great.. thx for the lightning fast fix

Just good luck I checked the board now Please, post a feedback from the site if bugs are found, it probably reaches me faster.

Where can I find Latest MANUAL for Format Strings/??????

Ever clicked the Help button?

@ upNorth

Can You add tracknumber and album name to single mode?

@upNorth:

Hi,

I'm testing your "hybrid" scheme and I like it very much (using it in single mode).

I would like to avoid repeating the artist name when more than one song from the same artist appear in the playlist (sorted by artist, of course): is it possible? I tried looking at the code, but was lost quite soon...

TIA for your help.

Alessandro

PS: BTW, the format string site is really helpful. Perhaps entries could be divided in two major (for me, at least) categories: album or single files mode.

Done, but there is a problem with Unicode again. Better wait untill amppa has fixed it before you download the new one.
edit: The problem has been SOLVED and the code is working.
Any constructive feedback or bug reports would be appreciated.

Can't be done. One entry has no knowledge of its neighbours. Thats part of the reason I use album mode myself. Don't like all the duplicated info
If it could be done, it would open a whole new dimension...

Then I can put my code in both
And expand it to fit in every new categori

edit: updated status to problem solved

Sorry for the late reply...
So, right now, I use this code from megar, and it's working quite good.
So, I think this is the only plylist code suitable for both albums, and for single files. Or are there any others ?
And about tagging;
I tag my MP3:s with EAC, (when I'm ripping) and thus they are pretty normal (track titles, artists, tracknumbers, and everything else in the right place...)
Plus a really neat-looking ExactAudioCopy&LAME Encoder in the comment field ! B)
I usually name the files like this:
If it is a single file, then Artist - Track Title.mp3
And in case the file is part of an album, then it's like 01 - Track Title.mp3

If the files are not ripped by me, use a great GPL:ed tool called MP3 TagTools

For me, it seems to be working fine, both string adding and editing unicode strings (look at string UnicodeTest). Are you sure you didn't edit the code with non-unicode text editor or something?

I have no idea what the problem was, but now it works. I used IE instead of Opera this time. Strange...
Or maybe my desktop dictionary interfered?

Anyway, It works now

Just out of curiosity, if this is true (and I have no reason to doubt!) how did you implement album-mode logic? (I guess I'm still hoping to have this feature somehow )

Alessandro

I'm not going to take any credit for inventing the album mode or the logic used. Start reading this thread from the beginning, and you might find the creator.

The logic is simply using each files tags to do what it does. This is the reason tags are so important.
The tracknumber tag is maybe the most important of them all, because it is used to decide what tags to show for each file.

An example for the column showing album info:
If tracknumber=1 : show ----------------
If tracknumber=2 : show artist name
If tracknumber=3 : show album name
If tracknumber=4 : show genre
If tracknumber=5 : show ----------------
If tracknumber>5 : show nothing

This approach can be used with tags that has a common value for all files in an album, to show them only once. Tags like title is shown for all files.
When info about codec is shown only once for an album in the playlist, it is actually a small cheat. The info does only apply to the track that "owns" the line that is used to show the info. This is not a major problem as long as all the files has been encoded the same or in a similar way.

To make the formatting more advanced and to some extent remedy the fact that you don't know anything about the previous/next file, you can add custom tags like: %album artist%, %various%, %lasttrack%, %singletrack% and so on.


Did this make it any clearer? If not, play around with formatting strings some more to understand how it works, or just ask.

Thank you for the explanation. Keep up the good work!

Alessandro

Is there any software available which is able to automatically tag the last track of all my albums with %lasttrack% ?

I'm trying very hard to get to grips with title formatting, but it's slow progress. Although the help file is useful so far as explaining each tag it doesn't explain the format and order to put things as such, unless i'm being stupid. So i'm trying to reverse engineer the default playlist string, but no matter what i remove i'm mostly getting errors. Could someone show me how to to do a couple of things with the default code?

$num(%_playlist_number%,$len(%_playlist_total%)): [%artist% ¦ ]$if(%title%,['['%album% ~ [[%disc%/]$num(%tracknumber%,2)]'] ']DADADA%title%,%_filename_ext%)[ %_length%]

What i would like to do is put the brackets around just the album details and possibly change the colour of the colon thing between the artist and album. Maybe if i see how that is done i can take over from there.

Thanks.

Dan

Well, as far as I can see that code works just fine. If you want to change the color of the thing after artist, just add a 000000 (of course, change the color to what you like ) in front of the mark and then  after it.

