MediaMonkey forum

dtsig wrote:good points ... something off the track ... your Byrds album has the wrong title i believe. Maybe it should be (untitled) as found here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untitled_ ... rds_album)

Thanks

The CD is how I tagged the 2nd CD from this expansion set
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Untitled-Uniss ... s+untitled

Barry4679, thanks for the feedback, most of it will be fixed or added asap.

Jiri

stax76 wrote:I don't mind any loss! Since I never worked with Delphi I have little idea why the old GUI had to go, a explanation for this decision would be very welcomed. MusicBee is also based on a legacy widget toolkit and looks significantly better on High DPI then MM. The legacy widget toolkit MusicBee is based on is called Win Forms which is for the most part a wrapper around the legacy WinAPI, I have 15 years experience in this technology, scaling Win Forms for High DPI pretty much sucks, on a 4K display it might not even be possible to use the form designer, down scaling might not be supported by the Win Forms designer, it did not work for me and I'm probably not going to spend time trying to figure out a workaround but rather learn the new Windows Universal Platform or something else like HTML.

I would prefer stability and compatibility over features, especially High DPI compatibility, a good extension development experience is also crucial for me.

The best technology for this is WPF (XAML) for Windows in .NET. Has native High DPI Compatibility.

The worst technology is UWP. Is a mobile/phone platform very limited (not real multistasking, not access to all computer resources and drives because runs isolated, not Window based, is screen based or page based, no perfomance (UWP apps are very slow), etc.

Totally agree with all post in this section. I only use MediaMonkey because of its power features. Simplifying it make no sense. MediaMonkey Is the only powerfull program to catalog big music libraries. There are a lot of of simple programs in the market that also have DSD support, Sync Lyrics, and more. But lack on the full catalog options that MediaMonkey 4 has.

Please do not forget that MM5 is in Alpha stage and we are still establishing UI and customization.

MM5 Core should be the same as MMW, but main difference is that you can actually be able to deliver/publish different distribution packs with various UI/functionality but on the first look they would be completely different.

Figurative Possible future Examples: want MM UI with two players, movie browser and transcoding without initial Audio support make plugins pack and get license to distribute it like that.

To make that possible just open MM5 Extensions and see what is already move from deep hardcoded to included extensions.

Fact: MMW and MM5 Library are the same and fully compatible with added features and optimization for MM5, so all power features can be made and added in matter of time and need.

In general, I feel like the killer feature of MM5 is the new framework. The switch is not only an improvement, it's desperately needed. Mediamonkey seems like it was originally developed with maximum compatibility to a third party media player in mind (which is now all but dead) in mind, its main language to write extensions in is considered a legacy technology and the skinning engine... well, better not talk about it.

That doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with the application. On the contrary, looking at some of the feedback regarding MM5, people seem to love Mediamonkey exactly the way it is. That's absolutely fine, they found something that works for them and they want to stick with it.

Nevertheless, building and updating an application only gets you so far if several of its core technologies are outdated. If anything, at some point you will stop being relevant for your users (especially new ones), simply because you can't keep up with their expectations in terms to features and functionality. For Mediamonkey I imagine a lot of this being related to online/cloud related stuff.
You can compensate a lot by custom-developing those features, but at some point you should probably take a step back and evaluate if starting from scratch might save you time in the long run.

To me it seems like the developers of Mediamonkey did just that, and the result looks extremely promising so far. I can't wait for the final version.

TIV73 wrote: Mediamonkey seems like it was originally developed with maximum compatibility to a third party media player in mind (which is now all but dead) in mind
You can compensate a lot by custom-developing those features, but at some point you should probably take a step back and evaluate if starting from scratch might save you time in the long run.

I agree completely. It passed 15 years when MMW was widely recognized and 16 when I firstly recognized as an app for me as a DJ at the time. MM needs to withstand another 15 years at least and what you wrote was exactly accurate and very well put. More and better changes are yet to come, some even in next few versions. Also some old things will come back better than ever.

TIV73 wrote:Nevertheless, building and updating an application only gets you so far if several of its core technologies are outdated. If anything, at some point you will stop being relevant for your users (especially new ones), simply because you can't keep up with their expectations in terms to features and functionality. For Mediamonkey I imagine a lot of this being related to online/cloud related stuff.
You can compensate a lot by custom-developing those features, but at some point you should probably take a step back and evaluate if starting from scratch might save you time in the long run.

To me it seems like the developers of Mediamonkey did just that, and the result looks extremely promising so far. I can't wait for the final version.

Well said. I agree with all this.

TIV73 wrote:... looking at some of the feedback regarding MM5, people seem to love Mediamonkey exactly the way it is. That's absolutely fine, they found something that works for them and they want to stick with it.

But not this. There is a lot I like about the new MM, but the current capabilities don't currently carry forward all capabilities. I can accept a changed route, but MM5 removes some destinations IMO.

ie. grid browsing facilities for album-focused collectors.
http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... 92#p437492

Barry4679 wrote:[...]But not this. There is a lot I like about the new MM, but the current capabilities don't currently carry forward all capabilities. I can accept a changed route, but MM5 removes some destinations IMO.

