MM4: Ok, that's it?

[sirandar]

So how could you actually improve MM for users who already appreciate MM?

1) Personally I don't think video was the way. I am not sure about the video thing as I don't rip video, partly because of legal concerns and partly because my collection isn't big enough to bother ripping. I worry that the video thing will bloat MM and cause instability that may take 5 releases to fix. Second, some of my collection is BluRay and I am pretty sure MM isn't going to play that.

2) TABs are fine as long as they work and I can customize them. Useful but MM3 was fine without them.

3) Give skinners a better toolkit to work with especially in terms of text size. No MM skin I know of can display now playing info big enough that I can see it across the room.

4) Set up a lyric server so I don't have to plod through all the sketch to get lyrics. Lyricator seems to do this off and on and when it works it works well ..... but it is always leaching from somebody I think. Lyrics that autopopulate would be great. I have a feeling there are legal issues with this.

5) Ripping tracks is a huge pain made much easier by MM (espicially since the dreaded CD refresh bug was finally stamped out) but no audio ripper I have ever found can handle when a single music compsition spans more than one track. It is a nightmare ..... I use Audacity to hand merge when the music is worth it. If MM could make this process transparent to the user ..... THAT would be a breakthrough.

How Media Monkey could handle this ....... When any track being ripped has a positive or negative signal still present at the end, MM would have a popup asking if you want to merge the two tracks OR have a default setting to merge automatically. It sould merge with no skips clicks or pops. Since this is hard to do even by hand it may take a effort to make it transparent.

That is a feature that would mean something to me.

4) MM still has some issues with the very beginning of tracks ..... sometimes it misses some of the very front of the track as the downstream audio process sync. This probably only happens when outputting over optical to a receiver but I have a feeling a lot of people do it that way. MM should probably have some routine to keep the stream active as long as MM is open.

[Dreadlau]

In fairness to the developers on the Tabs issue, it is a new feature and this is currently only an Alpha. There's plenty of time for them to (hopefully) get that fixed.

Actually, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I discussed this issue at length with Petr and unfortunately it isn't looking like something that can be fixed. Oh, and it's not limited to tabs, skinning stuff on the aero player is quite difficult. It's hard to explain, but pixels below a certain alpha value (for transparency) will not display at all. It means you need to really play with your images (ie test and re-test) because they will not display correctly (as in your original image). I had this problem with the aero player and the tabs and it was only after a lot of messing around with the images that I was able to make it look somewhat okay. Petr but he says there isn't much else he can do, it's a theme engine limitation. It's a shame, because I think problems like this will probably turn people off to skinning as it does make it much more difficult.

All that being said, I still think that we can turn out some great skins. And seriously, an upgrade is so much more than just GUI updates.

In this case I think it's time to change the theme engine.

[Lowlander]

4) Legally not possible as Lyrics have copyright, so unless we pay for the service it can't be done.

[Mizery_Made]

I feel that #1 was essential for this upgrade. There have been countless requests and questions regarding the support of Video over the years. Oh how many time people have called attention to the fact the program is "MediaMonkey" and not (or should be, due to lack of video support) "AudioMonkey." Beyond that, I believe all of the "big" players support both media types so MM kind of had to get with the times to stay competitive to the masses, it seems. However, I don't see the "bloat" that is feared by some over the inclusion of Video. The frame work was already there because Video isn't much different than Audio in a lot of ways. I think the only "bloat" there may be would be the Video codecs.

[rovingcowboy]

i don't see any bloat in the program at all only the use of cpu cycle bloat in some of the new features but rusty said its not
an optimized test version and they should have that fixed by the RC or stable version, but bloat in monkey i have never seen it as far i can remember?

[vpsaxman]

I feel that #1 was essential for this upgrade. There have been countless requests and questions regarding the support of Video over the years. Oh how many time people have called attention to the fact the program is "MediaMonkey" and not (or should be, due to lack of video support) "AudioMonkey." Beyond that, I believe all of the "big" players support both media types so MM kind of had to get with the times to stay competitive to the masses, it seems. However, I don't see the "bloat" that is feared by some over the inclusion of Video. The frame work was already there because Video isn't much different than Audio in a lot of ways. I think the only "bloat" there may be would be the Video codecs.

Well, improvement in the skinning functionalities, a skin repository, etc., have been requested a lot as well. It seems like not many people are interested in skinning MM, there must be a reason. MM isn't even listed in deviantart customization category, however players like "ashampoo" (I mean ASHAMPOO, c'mon!!!) are. This shows how much love design inclined people have for MM. Why is that? I got a good idea why reading the forum and it seems the only way to drastically change MM's skinning functionality would be to start from scratch which is why it's not being done IMO. Just like a Mac version of the program... No problem though, life's about making choices.

[sirandar]

After looking at the responses to my post I will rephrase to say:

It is a good idea to start thinking about incorporating video into Media Monkey.....If and only if none of the video routines are loaded until I actually go to play a video.

I wouldn't want all those video codecs and support files required to play a DVD loaded at startup. But that is my opinion. If is all says unloaded until I press play (except for the video catalog) I would be OK with it.

