Misc stuff and thoughts

[Promethee]

- Are icons (toolbar, menu, context menu) skinable ? I don't find intuitive some of the icons (according to my own way of thinking, of course).
- Playlist is always on top. This is disturbing. Option to change that behavior (normal MDI windows) ?
- How to reset Top50 and Last50 playlist to zero ?
- In Accessible songs node, what about an "Enqueue all" command, without to Select All before (actually, better would be an option to automatically enqueue all songs in a newly inserted media). That is you insert a CD and it plays all mp3 on it automatically (in order or random).
- dockable Internal player. It's actually a toolbar, not a mdi window. Having a very tall toolbar waste lot of space on its side.
- Apart normalization, is there any other advantage to use internal player over Winamp ?
- Songs Properties menu button: Save and Next, Save and Skip, Previous and Save, Previous and skip
- Art cover in Properties ?
- Suggestion: shortcut keys. I know your working on it. Xnews news reader keyboard handling is really cool and flexible. Most Delphi's subroutine can be assigned from within an exhaustive ini file. Might be inspiring to you.
- Classification is underused, probably because it's specific to Songs-Db and stored within the database, not in the song's file. Change your file organization and hours of classification can be lost... Therefore, some automation and more flexibility to classification would be a plus IMHO. What about:
1) editable categories,
2) on/off option for automatic association between categorys and genre (one to many relationships, like I can decide that all vocal, jazz,electronic are considered "Moderate/morose" by default, unless specific classification exist ? ),
3) Easy mode for mass classification and rating on selected files (not passing throught properties all the time)
4) button radio rather than drop-down list for rating
- semantic confusion betwen "rating" of quality and "rating" of classification. Another wording would be clearer.
- What about coloring fields or tabs in properties that are: a) id3v1, b) id3v2, c) Songs-db exclusive (thus not saved with the song's file) ?
- At last, but not the least, a script to export playlist with song order number. The whole idea of export a playlist is usually to print a rough content sleeve with actual track number.

That's all for now . Thanks for making Songs-DB.

[Promethe]

- Although Winamp is currently select as primary player, Songs-DB's playlist seems to still use the internal one. As as result, it can play a song through the playlist/internal and play another song at the same time with winamp if you double-click on another song in the database.
- As a result of having playlist still using the internal player but not displaying it because winamp is suppose to be the default player, there are limited control on playlist playback (no seek possible, for instance).
Is this mean that the playlist is only useful with the internal player only ?
- Another thing about the playlist: is it possible to have only it displayed on the screen, while the rest of songs-db is minimized ? I know that I have it already using Winamp, but is it possible, let's say, while using internal player ?
As you can see, I am still wondering which best of winamp or internal player in term of ergonomy.
-Finally, accessible song is by default sorted by name, not by path. If this view is used to enqueue file, without sorting it before by clicking on the path column it actually result in almost randomizing the list.

[jiri]

A lot of questiongs, so let's start from the beginning (here are anwers to the first part, I will add others later).
- Icons are not changeable yet, they will be improved soon and then probably also made changeable.
- Yes, more options for the playlist will come.
- It is not possible to clear Top50 and Last50, because they actually use information from playback history, which is not editable yet. It will be possible to view the history later, probably also with some charts, statistics, ...
- You are right, Enqueue (and others) should work for Accessible songs (and others). Some more features for newly inserted CDs are going to appear in the next version.
- There will be more options for the player position, but it will take some time.
- The internal player can be controlled a bit easier (more features to come), but generally the players are very similar (the same skins and plug-ins).
- New buttons in properties window - looks like a good idea
- CD covers will definitely appear.
- Shortcuts will be improved, it will be possible to define also some system-wide.
- Those suggestions for improvements of classification sound well, some should be implemented
- I hope that everything will be saved to ID3 tags in the future, it depends also on ID3v2 extensions, but it will be implemented anyway.
- Exports will be improved, so far they are rather an example of scripting features, anything better can be implemented.

Thank you for all your suggestions, they are not lost, most of them have been added to the to-do list. Let me know if I didn't answer enough any of your questions.

Jiri

[Promethee]

Thanks. Waiting therefore eagerly for next version(s) to address these issues.

[jiri]

Ok, answers to the rest of your questions:
WinAmp is not supported for 100% because of two things:
1. there is the internal player, which does all necessary (and more features will come)
2. it isn't possible to control everything in WinAmp

- More options for playlist will come as I wrote, it will contain also some docking and a possibility to allow the playlist only.
- You are right with the accessible songs, I will change the default order.

Jiri