Author Topic: MusicBee Remote (Remote Control for Android)  (Read 496983 times)

jonap

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hi guys, really nice app, i just don't get if i can't see it or it's not possible: how do i play playlists?
i mean how can i play my music without searching song by song or artist by artist?

and if i can make a suggestion, implement some sort of Auto-Shutdown from app would be really usefull cause you could turn off your pc when you finished listen your music

kelsos

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hi guys, really nice app, i just don't get if i can't see it or it's not possible: how do i play playlists?
i mean how can i play my music without searching song by song or artist by artist?

and if i can make a suggestion, implement some sort of Auto-Shutdown from app would be really usefull cause you could turn off your pc when you finished listen your music

framazzi these features (playlists/browsing) are part of the alpha version I mentioned above not available in the released version.
The alpha still has some shortcomings I am working on and then I plan to have a public beta.

I am not sure how easy is to add auto shutdown it will require investigation.

jonap

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framazzi these features (playlists/browsing) are part of the alpha version I mentioned above not available in the released version.
The alpha still has some shortcomings I am working on and then I plan to have a public beta.

I am not sure how easy is to add auto shutdown it will require investigation.

my bad i didn't read that,  so well thank you
i'll just wait for that

ehx

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For some reason mine won't connect and keeps saying connection timed out. The plugin on the actual musicbee application on my desktop is working fine and says running. It won't show up when I scan and when I try manually connect it says timed out, I have also tried portforwarding the 3000 port and also used another port but it did not work. Send help pls.

EDIT: Running Android Marshmallow on CM 13.

kelsos

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Hello everyone,

I am planning on starting an open beta in the following days for v1.0.0 of the Remote. Currently I am working on some Proguard issues
with the new application.

The new version will contain a number of bug fixes on issues of the previous version like the service starting on device boot, or the widget update stopping after a while.
The discover should start automatically with the background service, this means that if your network doesn't have any issues (firewall, ap isolation) it should discover the plugin and connect automatically.

There are some changes on how the connection works in the new version. Previously all the traffic would pass through a single socket. This would sometimes cause some lag to the commands especially when cover or playlist data was loaded. Now all these fetching actions will open a temporary socket in parallel.

Also there is a ping checking mechanism in the new version that should try to auto restart the socket connection if the pong response is not received in some specified interval (this should solve the issue of the socket hanging on a number of users requiring manual intervention to re connect).

Also the new version will a library browsing mode. This will sync all the library metadata info on the android application and allow the user to see the genres/artists/albums/tracks on the device. The search is now part of the library section and will search on all of the synced metadata categories.

Due to the changes for the library, this would also solve some issues with the queuing functionality being more inclusive than it should be when adding tracks to the now playing list.

Also the new version includes basic playlist support which means that you can view the playlists on the android application and press a playlist to start playing it.

This will be enhanced on v2.0.0 with the ability to manage playlist (adding tracks/creating new/deleting) etc


As soon as the links are up I will post an update.


ehx,

The new application will contain the ability to enable and send debug logs in case you run on issues. So it would be useful to give it a try and if it still doesn't work for you you could send me some logs that could potentially help us resolve the issue.

kelsos

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Hi,

v1.0.0-beta.1 of the application has just been uploaded to playstore as an open beta (it might take a while to appear for everyone). Who ever is interested can opt-in at the following link https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.kelsos.mbrc

You can also manually download the beta from the project's github page: https://github.com/kelsos/mbrc/releases
and the plugin from https://github.com/kelsos/mbrc-plugin/releases.

The android application requires the latest beta (v1.0.0-beta.2) of the plugin in order to work properly due to some breaking changes in the api.

The plans are to run a couple of weeks on beta and if there are no major issues to push on production.

Steven

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@kelsos, we now have an add-ons page for MusicBee now so if you wish, add it to there as well. It supports beta state.

eLr0n

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Hi Kelsos,

the library function is still very buggy for me. A lot of albums show no tracks on it and i have no idea why its with some albums and some not. In the Artist Tab when i click on an artist many albums are not listed that belong to that artist. For a better overview you should also use the album-artist tag for sorting in the artist tab or at least give the option to sort it that way. If you have a lot of compilations many artist show up in the list even if you have only one song from them.

kelsos

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That's weird, do these tracks appear properly on the track view? If you use the search functionality in the library do the appear properly?
It is probably something with the metadata that I might missed that could be failing the queries. Anything you can tell me about the album names?

Would it be easy for you to enable the debug logging in the settings of the remote application do a full library sync from the library activity (in the overflow menu) and send me the logs? (You can send them through the Feedback). (also don't keep it enabled after sending the logs)

I do log a lot of information so after a full sync so I should have the metadata to work while debugging.

The same goes about the artist. Also along with the logs I would like a name of album/artist that fails to list everything.


Yes the artist part was deliberate and if you press on them it should list the compilation (entering though should show all the compilation track).

