Visualizations, ActiveSync support, and more.

[GabesDad]

Great player, just found it yesterday and am quite impressed considering its short history.

A few wish-list items:
1. Implement the BASS_WA extension that allows winamp visualizations to be used.  I imagine this could be done as a frame in the player window, as a seperate window, as a desktop background, and/or in fullscreen.
2. Implement the BASS_ASIO extension to output high quality streams to allow bit perfect digital output.
3. Allow additional internet radio station directories, i.e., icecast, etc.  Also allow dragging and dropping links from external browsers onto the musicbee window to open and play a file / playlist / etc.
4. Portable Device support for Activesync connections.  I have a windows mobile professional 6.1 phone that can connect via active sync.  Winamp has a plugin for their relatively new PMP interface that can utilize this activesync connection (which is different from their MTP or plays-for-sure device plugin).  I can mount my phone as a usb storage device but that disables the activesync constant connection and syncing with Outlook, etc.
5. Ability to select root-level mapped network drives for library monitoring.  I can know I can work around this, but this is somewhat annoying.
6. Auto disable of crossfade if the next track is from the same album and the next track on that album
7. Option for auto-tagging defaults, in particular track / disc number padding.
8. Additional sources for track info, i.e., all-music, wikipedia, last-fm, ?gracenote? although I do appreciate using the musicip / musicbrainz source but it doesn't always have the correct info.
9. Mini-player ability to dock as a toolbar in the windows interface (sim to winamp).
10. since you are using XULrunner (horray!), rather than the IE Trident engine, perhaps you can integrate or allow the integration of, the ad-blocker plugin for Firefox.

These seem like a lot, but I have been a longtime Winamp user and tried many others including foobar, QMP, VLC and other mplayer/mencoder based players, WMP, iTunes, and more.

I often get the error window, but it is not often consistently reproduced, or is often fixed by restarting MusicBee.  Should I be submitting these error logs somewhere to help out?  Could there be a plugin that transmits error messages / etc. back somewhere across the internet to help with debugging?

Thanks for your quality work.  Looking forward to more.

[Steven]

i'll respond to the suggestions another time but just regarding the error messages, for now just copy the error and send a PM to me or put a new topic in the bug reports section - i dont have any auto-feeding of errors implemented. You can retrieve old errors using the View/ Error Log menu

[Steven]

i dont disagree with anything you listed, just that some are not trivial and will need to be done over the year
1,2 - seems you know BASS quite well! yes i can implement both which i will do further down the track
3 - i just need to read up on icecast some more - its supported with BASS but i had a look at the directory (admittedly some time ago) and at the time couldnt figure out how i could integrate the directories. I'll take another look after i get some of the other requests done
4 - i need to read up on the api for active sync to get a feeling for how hard it will be to do - currently i only support the MTP protocol (as well as iTunes and usb devices)
5- i actually intentionally stopped people from doing this, but perhaps a warning will suffice - the windows api used for monitoring folders can get overwhelmed and lose messages if the buffer is exceeded by too much activity occuring quickly (say if you are doing other things at the same time that are upating files), so i though it safer to force people to choose specific folders
6 - great idea and easy for me to implement
7 - as above
8 - i guess you are asking to be presented with comparative values from the alternative websites when things dont match. I was aware of this idea but was wondering how well you found it to work - is it done in a winamp plugin? I would rather not use AMG (they want a license fee and MB is freeware), although i could screen-scrape i dont want to get into that, wikipedia i guess could be ok, gracenote as with AMG i believe, last-fm i'm already using for artwork and keyword tags so could extend for other info
9 - sure, dont know how to do that but can find out
10 - i only had a brief look at that but for some reason i recall you cant integrate firefox plugins even though its the same infrastructure

[GabesDad]

Steven, thanks for the reply.  Glad to see you take suggestions very seriously.  A few reply comments to add:
5. In my particular situation, we have shared music folder (from a general use desktop in the office) mapped as a network drive.  To add this folder in MusicBee currently, I would have to map a folder one up from the music folder.  If I try to add the currently mapped shared music folder as a network share in MusicBee, it tells me the folder is already mapped.  It just seems a bit confusing, but I am not sure what performance implications this has.
8. As far a sources go, I'd agree with staying with the free licenses and not violating any TOS's with screen-scraping / etc.  I believe Songbird and Amorak use wikipedia as an info source, among others.  Perhaps continuing to use only musicip, but with the ability to edit the search fields - so that if for example the artist tag has unnecessary characters or featured artists, it doesn't throw the query off.
8.1. While we're talking about musicip, is this what you use for autodj to build playlists with similarities?  Just out of curiosity.
10. I think Songbird now allows some Firefox plugins to be used, but I know it took a large group effort to modify firefox plugins to work with songbird (or modify songbird to accept unchanged firefox plugins).  Just an idea.

[Steven]

for 5, if i understand correctly you have say L: mapped to a network share which directly points to your music folder and you want to monitor that folder. At present i stop you choosing the root folder of L: for monitoring but i can change that.

"To add this folder in MusicBee currently, I would have to map a folder one up from the music folder." - the files you add to your MB library dont have to physically reside in the Music sub-folder of the location your MB is located. So you could have your library located on the C: drive if you wish (or more likely on the L: drive) but in either case the files added to the library could be anywhere on the L: drive. The Music sub-folder doesnt actually need to exist for most people and perhaps i should not create it anymore (it was more a historical thing when i first started MB)
The only exception is when you utilise the auto-organise feature, in which case the files will be moved/organised as relative to the Music subfolder by MusicBee

for 8.1, i utilise last.fm to get similarity ratings (and for including new streamed files in the mix)

[GabesDad]

4 - i need to read up on the api for active sync to get a feeling for how hard it will be to do - currently i only support the MTP protocol (as well as iTunes and usb devices)

Steven, any progress or time spent on the activesync protocol?  This would be great to sync to a windows mobile device over bluetooth.  Perhaps not the fastest, but nice nonetheless.  Thanks for all the continued development!

[Steven]

no i havent spent any more on this. I'll still keep it on the list of things to do but as i dont have a device i can use activesync with its not something i can do quickly. Lets say around september/october time

[GabesDad]

Thanks for the heads up.  I'm currently using the usb mass storage mode on the phone with a simultaneous bluetooth connection for activesync, so I'm working around it for now.  However it would be nice to completely wirelessly sync my phone when I walk up to my computer.

I'll be glad to do any testing for you.  I have Windows Mobile 6.1 phones in the Professional (touchscreen) and standard (non-touchscreen) editions to test out.