This will put brackets around album and disc, and make the colon red:


As you might have guessed, the brackets in the formatting is an alternative $if statement. Brackets will only be diplayed in your playlist if they are within quotation marks like this '['.

My advice would be to stick with regular $if statements untill you get the grip of things. At least it helped me alot to understand how things worked.

While I was at it, I made a similar formatting that I hope can be easier to read and customize:

It has alot of comments, and every visible space and symbol is put in quotation marks. I tried to make it as clear as I could, but it made it alot longer.

It's me again

I have updated my "hybrid" formatting at Foobar2000 Format Strings and would like some opinions and feedback on a new feature.

One of the main goals of my formatting is readability, hence the use of colors. To try to make it more readable I thought of (and implemented) a new feature.

I have quite a lot of parentheses in song titles, and I guess that is quite common. The contents is for the most part extended info of the sort "(feat. .....)", "(.... remix)", "(intro)" and so on. To me most of this is not really necessary, but I don't want to get completely rid of it either. My solution was to make it appear in a somewhat darker color. I works without extra tags, as I found that to be an inefficient solution, a time consuming process and that you would have to remove the mentioned info from the title tag itself. The latter would make the info disappear completly with other players.

As it works now, it will not color anything if the title starts with a parenthesis (like the song by Blondie "(I'm Always Touched) By Your Presence" ) as I assume this to be part of the title, but apart from that it will look for the first one and color the rest of the string.
This feature is implemented as an option that can be turned on and off at the top of the code. Looks like this:

Default is on.

I you want to enable this but encounter a song where the contents of the parentheses should not be colored, the tag %LTA% (Leave Title Alone) can be used to skip any coloring of that particular title. Assign the tag any value you like.


I realize that this might be over the top for some, but one of the many features I enjoy with foobar2000, is that I can customize even the minor details.
If this this is old news and I'm reinventing the wheel, please let me know.
But at least I hope someone will have a use for it apart from myself.

Edit: Changed default status to on.

Well, you haven't completely reinvented the wheel, but I've been doing something like this with comments and artists on various artist CDs But actually I just noticed I have been dumb enough to leave the parentheses white, corrected now (but not on the page yet)

BTW, your formatting is great - it's really informational and you'll just have to take a really quick look to know all the specs on the album, great job!

Edit: So I meant I only had used the IDEA before you, but not the way you did. I had only changed the color of comment and va artist.

@ upNorth
Can You connect album mode with single mode?



and in single mode maybe You can change position of track number (...|artist|tracknumber|title|album)


Thank You for great format string.

I'm not sure what you want me to do. Do you want all the single files in album mode to show tracknumber and album info?
I'll look into it later and see if it can be done in a way that makes sense and looks good (without too much custom tagging and breaking other intended features).


I tried this, but I don't think it looks good. Personally I think the tracknumber belongs with the album info, but I might change my mind later




Btw: I updated my formatting to support coloring of parentheses in single mode too. I forgot that one last night. I also changed it to be on by default.

I don't think I will have the time to do too much the next weeks, but you never know

I forgot to enable e-mail notification on my message, so have only just seen the replies. Thanks anza and upnorth. I'm having a go now, the similar format you've done, upnorth, is extremely helpful.

Dan

Hy
i wanted to thank everybody for their great work! Everyone makes great strings, so, thanks
but i have a little problem.I want to edit a string (uglee), rip some stuff out that i don't use (year and album-gain info). I tried to remove it myself, but i got syntax error all the time. Can someone help me?

Well, it's nothing strange, I guess name fit not only the color scheme

Here's a stripped variant:

Locate appropriate part and replace it. Should work.

Thanks ak!!
Guess i'm not too bright for string-coding

Just a note for the ones wanting to know the last_track...
if you format your %tracknumber% as "xx/xx" meaning track x of x you can figure out when you got the last track.

I really like that greenish format by anza. I just wish there was a way that it would still display the Artists and Album on the first mp3 it sees other than the one marked as Track 1.

I was just looking back at the changelog and noticed that under 0.667 there is an entry "fixed issue with playlist repainting and tabbed columns with different colors, introduced in 0.666"

Anyone have any idea what this is referring to?

Also, has anyone played around with embedding color codes within meta-fields? Seems to work, so I guess the question is more about whether anyone's found a useful application.

Finally, see my post in the thread about subsongs, which is applicable to title formatting.

