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Messages - oblivion [ switch to compact view ]

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176
Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: M3U8 playlists
« on: September 06, 2013, 10:24 AM »
Hmm. I'm not sure what is the cause. Is there any way you can give me an MP3 that has the problem so I can do some testing?

Yes -- please let me know as soon as you have it so I can take it down again! (NB this is now an encrypted zipfile -- I'll PM the password to you as the content is commercial.)

problem file

177
Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: M3U8 playlists
« on: September 06, 2013, 04:32 AM »
Great! Let me know how it works for you!  :Thmbsup:
It's been okay, but I've just had something very odd happen...

It MIGHT be because the title tag of the last imported track was formatted as "artist name" + "forward slash" + "title" -- I claim no responsibility for that, it was as whatever online CDDB archive delivered for that CD when I ripped it -- but the upshot is that while the program still seems to be responsive (I've just dragged the file column wider to display the full filename and that worked fine) the Artist and Album columns for that track are displaying garbage and I can't delete that entry, I can't start a new playlist and try again, in fact none of the buttons respond to a keypress (beyond the tiny visual feedback indicating that they've been pressed). I can't even close the program.

Screenshot - 06_09_2013 , 10_20_52.png

I'll forcibly close it and see if I can pin down an exact trigger (assuming the behaviour's repeatable!) and let you know anything I discover...

[later]

Okay, I'm still getting garbage in the artist and album columns, but I'm wrong about what's causing it -- editing the tags in Opus to remove the slashes hasn't helped. All the tracks on the album exhibited something similar... However, the program's working as expected apart from that, now -- I can't replicate the bit where it went mostly unresponsive.

I'll have to drop the file into a tag editor that can show me more detail of the tag info to see if there's something corrupt I can't currently see.

[later still]

I did that, and couldn't see an obvious problem. The tags were v3.2 and looked as you'd expect.

So I rewrote them all anyway: inserted "various" into the album artist tag, cut the artist name out of each title and pasted it -- minus the <space><slash><space> -- into the artist field. Finally renamed the files themselves to <trackname><space><dash><space><trackname>.

If I were the patient sort, I'd have changed one thing at a time until it worked properly. I'm not the patient sort. Sorry. It works as expected now, anyway. Oh, except that I'm getting "various" for the artist, so presumably either you're using the content of the album artist field or the tag editor I used has it backwards. No biggie.

Strikes me that it's most likely that whatever created the tags in the first place (I have no idea but it would probably have been CDex or fre:ac/BonkEnc as it was in 2010 and that's about when I started using things other than CDex) stuffed something up and me rewriting the tags has unstuffed them. Unless it was something to do with the slashes.

[yet later still]

I think it's something to do with fre:ac. That's what I use for MP3 ripping and conversion pretty much all the time now and I've just seen similar behaviour from a track I ripped only a couple of weeks ago. Phooey -- I LIKE fre:ac.


No, it's not that consistent. The more I play, the less I can get an idea of what the problem is. :(

Any ideas about what might be going on? I should think the problems aren't worse than cosmetic -- I still haven't replicated the crash and it's only the (entirely non-controversial) filename that's being written out, after all -- but if the tags, as written by fre:ac, aren't behaving properly I should probably think about ways to identify and then clean up the problem...

178
I thought this was great, so I'm posting it:
 (see attachment in previous post)
That is wonderful :)

The current phrase describing people who care about this stuff appears to be "grammar nazi." The negative connotations for the phrase are clear: this is fanatical geekery and normal people need not care. The above is a beautiful example of just why the textual representation of grammatical niceties is rather more than just the icing on the cake, however!

Back on topic: my mic arrived today. It's an old-fashioned-looking thing I can arrange and angle reasonably easily. It's not studio quality but is a little better than the tiny condenser microphones built into most of the kit most people use. I don't have a studio to work in but a brief experiment "testing, testing, 1,2,3" with a radio playing in the background didn't leave much evidence of background noise in playback. I'm sure I won't achieve perfection but will do my best to be "good enough" :)

Enough already. I still have to finish reading the book. :)

179
Oblivion, care to chime in? (We've been PMing...)
Sorry, I thought I had notify switched on for this thread and ... well, I have now :)

I'm offering to do the audio but I'm not especially experienced in this stuff, so any and all advice will be helpful! (But first, I have to finish reading the book -- which yes, I'm thoroughly enjoying and will review on Amazon when I've finished -- and wait for my shiny new microphone to arrive!)

