that is going to likely.

I still think there must be something wrong with the sort criteria. If i try to do anything related to the tags displayed in the panel, they just get removed from the list.

e.g., if i put $replace(%artist%,'the ','test ') in the sort box, it just removes every artist with the %artist% field from the browser. Same thing happens if i try $substr(%artist%,2,$len(%artist%)). Just removes it entirely.

I'll look into it.

You may want to think about using the sort string as the formatting string and sorting by '*' though, because it will be faster, due to the implementation.

Well, it's not really life-or-death or anything. I just wanted to try to get the browser to ignore the word 'the' at the beginning of artist names without actually changing the way it displays the artists. (That's the way i have it set for my play lists.) If i can't get it to work for some reason, it's not a horrible tragedy. But it'd be nice i guess.

Thank you for great plugin!

It's really handy to select multiple albums by one artist, is there a way to select multiple artist from single album (in case it's a various artists release)

The last few revisions have been awesome.

A simple suggestion regarding user-friendliness though. You might want to document the <CTRL>+<ENTERR> function somewhere in the browser preferences window. Or simplify the process entirely and implement an "add new" button in the browser preferences window, similar to how the album list views preferences operates. Whereas you'd have your list of headers and the following <up> <down> <delete> <add> buttons. Double clicking a header brings up a popup window where the three fields can be edited. Like I said, mimicking how the album list edits its views.

Thank you cwbowron for the wonderful plugin.

I am trying to accomplish the same thing as lav-chan and I have been having similar issues. This is the sort string I have been using, it has worked in the past.



When this is placed in the formats field and the sort field is * the artists with 'the ' at the beginning are sorted as they should be, without the 'the' at the beginning. However, when placed in the sort field the results are not sorted as they should be. It is difficult to discern a pattern for the most part the fields seme to be sorted alphabetically but there are places where random albums appear for no reason.

Never mind, after some combination of refreshing the browsers and shift+right clicking the display is now sorting and displaying in the desired format.

Sort Criteria in foo_browser version 1.1.0 and above not work correctly.

I create new column "Last Played" with format string %last_played% and sort criteria string

$sub(99999999,$substr(%last_played%,1,4)$substr(%last_played%,6,7)$substr(%last_played%,9,10)).


With this string I must sort playlist by by tag %last_played% reversly, but result is bad:

2006-02-10
2006-03-17
2006-02-10
2006-01-19
2006-03-10
.....
2006-03-24
2005-12-08

Hello, first of all, thanks for this awesome plugin, everything works fine...

But I'm a total newby concerning sorting strings and : I'd like to know how, if it's possible, to show only my own personal genre, and not the other ones. In another words : what is the string to choose genre I want to show...? (can't find it in the forum, neither in the foobar string help)


P.S. : I'm aware that my english is bad (it takes me 10mn to write this)... Hope someone will understand my question...

I get similar results with trying to do "recently added."

hi,...

great plugin, but it would be nice to have menuentries just like they are in the albumlist panel,...

i think of "add to playlist", "send to playlist" and so on,...

not the ones in the utilsmenu because there you have to select the playlist. i want to add the album, song,... to the actual playlist by doubleclicking.

will this be implemented or is it already and i just can't find it.


thanks

Tommy01, you need foosion's utilities component. It adds an 'Edit/Add to Current Playlist' function that you can set double-click to perform.

@lav-chan

thanks a lot

I havent yet been able to reproduce this.

I set up a panel with this setup:

Header: Artist
Format: artist
Sort: $replace($replace(%artist%,the ,),The ,)

and it seems to work correctly...

That 'artist' thing is kinda weird, i don't really understand how it works. Your replace function seems to work correctly when i do that, but it sorts all weird -- for some reason it goes full albums -> <MISSING> -> single tracks. The only thing that separates single tracks from full albums in my library is the 'garbage' tag, and i have no idea why the browser panel would be looking at that if i didn't tell it to. Or why '<MISSING>' comes in the middle. Totally weird, you might have to explain that one to me.

