1.2 Beta Whishlist

[Antonski]

Hi Steven,

Maybe you can implement some of the features below in the new version:

- Button for fast switch of RG playback mode (Track -> Album), maybe a toggling button next to Equaliser and DSP manager button?
- Some indication, probably changed icon when a DSP is enabled.
- In track details section multiple entries to be displayed on multiple lines.
- Web links in track details section to open different tabs (browsers), option to close all tabs except 'Music Library' (or current tab under the mouse pointer)
- Allow copy (Ctrl+C) in browser window
- Time stamped (synchronized) lyrics for every tag type - with edit and normal mode. In edit mode timestamps should be visible and editable (for example right-click on a line to update the timestamp), maybe in normal mode only text to be editable, the same behavior as with unsynced lyrics?
- Editing of Musepack chapters
- Custom formats support (by bassWinamp.dll) or just implementation of VQF
- Option to use lossyWav preprocessor with FLAC, TAK and WavPack

Is it too much?

Maybe more will come, but you like challenges

Thanks in advance.

[Steven]

good you have compiled into a list and i'll try to work through this over the next months

[Antonski]

Thanks

[Steven]

- Button for fast switch of RG playback mode (Track -> Album), maybe a toggling button next to Equaliser and DSP manager button?

done for next update although accessible from the Controls menu in the top main menu or invoked as a hotkey - when i make the player control panel layout configurable i will look to give you the ability to add a button

- Some indication, probably changed icon when a DSP is enabled.

done for next update

- In track details section multiple entries to be displayed on multiple lines.

this is much more difficult than it sounds!

- Web links in track details section to open different tabs (browsers), option to close all tabs except 'Music Library' (or current tab under the mouse pointer)

ok

- Allow copy (Ctrl+C) in browser window

ok

- Time stamped (synchronized) lyrics for every tag type - with edit and normal mode. In edit mode timestamps should be visible and editable (for example right-click on a line to update the timestamp), maybe in normal mode only text to be editable, the same behavior as with unsynced lyrics?

will do for next week but do you have any sample file you can send me with the synchronised lyrics embedded - i cant seem to get the winamp plugin working, and although the id3 specs seem straight-forward it would be better if i had an example

- Editing of Musepack chapters

i will do at a future date

- Custom formats support (by bassWinamp.dll) or just implementation of VQF

i will do at a future date

- Option to use lossyWav preprocessor with FLAC, TAK and WavPack

could you explain what you mean - if i understand the purpose of this tool correctly you would use it either as an option when ripping a cd, converting a format, or as a stand-alone command as a way to reduce the file size. Is that what you meant?
Also i see in the hydrogen audio writeup it produces a wav file output. Using wav files have very limited standard support for tagging - how do people tag these files?

[Steven]

in the latest 1.2 beta:
- Button for fast switch of RG playback mode (Track -> Album)
- Some indication, probably changed icon when a DSP is enabled
- Allow copy (Ctrl+C) in browser window - copies text only

[Antonski]

in the latest 1.2 beta:
- Button for fast switch of RG playback mode (Track -> Album)
- Some indication, probably changed icon when a DSP is enabled
- Allow copy (Ctrl+C) in browser window - copies text only

Thanks, really fast update

...
when i make the player control panel layout configurable i will look to give you the ability to add a button
...

That would be great!

[Antonski]

- In track details section multiple entries to be displayed on multiple lines.

this is much more difficult than it sounds!

I guess so, but maybe you can think out some tricky workaround
Otherwise, displaying a  multiple entries tag would not be very useful.

- Time stamped (synchronized) lyrics for every tag type - with edit and normal mode. In edit mode timestamps should be visible and editable (for example right-click on a line to update the timestamp), maybe in normal mode only text to be editable, the same behavior as with unsynced lyrics?

will do for next week but do you have any sample file you can send me with the synchronised lyrics embedded - i cant seem to get the winamp plugin working, and although the id3 specs seem straight-forward it would be better if i had an example

I'll find some, but I have to fire up my old PC (some maintenance needed). I don't know whether I can do it till the weekend.

- Editing of Musepack chapters

i will do at a future date

Thanks, I appreciate this. Anyway, MB is the only program (AFAIK) that display correctly Musepack SV8 tags and chapters, so I'll be waiting patiently.

- Custom formats support (by bassWinamp.dll) or just implementation of VQF

i will do at a future date

Thanks

- Option to use lossyWav preprocessor with FLAC, TAK and WavPack

could you explain what you mean - if i understand the purpose of this tool correctly you would use it either as an option when ripping a cd, converting a format, or as a stand-alone command as a way to reduce the file size. Is that what you meant?
Also i see in the hydrogen audio writeup it produces a wav file output. Using wav files have very limited standard support for tagging - how do people tag these files?