Secondly, BluRay is slowly getting into the mainstream but it may get replaced by something else .... even Arcsoft TMT barely plays them if they are new releases. Media Monkey devs definitely don't want to go there. High Def on a PC is a nightmare until very recently, and even now when I rent a disk I wonder if it will actually play.

Unless of course if it is illegally ripped (ironically enough) ...... MediaMonkey .. choice of pirates everywhere

Video is such a horrible mess I don't even want to think about it....

[dypsis]

Secondly, BluRay is slowly getting into the mainstream but it may get replaced by something else .... even Arcsoft TMT barely plays them if they are new releases. Media Monkey devs definitely don't want to go there. High Def on a PC is a nightmare until very recently, and even now when I rent a disk I wonder if it will actually play.

Unless of course if it is illegally ripped (ironically enough) ...... MediaMonkey .. choice of pirates everywhere

Video is such a horrible mess I don't even want to think about it....

Sorry, but I just don't understand some of your statements. Maybe I am a bit slow today.

What do you mean by: "Video is such a horrible mess I don't even want to think about it...."?
What do you mean by: "BluRay is slowly getting into the mainstream but it may get replaced by something else .... even Arcsoft TMT barely plays them if they are new"?
What do you mean by: "Unless of course if it is illegally ripped (ironically enough) ...... MediaMonkey .. choice of pirates everywhere "?

By the way. If you mean that you find it hard to play Blu-ray discs, then all I can say is that PowerDVD plays all my collection.

[sirandar]

Secondly, BluRay is slowly getting into the mainstream but it may get replaced by something else .... even Arcsoft TMT barely plays them if they are new releases. Media Monkey devs definitely don't want to go there. High Def on a PC is a nightmare until very recently, and even now when I rent a disk I wonder if it will actually play.

Unless of course if it is illegally ripped (ironically enough) ...... MediaMonkey .. choice of pirates everywhere

Video is such a horrible mess I don't even want to think about it....

Sorry, but I just don't understand some of your statements. Maybe I am a bit slow today.

What do you mean by: "Video is such a horrible mess I don't even want to think about it...."?
What do you mean by: "BluRay is slowly getting into the mainstream but it may get replaced by something else .... even Arcsoft TMT barely plays them if they are new"?
What do you mean by: "Unless of course if it is illegally ripped (ironically enough) ...... MediaMonkey .. choice of pirates everywhere "?

By the way. If you mean that you find it hard to play Blu-ray discs, then all I can say is that PowerDVD plays all my collection.

Standard DVD is fine, I am confident every single DVD I rent or buy will play ....

Blu-ray for the PC is a nightmare unless you are playing Blu-Rays that are more than 8 months old. They often simply won't play on any software player until there is either a copy protection fix or a bug fix issued by the devs. There was a time that I had 2 Blu-Ray players on my system just to have some hope that the newish release disk I rented from the video store would play. A year an a half ago even with 2 players there was a 50:50 chance that a given newish release disk would never play on my system until there was a player update. It had nothing to do with my system as every disk I had problems with worked fine after with ONLY and update to the player.

Eventually I plain uninstalled WinDVD because it was updated so infrequently and played so few new disks, even though I bought a license.

Arcsoft TMT playes my collection and has a fair chance of playing a new-ish release from the video store, and a good chance of playing it if I install an already available player update but not always. The 3rd last Blu-Ray I rented was Centurion, and it played with several glitchy areas after a player update, but the combination of that update and the crap the movie tried to install corrupted my system enough that it was never able to play either DVD or Blu-Ray disks properly until I recovered my system from backup.

That is how bad Blu-Ray is on a fully stable, burn tested, MEMTEST certified system for Blu-Ray disks less than 8 months old. If they are a year old they will almost always play without trouble. Don't blame my system as the issues are always fixed by a update to the player.

As you hinted at: pirated and semi-pirated Blu-Rays play much better than the legal ones if they are new releases and ANYDVD seems to be the program of choice.

[dypsis]

OK. I haven't come across any Blu-ray discs that I couldn't play using PowerDVD, but I mainly buy concert Blu-ray discs.

[Dreadlau]

Also iTunes is not skinnable correct?

[Melloware]

I stand corrected!

[Dreadlau]

re. the theme engine.
1) I saw that there have been new versions of the theme engine:
http://www.ksdev.com/themeengine/

2) I saw this: http://www.ksdev.com/vgscene/index.html

Is this applicable to Mediamonkey? I see that delphi is supported.

Can someone shed some light on this? As I don't know anything re. programming.
So I'm not sure if my example is pertinent.

Thank you.

[gege]

1) I saw that there have been new versions of the theme engine:
http://www.ksdev.com/themeengine/

2) I saw this: http://www.ksdev.com/vgscene/index.html

1) I can't talk for sure, but I think the problem here is the MM team have made their own mods on an earlier version of themeengine. Now it is kind of difficult to use an updated version of vanilla themeengine. Can someone confirm this?

One thing I noticed is the last important update on vanilla themeengine was more than two years ago. After that, only bugfixes basically.

2) As I understood, VGScene is a completely new vector based engine (opposed to bitmap based themeengine). Adopting it would mean swapping engines in MM. (Maybe the move so much people is asking for... )

[Dreadlau]

Thanks for the info gege.