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Messages - JustSomeone

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1
MusicBee Wishlist / Re: Auto-import of playlists
« on: August 27, 2021, 08:03:36 AM »
I would rather musicbee handle the playlist like how wmp does. Leave it where it is, map the tracks to the songs in the library relatively and leave the physical .m3u file as found. Making backing up of the music folder and restoring a lot more seamless. Also allowing m3u files to be shared between media players like wmp that do have dlna functionality.
If I understand your post correctly I think we are basically on the same page.

Currently MusicBee offers a functionality to manually import playlist files like *.m3u. While I don't know how MusicBee would manage its internal playlists, it appears to me that MusicBee would create a separate internal playlist based on the external playlist specified and not modify the external m3u file in any form.

My idea above was that whenever a playlist file is found in a folder being monitored, MusicBee could execute that very playlist import functionality automatically. I don't have a concrete idea of how MusicBee could recognize an update of an existing playlist (maybe via time stamps), however, a simple auto import of every playlist found on startup might do the job.

Apologies if I haven't made my point clear enough in my initial post. Hope this clarifies.

2
MusicBee Wishlist / Auto-import of playlists
« on: August 23, 2021, 11:52:12 AM »
May I drop an idea for another feature?

Similar to the monitoring of music files in specified folders and auto-update of the music libraries (library settings), if such a monitored folder contains playlist files (e.g. m3u), MusicBee could trigger an auto-import of these playlists. That may not need to be a separate feature, but done in parallel to an update of the music library. A simple checkbox „include playlists“ in the library monitoring / update settings could allow for a switch to turn that function on or off as per a user’s preference.

I imagine this to be useful if external playlists are used (e.g. when MusicBee is used on multiple devices, which are supposed to use the same, synchronized playlists) and are modified more regularly.

3
try this version of mb_vst.dll
https://www.mediafire.com/file/smvaba4coqboamh/mb_VST.zip/file
unzip and replace the existing mb_vst.dll file in the Plugins folder
So many thanks, Steven! Just gave it a try and seems to work like a charm now. Highly appreciated!

4
Hm... thanks for sharing this openly, hiccup. I can't connect to some of the impressions and views you seem to have gotten from my posts, so may I ask further?

- implied that the developer responded to your original post/request without him having a good understanding or having considered the underlying details.

He replied swiftly.
Not to your satisfaction, but unless you think you have a deep and better technical understanding of everything involved, you could accept and appreciate the prompt responses on this forum. Even by the developer himself.
Or you can be unhappy. As you were, and still seem to be.
Where did you get the impression I would think that Steven responded to me without a good understanding?

That was never my thought or intention and would be quite arrogant of me if I would. The only assumption I made based on his response (from my point of view as IT professional, not being specialized in audio software but familiar with software development and IT management processes) is that within 1h he wouldn't have conducted a code inspection in a search for the root cause of the reported behavior. I made this assumption because I wouldn't be able to do that in that timeframe on my own code, especially when it comes to potential memory allocation issues which I find quite tricky to hunt down. However, what I usually can do within 1h is a prioritization of a bug report / request on a number of aspects. Which aspects would have been relevant for Steven to not further investigate for the root cause are not known to me as he didn't elaborate.

Furthermore, why do you think that someone needs to have a better understanding of the technology involved in order to be disappointed with her or his report not being further investigated?

From my point of view users or customers are not expected to have a better understanding of a product. However, if they emotionally connect with a product, of course there will be expectations for their use cases, and naturally there will be disappointments when expectations important to someone are not met. So, as long as things don't get personal, what's the big deal? There always will be expectations not being met. Having said that, I believe that providing a brief rational would help to understand a decision to not further investigate a user report.

- implied (and still do) that since there is a VST addon for MusicBee available, users should expect it to work perfectly with all sorts of VST plugins.