Maybe I worded that part poorly. I didn't mean that people want to (or should) keep using MM4, but rather that they found some way of organizing themselves, some workflow they like, a layout they prefer or some feature they used on daily basis - and that's what they want to keep. The more detailed and fleshed out this process is, the more it hurts if the new version of MM removed a specific feature needed for the process. This especially hurts longtime users since they, literally, had a decade to get used the old mediamonkey.
That's absolutely understandable. I mean, I'm kind of in the same boat; I bought a lifeteime license in 2011 and used Mediamonkey quite some time before that.

On the other hand, I can also see why some of these features didn't make the cut. The mm development team now has the opportunity (and workload) of a completely fresh start, and judging from how different the core technologies in MM4 and 5 are, I'd assume that, except for some concepts and workflows, they probably had to develop everything from scratch again (as opposed to just porting old code).
In this respect it's probably natural for them to weed out some of the features that were either not well received or only used by a small minority of the userbase.

I'm somewhat lucky in this regard as most of the things I used in MM4 are also in MM5. For the functions I'm missing I could write a few small customizations (or am currently in the process of doing so). Because of that I also have the impression that MM5 is much easier to customize than MM4, but I could be imagining this since I never really got into addon development for MM4 apart from a few small scripts.


One thing to keep in mind is that MM5 is very much in alpha stage, and while some of the public revisions made pretty big leaps in terms of stability, there is still quite a way to go. So even if something is missing right now it doesn't mean that it won't get added during the development process, therefore feature requests and feedback like yours is the way to go at this stage, IMO.

I wouldn't it better myself. I personally do not like that they expect MM5 as fully working product. Well yes it is working, it is portable and if you ever paid for MMW in the past 15 years you will be able use fully all that is developed (Note sure I seen much of other devs were done that).

I didn't notice it in your Mantis change summaries, but I see that the current version of MM5 implements the Column Browser and also ShowArtWithDetails (aka Albums&Tracks in MM5).

Thank you for that. I don't think that I would have migrated to MM5 without these facilities, but now look forward to the goodies which MM5 is bringing.

Feedback:

Column Browser numeric column Sequence is not working: eg. add a column for BPM ..it is sorted 0, 1, 10, 2, 3

It continues one weirdness from MM4: setup two browser columns; genre & BPM ... initially each column contains all values, ie. all genres and all BPM's ... select a Genre, and the BPM is filtered to contain just the BPMs for that genre ... but this does not work in reverse, ie. select a BPM, and the genre values are not filtered .. add another column, ie AlbumArtist: select a BPM, and AlbumArtist is filtered, but not Genre .... reset all columns so that all are selected ... now select an albumartist ... neither genre or BPM are filtered.


Column Browser availablity: doesn't seem to be available everywhere. available from All Tracks, Albums, AlbumArtist .... But is not available from other places: eg. Artists, Composers, etc .... Personally I don't care, because I only will use it in the Album View, but it does make the UI more complex, by being less predictable


Album & Tracks view: it is great to see this return to MM. Are you going to re-implement a custom display limitation upon the number of rows per album? .. ie. given my screen configuration, a limitation of 7 tracks per album would make best use of vertical space ... ie. pack the most albums per page ... the use case for this is as follows: I often don't need to see *all* tracks ... I just need to *some* tracks per album, so that I may resort the display according to what I try to achieve, eg. data released, or date last played, or data added, etc ... there is no sort facility for this in Art view currently ... Album&Tracks is the next best thing, to the ArtView matrix, for an album-focused person, who identifies their music visually using album art .... it is immersive in one sense (ie. a decent sized thumb of the art) ... but is not in another sense (too much white space between each album ... too much scrolling)

example: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zb6ck9hdhedgh ... w.png?dl=0


Album&Tracks scrolling: if I scroll too fast the album art can get truncated down into a little horizontal strip ... once this happens the tuncated view seems to be cached, because it does not go away.

example: https://www.dropbox.com/s/gydojkkspow92 ... t.png?dl=0


Thanks again for the addition of these features. I great to be able to observe the steady progression of MM5.

Thanks for you report. I will check the issues.

It continues one weirdness from MM4: setup two browser columns; genre & BPM ... initially each column contains all values, ie. all genres and all BPM's ... select a Genre, and the BPM is filtered to contain just the BPMs for that genre ... but this does not work in reverse, ie. select a BPM, and the genre values are not filtered .. add another column, ie AlbumArtist: select a BPM, and AlbumArtist is filtered, but not Genre .... reset all columns so that all are selected ... now select an albumartist ... neither genre or BPM are filtered.

The idea there is that only lists to the right are filtered, i.e. that the most generic field is listed field. I think that other apps work the very same way (iTunes, etc.).

Jiri

jiri wrote:The idea there is that only lists to the right are filtered, i.e. that the most generic field is listed field. I think that other apps work the very same way (iTunes, etc.)

Got it. Thanks.