But yeah, it does, for example, place 'The All-American Rejects' immediately after 'Alkaline Trio' instead of down in the Ts.


If i try the sort string $replace($replace($meta(artist,0),the ,),The ,) (same as yours, but i hate field remapping) with a formatting string more to my liking -- $if2($meta(artist,0),$char(13)'(none)')) -- i get similar weird behaviour:

(1) It's not using $meta(artist,0), it's still using %artist%. For example, 'Rika Muranaka' is in the 'A's because her tracks have 'Akira Yamaoka' in the %album artist% field. (If i set the sort string back to * it puts Rika Muranaka in the 'R's where she belongs.)

(2) It still puts all the artists who have single tracks at the bottom of the list instead of just putting them all in alphabetical order. (Again, if i set the sort string back to * it behaves correctly.)

(3) It still puts '(none)' (which is what i replaced '<MISSING>' with) in between the 'full' artists and the 'single' artists. (If i set the sort string to * it goes back to the top.)

It does correctly ignore 'the' when sorting, so i guess that's a plus....


The string above actually isn't the one that i normally use, but i'm sparing you the specific details since i use a weird tagging method that you probably won't be able to reproduce without a lot of extra work. You shouldn't need my specific string to see that the sorting options are broken though. :/


edit:
This probably doesn't matter, but just in case: I have Windows XP with SP2.

I too have problems with panel sorting.

I set up a single Genre panel (with default settings) and when I browse selecting All, songs are not sorted by Genre (I have a column in my PL, so it's easy to check ).

Also, on Win2k the drop downs in the preferences are not exploded: only one row is visible and I have to use the keyboard to make a selection.

Alessandro

Any chance of adding support for customizable captions? Instead of stating Browser I would love if I could customize it to "Genre" or "Artist"....

Thanks for the compoenent, I can't believe we went without this for this long!

I dont think that it is possible due to the order in which things happen. Column UI asks for the name (caption) before I know what is going in the panel.

I allow myself to ask again, is there a way to show only the chosen genre, I don't know the string to use...? Maybe someone can answer or give me an url where some infos are...

Thanx in advance....

Its not possible to show only one genre, but it is possible to show one genre, and an "other" category or something similar.

use a format string such as:



look at /titleformat_help.html in foobar2000 program directory for more information about what that does.

Thx a lot...

I've already look at it, but unfortunately, the given informations aren't very ample...
But thx for the code, even if it doesn't seem to do exactly what I expected...
Maybe there's an url where I can find more informations, Google doesn't gave me results I hoped for? (questions, always questions )

cwbowron: foo_browser overwrites the browser playlist on startup, this renders the "resume playback on startup" option useless. Could you change the behaviour, so that the playlist is only updated when you select an entry in the browser?

Regards; ilikedirt

Any chance to get "Send to playlist", "Add to playlist" and "Send to new playlist" in the context menu, like Album List?

Also, drag-and-drop from a browser panel onto a playlist would be nice.

I may add those after I finish updating playlist tree, but that is a long process. If I do implement it, I would probably develop an entirely different component that adds those items to the global context menu, and possibly some more. If anyone else wanted to give that a try I could furnish them with some code that did something similar under 0.8.3

Searched the whole thread and found the same question - without an answer. But it's essential, I think: How can I force foo_browser to sort the created playlist by criteria determined by me (for example: browse by album, the playlist has to sort by tracknumber)?

Try "General->Sort incoming items by:" in the foobar preferences

Thanks a lot, that seems to work.
But wouldn't it be nice if you can configure the browser panels itself to sort by criteria (like foo_albumlist e.g.)?

Great component, that is the one I missed for a long time!!! Keep up the good work!

Is this not what the third edit box in Browser config allows? "Sort Criteria"? Or are you talking about something different?