You are aware there are hundreds of them, right? Probably thousands.
And pretty much all of them are designed to be used in DAW studio production software.
(or maybe you know some that claim and advertise they will work perfectly on WinAmp/foobar2000/iTunes/MusicBee/et al. ?)
Posting and sharing with the community (and the developer) which ones work, or which ones don't is of course appreciated and can be useful.
But voicing being unhappy (or disgruntled or whatever) that some won't work, and complaining when that is the case and it can't/won't be addressed or solved for you is something else.
Well, I don't see it in this absolute terms. I don't expect that MusicBee would work smoothly with every and each of available VST plugins out of the box. My expectation is around the situation if someone finds and reports a potentially faulty behaviour with a concrete plugin. Let me elaborate:

Based on my experience there is a variety of different potential root causes for 2 pieces of software to not properly work together, even via standardized interfaces. Some of them can be related to the interface or to the interaction of the pieces of software. And the more parties involved (different developers for different pieces of software, other parties for interface standards etc.) the trickier to resolve. However, other root causes might be around a bug in only one of the software pieces, in this case the VST host or the plugin. (This bug may not surface when combined with another piece of software due to differences in interaction.) Such a potential root cause could be further looked into by a developer on his own within his piece of software. In this context, I personally do have an expectation that a developer of a still supported software is in principle willing to look into such kind of potential bugs. However, I see perfectly reasonable reasons to not look into a specific case - see my next comment below. So my expectation is not that something works flawlessly from the very beginning, or that something gets finally resolved for me, but that a developer is in principle (not in every concrete case) willing to look into a potential bug - with open result.

Can we agree on this or do you have a different view?

Do I get my point across that I make a difference between MusicBee throwing an error in combination with one of my favourite plugins and the response from Steven on my initial bug report? Am I understandable pointing out that I do not complain about the potential bug in the first place, but that I was unhappy with my report not being further looked into and no brief rational for it being provided?

- implied that MusicBee (its developer) is not able to solve this for you since it is not commercial and paid-for software.

Again, by phrasing it like this, you are implying that in principle each and every VST plugin should not only work on professional DAW studio software, but on consumer audio players as well. And if it doesn't, it's likely a lack of programming skills, interest, time, or resources.
Which I believe is a very wrong assumption and standpoint.
Where do you get the impression I would think that the developer is not "able" to solve this for me?

I've neither seen Steven in action nor have I ever had a glance at MusicBee's code. So how should I be in a position to judge Steven's programming skills. Anything in this direction would be nothing short of arrogance and ignorance.

In contrast, I see time and resources as prefectly valid reasons to not look into a specific user report. Genuinely, I'm not sarcastic about this. Time and resources are the main limits for not being able to work on all reports or requests and the reason for the need to prioritize. I myself prioritize every day for me and my teams based on time and resources. And I stated that in one of my early posts to indicate what I would understand as a reason for the decision being made. Furthermore, I see commercial software developers in general to have more resources availabe than the ones developing software in their spare time for free.

Regarding interest, that's where I make another difference between commercial and for free software. Again, no sarcasm, while being a tough argument to defend for commercial software, I personally consider interest as absolute legimite aspect of software shared for free. I could think of a couple of reasons to develop and maintain software in my spare time and offer it for free to others. And one of them is simply my personal interest in a coding challenge or a product I'd like to have for myself. And in such a case, for me interest would be the main aspect when deciding which things to work on.

Again, I pointed this out in my later response to you when mentioning the example of FabFilters response to my report in order to make clear, that I do not have the same level of expectations to a software offered for free than to a commercial software and that I would honestly understand if Steven would say something like "no interest to make MusicBee work with Saturn 2 in my spare time for free".

I am not interested in having discussions with you, nor have any inclination to educate you.
Thanks for clarifying this as it felt that way at times.

5
Presented more as a "voice crying in the wilderness,"  have you updated your bass_vst.dll to version 2.4.1.1?  I "think" there were changes in the newer version regarding caching behavior; downloadable here: https://www.un4seen.com/stuff/bass_vst.zip
Many thanks for your hint, sveakul. I just gave it a try and unfortunately no luck, the combination of MusicBee and Saturn 2 still shows the same behavior. Anyway, much appreciated!

I assume from a previous post you are already using the July 2019 update of Steven's 1.0 VST host (which kept the 1.0 version but changed from the 2016 original).
Yep, I've downloaded MusicBee as well as the VST and UPnP plugin from this website in May 2021.

6
What you (and others) probably should also understand:

VST stands for Virtual Studio Technology.
It was developed and designed for multitrack DAW software. That is professional (and semi professional) software for multitrack recording, mixing and processing. (DAW stands for Digital Audio Workstation)

VST was never intended to be used for simple stereo playback on players such as MusicBee.