I found the playlist fromat string in this topic so I won't copy it here, but my status bar code is quite good I think

You may put out the tick from the 'show attenuation' box in the display section to make enough space for everything.



Sorry for the quality of the screenshot

http://www.pc-shop.hu/curian/foo_full.jpg

now it uses $upper only when $abbr is needed in the album string

UpNorth,

My apologies if this has already been addressed, but I dug a few pages back (which takes a while over dialup) and couldn't find an answer.

I've been using your strings for a few months and have been super happy with them, you are awesome. I just got the latest version of your hybrid string which is great. The only problem that I'm having is with the progress indicator in the status bar.

I got the new one because I was using the Lucidia Console ANSI and it was having problems with special characters. I got the new version of the status bar and it has '?' for the progress indicator. Am I supposed to be using a special font? I have it set to Lucidia Console right now.

Also, can you explain really quick how the %various% and %preformer% tags are meant to be used?

Thanks a lot and keep up all of the great work.

*Ok, I'm stupid and didn't see the "Status Bar Font" on the web page. I switched it to Lucida Sans Unicode and I'm still getting '?"

@Packman: Welcome to the forum

Sorry about the problems with my statusbar. It was caused by my Opera browser when I uploaded the code. Should work now (still need IE from time to time...) with both 'Lucida Sans Unicode' and 'Lucidia Console ANSI'.


I don't use %performer% anymore myself, it's a remnant from when I started formatting. It's still in the code because someone asked for it and for backwards compatibility.

This is what I do with my 'various artists' albums:
I don't really need tags anymore, because I start the name of the folder with 'VA - '
That way they are automaticaly recognised for what they are. Works for both:
'VA - albumname\track1.mp3' and
'VA - albumname\CD1\track1.mp3'
An alternative is to give all the tracks the %various% tag and assign a value to it (I use %various% = yes). The %performer% tag will work the same way.
For DJ compilations I use the %album artist% tag to show e.g. 'DJ Tiesto' insted of 'Various Artists' in the first column.

Hope this made it clearer. If not, just ask

Btw: Thanks for bringing this up, because I found a 'bug'. The %performer% tag should be used when %artist% is not present. Will be fixed sometime in the future.

Ok, that did it. I think I was having a similar problem because I was using Firebird and it wasn't recognizing the characters. Works great now, thanks a lot.

I want to put the progress into the window title in %.
My only idea is this:


But this returns a constant 0 :/

What's the problem?

@curian: I'm not sure what's wrong with yours and I don't have the time to look into it, but if you want it to work you can use this:

This works fine in 0.7 and 0.667



Yours returns zero because you need to multiply before you divide, because the division you've done will return a decimal (between 0 and 1) and the math functions only support/take integers (whole numbers) so your code will return zero for 99% of the song as the decimals arent really rounded to nearest whole number, rather cut off = rounding down.

Okay I understood the problem and the code you wrote works just fine.

Thanks

Am currently busy updating my string to show me when there is no replaygain value present. However I don't seem to be succeeding.

When I use the following:

$get(artistinfo) $if(%_replaygain_album_gain%,*,NO REPLAYGAIN)$get(fileinfo)


the playlist will always display the NO REPLAYGAIN reminder, even if the tracks are properly replaygained.

Have tried impementing this in several ways and don't seem to be able to get it working.

(artistinfo) and (fileinfo) are properly defined and work just fine (did not want to post the entire string)

(:B 0.7b22)

alrighty, this one's easy, albeit non-obvious:

all the "tech info" fields - aka replaygain, bitrate, codec and so on - require two underscores before their name when you reference them. "special" fields - filename, path, subsong, etc - use one, and regular metadata doesn't use any.

hence, the problem (which you've probably figured out by now) is that you only have one underscore. so change it to "$get(artistinfo) $if(%__replaygain_album_gain%,*,NO REPLAYGAIN)$get(fileinfo)" and it should work fine.

Wow, really that simple. Already looked at the title formatting help for hours today, but can only spot it now that you've pointed it out.

And I have really tried god knows what.

Thanks a lot for pointing it out

Just tried it and it works fine, time to fine tune now.

Allright, I hope this ones not as easy as the last one . Although I am sorry if it has been answered before and I overlooked it somewhere.