I thought that, too. But doesn't work for me, or I have misunderstood the sense of that. A wiki would be nice...

Hi,
I was using playlist_tree with fb2k 0.8.3. Now I switched to 0.9 and foo_browser. My question is - can I somehow create dynamic playlists like I could with playlist_tree? For example 50 most played songs, never played songs, 100 highest rated etc. Thanks.

foo_browser is not foo_playlist_tree.
So you will be able to do that
- when foo_playlist_tree will be updated
- with autoplaylist (an official additionnal component)

Ok, i had this working not too long ago. but now that i switched my foo around again it doesnt do nothing but clear everything when i click on em. For example, i added all my music and it never showed up in the browser i click on ALL inside the browser and it just clears my playlist and i have to keep adding it all back again.

Ive tried resetting everything and starting over but it still gives me the same trouble. ANY idea why this is acting up now when it wasent before? thanks


~nightwingz



EDIT: NVM I FIXED IT, JUST HAD TO RIGHT CLICK AND GO TO BROWSE INSIDE MY PLAYLIST

is it just me or when u load foo_browser for the first time and it tries to add all your tunes to the panels it goes nut memory usage wise
i saw it spike to 424mb of usage

i have 230gb of music so i usually expect a delay of sorts but this is crazy
this is similar to the way musikcube and itunes function and they are very quick so i am just wondering if i am doing something wrong

cwbowron, thanks for great browser component. Are you interested to fix the following bugs (if possible)?:
- playback follows cursor everytime i switch to different bwowsers playlist, no matter if i unchecked it in playback menu
- as someone mentioned before, resume playback at startup function becomes useless, because browsers playlist is always selected on startup
- doubleclick on statusbar to highlight now playing item when on different playlist doesnt work too

When I have foo_browser installed, the changes on files are not tracked by the media library anymore. So if I delete a file within foobar, it will remain in the library; if I rename a file using masstagger, the library will display both the old and the new name. To solve this I have to delete both the *browser* playlist and the foobar database.

Furthermore, rescaning the media library or resetting the browsers don't solve the problem.

Yeah, Ive got about 300gb and the loading delay is the only thing thats keeping me from using foo_browser now. I havent really used itunes much, so Im not sure if it has similar loading times, but I know that anytime I click "All" it ususally takes at least 25 seconds to populate the lists. I think what you need is some kind of caching mechanism to hold the contents of the lists until they are manually repopulated by the user.

If any programmers out there want to take a look at the code to see if they can improve the speed, let me know, I'll gladly share the code.

Suggestions for speed improvements:

1 - Don't use a Title panel. Just use the browser playlist for browsing individual files.

2 - Sort by "*". This lets me keep the display list in sorted order and I can shortcut the search.

thanks cwbowron i will try those ideas.
i know it must be hard trying to suit everyones requests and demands

especially when this to me seems more of an issue with the media library system itself rather then your component. when i rescan my media library it takes along time...

i think this is just an unfortunate side effect of the size of my music

I'm not using a title panel, mine just goes as far as album. Hopefully someone can speed up the code a bit.

Another suggestion to improve speed would be an option to disable the "all" entry on the first panel (parameter on a per panel basis); this would prevent from rebrowsing the entire library.

hey, i have this minor problem one artist is showing duplicate files, any way to fix that?

The problem is probably due to a duplicate in your media library... Try rescanning the media library...

did so, nothing.

I'm getting a problem..

When I select a genre or artist or whatever, it creates a new playlist, but when I change to another (genre, artist, etc) it create anooother one playlist and so...

it's ok?

i don't want to have loooots of playlists while browsing the items, and need to delete one by one.. ufff...


any suggestion?

What is your browser playlist set to?

If its somethign with TAGZ in it, change to something that doesnt involve TAGZ... i.e. "*Browser*"

Or do you wish that the component automatically removed its last playlist when it populates a new one?