We should consider it a marvel that plugins and players such as MusicBee make it possible to even use some VST plugins that are intended for these DAWs to begin with.
Some VST plugins will work, some won't. Some with limitations or issues.

Complaining about it, and even being 'unhappy' or 'sad' when some don't work properly or perhaps even not at all, to me shows that the complainant does not have a good understanding of what VST and most of its compliant plugins are designed and created for.
Ok, so once more, let's try to straighten things out.

I'm perfectly familiar with what VST is or originally has been designed for. No need to educate me. So I'm aware that VST plugins are initially not built for being hosted by music players. However, MusicBee offers a VST host plugin. Thus, there is an indication for me as a user that MusicBee would support such use cases. So, of course, there is some expectations - or let's say hope - that it would perform with my preferred plugins.

After a while I found out that one of my favourite plugins seems to be not properly working with MusicBee. So I compiled a bug report, encouraged by the section in this forum explicitly asking for it. I've tried to write my report in a way to make it as easy as possible to reproduce the behavior as I have experienced it. I genuinly hope that we can agree upon that this initial post of mine is anything but a complaint.

1h after posting my report Steven stated that he won't take any action on it without any explanation or rational. This is his absolute right to do so. And the decision can be very reasonable from his point of view e.g. because of my use case being rare or because of dependencies on legacy third party libraries. Nevertheless, it was that response that left me disappointed. And I articulated exactly that with all due respect. So consider this as my open and honest feedback as one of your many users on the decision made and the communication style. Steven, you or anyone involved can take that feedback as food for thought for improvement, dismiss it or ignore it entirely. Totally up to you and genuinely fine with me whatsoever.

But I begin to get the impression, that you try to tell me that I have an obligation to be grateful for being "swiftly" turned down within 1h (as this would be any better than to be turned down after e.g. 2 days) and to ignore that potential bug because all the other great things with MusicBee. This is, frankly, bullshit. I can perfectly love MusicBee for all the great things it does (which I made absolutely clear in my posts I do) while recognising a bug which degrades my personal use case and looking for support. And as it is Steven's right to take no action upon my bug report without further explanation, it is my absolute right to be disappointed about that.

Apart from that, based on the decision made, and because the Saturn 2 plugin is important to me, I do exactly what even Steven himself told me to do, namely looking for an alternative to MusicBee. And fortunately JRiver and Audirvana seem to be two other music players working fine with my preferred plugins. Furthermore, FabFilter currently looks into the bug report I raised with them and investigates whether they can do something with reasonable effort on their end - although my use case does not belong to those use cases these plugins are originally built for and although they suspect the VST host to not clear the cache. Whatever the outcome is, and I personally think it is far more likely not to be the outcome I hope for, I feel valued as their user and customer. Having said that, I certainly respect the fact, that FabFilter is a whole team with paying customers while MusicBee seems to be developed by one man and offered for free.

I sincerely hope that we can settle this discussion now as I don't believe that it would take us anywhere useful anymore from here.

7
That's what I thought until I got myself Toneboosters bundle.
I've tried the some of the ToneBoosters plugins a while ago. Their Equalizer 4 performs really well in general. However, I own a pair of Denon AH-D9200, which can get a bit harsh on the sibilants above a certain volumne. Espially the peak at 12kHz is a bit piercing to my ears. So I need to eq my headphones sometimes and personally Pro-Q 3 does a silghtly better job at this without doing too much harm to the high frequencies in general. Especially the dynamic bands work really well for me. Furthermore I haven't found a Saturn 2 equivalent in the ToneBoosters bundle, especially for tube sound emulation.

Audirvana looks really good. Does it has built-in support for VST's or does it require a plugin?
It worked out of the box without any need to install an additional VST host plugin. However, they don't seem to offer a folder view and I'm a bit hesitant with the subscription model. JRiver integrated my plugins out of the box, too. And both seem to be fine regarding memory usage.

8
Fabfilter plugins are highly overrated due to their design and ease of use. Good design = Better. On the scale of Sound Quality there are tons of plugins that would beat Fabfilter in a heartbeat.
I respect your personal view. However, for me Pro-Q 3 and Saturn 2 by FabFilter are - especially regarding audio quality - second to none. For example, Pro-Q 3 manages comparatively steep filter curves with less of the usual side effects. Haven't found that in any other parametric EQ plugin. And Saturn 2 comes so close to the sound characteristics of some real tube amps that for me it's simply a joy to listen. Having said that, everyone is entiteled to his or her own preference, of course.