OldChicagoPete

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This is looking really great, thanks for all the hard work!

I got to play around with the new app and plugin this morning and have a couple of questions/thoughts...

- I'm pretty sure (or at least I was pretty sure) I have a clean install of MB 3.x, but the plugin exe aborted because it had detected MB 2.x components. I downloaded the 7z version and updated the plugin manually with no issue. Can you list what the installer is checking so I can clean up any old installation files?

- The 7x readme mentions that ServiceStack.Text.dll is required to be present in the plugin folder but the file is not in the zip archive. It's also not in my plugin folder, but again I have no issue using the app.

- I found the Library refresh in the overflow menu, but that didn't refresh the playlists. The playlist screen uses a pull down to refresh. I would have thought both would be done with the library refresh, and the two different methods seem inconsistent. But certainly not a big deal.

- I have the setting for Search List Default Action set to Get Subcategory which to me seems like the natural default action. Once I get down to the song level a tap on a song clears the Now Playing list and plays the song. This feels backwards - I would think moving to the subcategory would be default, with dots to allow adding/queuing the entire category and the app setting to control the action to take when tapping an individual song.

- This might fall under your future playlist manipulation plans, but when I reorder songs in Now Playing on the app, the changes reflect on my computer but MB skips anything that was reordered up.

- In Now Playing, I naturally went for the dash-dash-dash UI prompt to reorder the songs. That placed my finger over the row title and I couldn't see when I had the row selected to move. I did figure out that I could hold the row anywhere to move it, but it might be better to have the indicator on the right hand side of the row.  (As I typed that I realized that I'm having righty bias)

kelsos

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Hi there,

Thank you for your feedback.

The installer checks for the latest MusicBee 3.0.6132 so if you have any previous build the installer will stop. It should potentially work with previous builds.

It clears a folder in the %AppData%/MusicBee/ called mb_remote that contains the configuration and log.
Also the previous version cleared the ServiceStack.Text.dll the mb_remote.dll and the installer exe.

Indeed the ServiceStack.Text.dll is not present in the archive since it is now embedded in the remote plugin dll. I just missed updating the readme. I will make sure to update on the next version.


Indeed you are right, I will keep it in mind for the next update, There should be an update in January with fixes based on all the feedback I get.

You are right, the move to subcategory default action is a leftover from the previous version. Before with the search functionality it had a purpose. I am going to change it to affect only the song in 1.0.2 since that is indeed the proper behavior.

I will investigate this and see what can be done.

Truth to be told at some point I think I was doing this exactly. I had to rework the sorting functionality since the library I was using was abandoned and there is a easy way to do this without third party dependencies now. I will reintroduce it at a future update.

OldChicagoPete

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Thanks for taking the time to read all that and taking it in the (hopefully helpful) feedback manner that it was intended  :)

I checked my version and was on an ever so slightly older build (3.0.6129) so I updated to the current and the exe worked perfectly.

HowdyDoody

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That's weird, do these tracks appear properly on the track view? If you use the search functionality in the library do the appear properly?
It is probably something with the metadata that I might missed that could be failing the queries. Anything you can tell me about the album names?

Would it be easy for you to enable the debug logging in the settings of the remote application do a full library sync from the library activity (in the overflow menu) and send me the logs? (You can send them through the Feedback). (also don't keep it enabled after sending the logs)

I do log a lot of information so after a full sync so I should have the metadata to work while debugging.

The same goes about the artist. Also along with the logs I would like a name of album/artist that fails to list everything.


Yes the artist part was deliberate and if you press on them it should list the compilation (entering though should show all the compilation track).

I am having same problems with the library not indexing correctly.  I'll select and artist (I also agree that being able to sort by album artist would be helpful), and then instead of seeing multiple albums that should be there, I get an error "Sorry cannot find any results for your search!"

Did you get the log file from the other guy?

I'm making the switch from winamp and Awarremote.  I like the look of your app but I can't get it to index the library properly.  Cuold it be that there is a problem because my library is very large?

Thanks!

kelsos

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Hi there,

There is a confirmed bug with compilations, that's probably it. If the artist is not he album artist then the application fails to show any results.
I will start working on a fix hopefully by the end of the week.

The only thing affected by the size of the library is the time that it will takes to sync the library metadata.

HowdyDoody

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Hi there,

There is a confirmed bug with compilations, that's probably it. If the artist is not he album artist then the application fails to show any results.
I will start working on a fix hopefully by the end of the week.

The only thing affected by the size of the library is the time that it will takes to sync the library metadata.

Thanks for getting back to me.  That was the problem.  I reset the tags for the album artist and artist to be the same and they showed up on the remote library on my tablet!

One more suggestion:  For people with very large libraries, it takes forever to scroll down to the end of the artist list.  Perhaps there would be a way to put a slider on the right to scroll down more quickly.

Thanks again for your work on this.  It is a great app!