Author Topic: ASIO and a few others...  (Read 10854 times)

vortex

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Hello Steven,

Allow me to congratulate you for building a nice player with a comprehensive set of features! There are three things that are lacking in Musicbee today for me:

 - ASIO output plugin. This is a must for me as I am using my computer as a HTPC and am passing on Analog ouput from my soundcard to an AV Receiver. And ASIO quality is hugely better than just Directsound.

 - Queueing songs. Is there a way we can conveniently queue up songs to be played next even when the Shuffle mode is on? This could be within a playlist and optionall we should also be able to queue songs up from the media library which would add the song as 'next to play' (in the queue list, not the play list per se).

 - Search in the playlist. I have playlists having over 500 songs or so. If I want to search for a specific song within that playlist, I am not able to do that right now.

Do let me know your thoughts. In closing I would say that there is also some room for speeding up Musicbee's startup time. I have about 30 GB of songs in my library. So, this could be a factor.

Steven

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ASIO output is supported by the BASS library I use and I plan to implement this at a later date. I seems a few people have asked for this so i can start looking at this sooner but i need to research a few things first.
There are 2 ways queueing is supported - right click on a track and choose Queue Next (or press the associated hotkey) and secondly, in the player preferences you can specify the double click action queues next (there is a setting for when tracks are already playing and a separate setting if playback is stopped).
However I think the main point you are raising that it should actually play the song next in shuffle mode is correct and i will change this behaviour for the next update.

Regarding the startup time, if you are using v0.3.3375, i've stripped everything i can from the startup. It shouldnt matter whether your collection is large or small, it does things like checking if the files have changed/ still exist in the background after startup. Most of the startup time is actually the .NET infrastructure firing up which will always be slower the very first time but should be faster for restarts. How long is it actually taking though? - on my home PC its just a few seconds but at work it can be up to 20 seconds

vortex

  • Guest
Steven - thanks for the quick response. I will look forward very eagerly to the ASIO output plugin support.

For the queueing behaviour, there is an option to get the song to 'Play next'. But what I really want to do is to add to this queue by adding songs to be played one after the other. And all this when the playback mode is set to Shuffle so that when the queue is over, the player moves onto the next track in the playlist based on the shuffle algorithm.

As for the startup time, it takes about 6 to 8 seconds - which is not much. But I have used a host of music applications to try and find the best one for me and not many have taken this long. But this is not terribly important right now.

Searching for a track in the playlist though is pretty important for me. If there is a quick way for me to find out the currently playing track in the playlist, that also would be great.

Steven

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regarding searching in a playlist - if its a saved playlist you can use the same search functionality as with the library ie. just open the playlist on the left navigator bar and use the text search box on the top or the quick finder on the bottom left.
If its the now playing list, yes you are right - i guess thats what you are referring to?
You can find the current track in the now playing list by clicking File/ Goto current track in the now playing sidebar, or associate that action with a hotkey.

I think i see what you mean about queueing - would the Queue Last action not fulfil this? Or did you mean you want to insert multiple individual songs after the current playing one such that they are inserted as a queue one after the other, rather than as the next song every time you do this action

vortex

  • Guest

Yes I did mean searching the Now Playing portion. Thanks for letting me know about finding the current track. And about the queue function you understood right. I dont want for songs to keep replacing the 'next song' all the time. I want to add them up one after the other.