In my formatting string I have this field wich will display the file info:


///////////////////////////////
//// Display file info ///
//////////////////////////////
$puts(fileinfo,
$transition(
$if($stricmp($get(display_file_info),1),
$get(tag_spacer)
$pad($upper($right(%_filename_ext%,4)),5) $pad_right($num(%__bitrate%,4)/$div(%__samplerate%,1000),6))
$if($stricmp($get(display_time),1),$pad_right(%_length%,6)),
$get(spacer_color),000000|000000))


Yet I don't seem to find a way to get %_filename_ext% from either a CD Audio nor a .wav file. In both cases %_filename% works fine and will give me the filename (without extension) in case of a wav file and something like this in case of a CD: 1C76984A,09

So I was wondering if there was any way to make tagz recognize that there is a cd or wav file present. Then I could just manually define a few variables for the file extensions. ie, $puts(CDA_ext,.CDA), $puts(WAV_ext,.WAV) and then make the file info read those values whenever a CD, WAV is detected.

Something like this should do the job then (roughly):

$if("cd detected" by so far unknown method,$get(CDA_ext),$pad($upper($right(%_filename_ext%,4)),5))............

Funnily my title info does display "cd track 09". So there must be a way to get this feedback somehow. Hmh guess I am overlooking something really obvious again. Will go on braking my head over this now.

For CD something like $if($strcmp(cdda,$cut(%_path_raw%,4)),CDDA,FILE)

Thanks musicmusic.

%_path_raw% seems to work for both cases. The one you mentioned and also for showing extension on .wav files.

Strange that %_filename_ext% doesn't work on .wav files though. Well doesn't really matter anymore now

?? i have wavs and $ext(%_filename_ext%) works fine (returns wav). what does %_fileame_ext% return on one of your wavs?

either way,

$if($strcmp(cdda,$cut(%_path_raw%,$sub($strlchr(%_path_raw%,:),1))),CDDA,FILE)

is a better version of the above as you can use it on silence and other things.

Strange I just tried it again by changing %_path_raw% to %filename_ext% and now suddenly %filename_ext% does display the right wav extension.

Yet however when I tried it before it returned all extensions correctly except for .wav, where it returned N/A. I even checked a few times back then, by switching back and forth between(%_filename%) and(%_filename_ext) and it was always N/A for .wav.

Can't really explain it either

Could someone help me here? I am using the Lucinda Console font, but the lines are showing up as dashed lines, and not solid ones.

screenshot:

(the colors are fucked up because i had to save it as gif under mspaint.)

That would be the result of windows converting Unicode to ASCII for you.

If you have Windows 2k or xp, try to find a different text editor that can handle unicode - the 2k/xp versions of notepad will work in a pinch.

If you have windows 95/98/ME, then i dunno what you can do - someone with more knowledge of unicode with older versions of windows would have to help you there.

Allright, back again. Seems like I just can't sort out certain things without you guys help.

After finally finaishing my single based playlist string I couldn't help it and just had to go with the current trend and am wotking on an album based one now.

The problem is, I basically want it to hightlight not only the currently playing track, but also the currently playing album.

Am trying to do this using this code:



Yet somehow this only does what I want if the first track of the album is playing and not if any other tracks are playing. The thing is, I want it to apply the 9B8A74|9B8A74 color when any tracks of the current album are playing. [EDIT] But only to the first track of that album. [EDIT]

Don't even know if this is possible, but I guess it should be.

Any help greatly appreciated.

@ampa:
Thanks for keeping up that formatting string site. Just got my account yesterday. Nice way to learn from other peoples strings.

I'm a little tired, so I might not think straight, but I would say this is impossible. Simply because the current line in the playlist doesn't know anything about the content of the previous or the next one.


I thought it was amppa that kept that site up? Is it more than one site? Or do you talk about keeping it up as in submitting skins? If the latter is the case, I guess you're right, it's billcow

Oops, what an emberassing mistake. You are right it's amppa. Apologies to amppa and billcow for this confusion. Must have gotten that wrong somewhere along this (not to short) thread.



Well the idea behind it was that the currently playing track sets the (playing_album) variable to whatever it's album is and the rest of the formatting string can then call on that variable to compare whether it is the same as the album in that specific line and then adjust the coloring accordingly. I guess you are right though and it's not possible. Although I comletely seem to be overlooking the reason why it doesn't. I probably get the idea of the %isplaying% thing slightly wrong.

[EDIT]
Allright guess I just had to leave the computer alone for a while. Suddenly had one of these revealing moments and completely know now where my train of thought went wrong before. I just completely misinterpreted something. Hmh, guess I'll have to live withought it then.
[EDIT]