As a stand-alone tool lossyWav is quite useless because the output wav file has the same length as the original. This tool removes some less significant bits from the original file and thus it could be used as a preprocessor for some loseless codecs as FLAC, TAK and WavPack, either when ripping a CD or when converting a file. The standard output of the preprocessor must be piped to standard input of the loseless compressor. The resulting file (with extension lossy.flac, lossy.tak, lossy.wv) could be (almost) comparable in size with mp3 at 320 kbps, but it has a higher (quasi-loseless) quality and it can be further transcoded with other loseless codecs without additional quality loss, which is not true about the lossy codecs.

[Steven]

thanks for the lossywav explanation - it actually sounds a very useful tool so will look to incorporate it.

re: showing multiple values on separate lines for a single tag, what i can do easily (and will do for the next update) is in the Now Playing track information panel have the option to show multiple entries for a single tag on separate lines. But in cases where it overflows the panel size, i will ensure any web links still display

[Antonski]

thanks for the lossywav explanation - it actually sounds a very useful tool so will look to incorporate it.

Just bear in mind that when the lossywav is used as a preprocessor, some "mandatory" arguments of compressor command line must be used (in order to achieve better results):
flac: '-b 512'
tak: '-fsl512'
wv: '--blocksize=512'

You can check here and here for details.

re: showing multiple values on separate lines for a single tag, what i can do easily (and will do for the next update) is in the Now Playing track information panel have the option to show multiple entries for a single tag on separate lines. But in cases where it overflows the panel size, i will ensure any web links still display

That sounds great! So I can have 2 or 3 single-entry tags (say album, artist, year) and one multi-line tag (say lineup)?

BTW web links in separate tabs and text copy in browser is working fine, thanks.

[Antonski]

...
Using wav files have very limited standard support for tagging - how do people tag these files?

BTW, this is really an interesting topic, I even thought to ask you whether you plan to implement wav chunks support.
I remember some years ago (I was doing some track mastering of my friend's band) I was looking desperately for an audio organizer that support wav chunks reading/tagging. If I remember well, the only such tool at that time was MAC (MPEG Audio Collection), now discontinued.
Anyway, it seems that there is a consensus about the basic chunks, below you can find the ones used by GoldWave and Sondforge:

GoldWave
-------------
IART Artist
ICMT Description
ICOP Copyright
ICRD Date YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS
IGNR Genre
INAM Title
IPRD Album
iaar Album Artist
isrc ISRC
itrk Tracknumber
iurl URL

SoundForge
----------------
IARL Archival location
IART Artist
ICMS Commissioned
ICMT Comments
ICOP Copyright
ICRD Creation Date
ICRP Croppped
IDIM Dimmensions
IDPI Dots Per Inch
IENG Engineer
IGNR Genre
IKEY Keywords
ILGT Lightness
IMED Medium
INAM Name/Title
IPLT Palette Settings
IPRD Product
ISBJ Subject
ISFT Software/Encoded By
ISHP Sharpness
ISRC Source
ISRF Source Form
ITCH Technician
DISP Sound Scheme Title (picture)

Actually, SF use DISP chunk to store images (album art), I don't know what format is used.
Also some other chunks may be seen here and there, such as:

IDIM Dimensions
IDPI DPI
IKEY Keywords
ITRK Track
TRCK Track
TLEN Length
TURL URL
TVER Version
LOCA Location
TORG Label

Additionally, it seems that you can implement custom tags (chunks) using 4 small letters.

Maybe the main problem would be that you have to update the file header every time you change/add a chunk, but I believe this wouldn't be an obstacle for you.

Edit:
Accidentally,  I've found this document, it seems that most of these tags are standartized by the EXIF specification (section 5, Exif Audio File Specification).

[Steven]

the following are in the latest 1.2 beta:
- In track details section multiple entries to be displayed on multiple lines.
- Option to use lossyWav preprocessor with FLAC, TAK and WavPack

[Antonski]

Thanks, it works great, as usual
Just two small questions:
 - is it possible to configure display to show only tags that are present in the file (in track details)?
 - is it possible to have presets also for lossyWav (portable, standard, archive etc.)?

[Steven]

- is it possible to configure display to show only tags that are present in the file (in track details)?

at the moment if say 'year' is blank it will show 'Unknown Year' - you want it to show nothing at all, and use that space for the following tag?

- is it possible to have presets also for lossyWav (portable, standard, archive etc.)?

yes no prob - at the moment it uses portable for the portable profile and extreme for the archiving profile

[Antonski]

- is it possible to configure display to show only tags that are present in the file (in track details)?

at the moment if say 'year' is blank it will show 'Unknown Year' - you want it to show nothing at all, and use that space for the following tag?

Exactly, but somebody may prefer the current behaviour, so maybe this could be made optional?

- is it possible to have presets also for lossyWav (portable, standard, archive etc.)?

yes no prob - at the moment it uses portable for the portable profile and extreme for the archiving profile

Well, this is good and sane enough for my today's needs, but could I know what would I (or somebody else) need tomorrow?

[Antonski]

Also, don't you think it would be good to add '.lossy' to the output file name, so if a real loseless flac file is 'somefile.flac', a preprocessed (by lossyWav) one will be 'somefile.lossy.flac'?