Regarding your suggested options: (2) to (4) are no real options for me (I didn't manage to get DDMF to properly work on my system, EqualizerAPO doesn't work with WASAPI Exclusive and I don't want Windows audio manipulation to be part of my audio chain, and as said FabFilter Saturn 2 is the one I enjoy most). However (1) is certainly something I can look into. So thanks for the idea. And there is a 5th option, which is to further explore JRiver and Audirvana as alternative to MusicBee.

9
@sveakul I very well believe that. And yes, I truly love MusicBee as it performs so well in so many aspects. There are only very few players on a similar level. And it works like a sharm with my other VST plugins like Pro-Q 3. That's why I turned to this forum and was looking for help. However, a decision has been made, and I accept this while being genuinly sad about it. And I understand MusicBee is non-commercial.

In my view FabFilter Saturn 2 is second to none for emulation of tube sounds and the like. At least I haven't found anything on a comparable level so far. However, Saturn 2 seems to work fine with JRiver and Audirvana on a first test today, so there might be an alternative option for my use case.

10
Let's hope you find a safe place to put your unhappiness without it doing much harm.
If the background of your comment is a concern that I would start a rant in this forum, that's neither my intention nor do I believe that it would help anybody. No need ever to get personal or unprofessional.

11
I'm a software developer myself and personally I haven't managed to review my own code in a hunt for a bug or even debug in about an hour after report.

However I certainly understand that especially with limited resources decisions have to be made which reports to further investigate and which ones to dismiss based on benefit vs. effort considerations. But there is no obligation either as a user to be happy with any and each of those decisions.

12
Well, I love MusicBee as player and the Saturn 2 plugin to emulate tube sound, so I was genuinely hoping that there is something which can be looked into instead of being that quickly dismissed... I guess I have to simply accept that then.

13
Forgot to post my specs:

Plugin: FabFilter Saturn 2, version 2.03 (32 bit)
Host: MusicBee, version 3.4.7805, with latest (1.0) VST Effects Support plugin
OS: Windows 10 Pro, version 21H1, build 19043.1151

14
I might have stumbled across a strange behavior of MusicBee with the VST Effects Support Plugin in combination with FabFilter Saturn 2 Plugin.

When my FabFilter plugin Saturn 2 is deactivated via the Equaliser and DSP settings, MusicBee would start with about 40 MB of Memory usage. The RAM usage stays mostly stable during playback of various tracks. When activitating the FabFilter Saturn 2 plugin, the memory usage initially jumps up to e.g. 100 MB. So far so good. However, when I now start to play tracks the memory usage constantly increases. When pausing the playback, the occupied memory freezes at this level, until playback continues. Then MusicBee continues to occupy memory. When stopping the track, e.g. with 150 MB at use, the used memory falls back to e.g. 120 MB, but as soon as I hit the play button again, the used RAM jumps immediately up again to 150 MB (or whatever the value was before hitting the pause button) und continues to increase. The increase of the used memory would continue until about 1.5 GB and MusicBee would crash with an out of memory error.

Interestingly when stopping the playback after a while with active FabFilter plugin and then deactivating the FabFilter plugin, the used memory drops partly but not to its initial value. As an example: 40 MB of memory usage when starting MusicBee without plugin. 100 MB when activating FabFilter plugin Saturn 2, so a raise by 60 MB. Now playing tracks with active FabFilter plugin until used memory reaches 200 MB, so another increase by 100 MB. When stopping playback at this point and deactivating the FabFilter plugin, the memory used drops to 140 MB and would stay stable when playing tracks without FabFilter plugin. So it seems that MusicBee would not free up the memory gradually occupied during playback with the FabFilter plugin.

Might this be a potential bug in the VST Effects Support plugin for MusicBee?

I'm aware of the procedure described in this forum of how to make MusicBee work with up to 4 GB of RAM. However, that would just ease the symptoms / delay the out of memory error and not fix the problem, wouldn't it?

Next to FabFilter Saturn 2 I also use their parametric EQ plugin Pro-Q 3, which does not show this strange behavior of increasing memory usage.

I'm already in contact with FabFilter, however it seems that this behavior of their Saturn 2 plugin can't be reproduced with other VST hosts.

Many thanks in advance. Any help would be much appreciated.

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