180
I’d be interested to know if your preference for PowerDesk is just about familiarity, or if it genuinely has acquired functionality or something ergonomic that gives it an edge over the other (increasingly extensive!) non-Microsoft competition.

Familiarity has a lot to do with it and have also tried XYplorer but found it still can't match Powerdesk's View>File Panes function and Drivebar toolbar.
-Midnight Rambler (August 19, 2013, 10:30 AM)
XYPlorer is much better at being pushed around into configurations that suit what you're doing at any given time but it's a lot less user-friendly out of the box. And, rather like Opus, it has a LOT of power and configurability that's available but not easy to get to grips with -- particularly early on -- and I'm still far from comfortable with the scripting language of either. However, it has tabs that are extremely configurable (and can have different settings from each other) and although I'm not sure everyone gets it straight away, there's a tree mode that effectively displays just the places you go. The drivebar was one of the things I missed when I ditched PD but Opus has one just like it and both Opus and XYPlorer have a drives dropdown that's just as functional in lots less precious realestate.

There was a time, with Opus, when the paradigm shift just happened, and I knew I'd got something I could work with. XYPlorer is taking longer to reach that point but I think I'm within sight of the time when the clouds will just suddenly part.

I think, remembering back, when I first used Opus I tried hard to make it look and feel like PowerDesk, because that's what I was used to. My favourites list still has echoes of what it was when I used PD. XYplorer can't easily be made to look and feel like PD -- it has an economy to it that means a lot of things you think you need aren't instantly available (and sometimes turn out to be just eye-candy), but I can easily see that the transition from PD to XY would be difficult and even frustrating.

Reading this back, I suspect you're going to think that I'm trying to convince you to change. I'm not, really -- just reminiscing about the transitions I went through, as much as anything. I DO think that if you decide to jump ship you'll do better with Opus than XY -- because it's less of a culture change -- but I'd also suggest you go here and reconfigure it along the lines suggested before going too far, just because (a) it worked for me, and (b) a lot of ex-PowerDesk users seem to love the approach taken. :)

181
General Software Discussion / Re: Replacing the Control Panel
« on: August 21, 2013, 12:48 PM »
Just to make sure we're on the same page, how did you try launching it in Vista?

From a cmd.exe prompt.

It asked for elevated privileges nicely (via a UAC prompt), opened the Windows Features window, put "Please wait..." in the rectangular area below the descriptive bit of text at the top, and I did as it suggested.

I'm doing it now, in fact. Waiting, that is.

Ooh. I was too impatient this morning. It's populated the window with the stuff I'd expected to see.  :Thmbsup:

You can also try launching it with the following command line:
%windir%\System32\OptionalFeatures.exe
Yes, that works too.

Okay, so for what it's worth, it works in Vista. The "it takes ages to populate the dialog" thing might just be because this machine's a few years old -- and, of course, it's running Vista :)

182
General Software Discussion / Re: Replacing the Control Panel
« on: August 21, 2013, 10:32 AM »
I am not sure what should happened when I run explorer.exe shell:::{67718415-c450-4f3c-bf8a-b487642dc39b} but I used DOPUS as my explorer replacement and it opens my Desktop (I am running Windows XP SP 3).
In Vista, it opened the add/remove windows features applet and then sat for ages trying to populate it. I gave up waiting, so I don't know if it would have got there eventually. I can confirm that it doesn't work right in XP -- I have a suspicion that this may only work correctly in at least Vista and possibly Win7.

183
There's always another way to skin any given cat. :)
Now that you mention it... I get pretty bent out of shape about this... As is really bloody pissed.
Easy, tiger. :)
ALPass does what 99.999% of people need/want.
I thought, here’s one I haven’t heard of, let alone tried. Oo. Roboform plus support and maybe even some integrity. Mm. Lots of yummy features. Excellent.

Then I saw the last line of text on the page.
ALPass requires Internet Explorer. It does not currently support Firefox, Opera, or other alternative web browsers.

Really? Even now?

Is there an emoticon for “disappointed”?  :o

If you lose your ALPass master password, you're hosed. Completely hosed. Toast. Dead. Screwed.

I know people get worried about the cloud, but the same is supposed to be true of Lastpass. Lastpass have Firefox and Chrome versions, I even managed -- after a fashion, and before I finally abandoned it -- to use the published workarounds for Opera. They even have an Android variant -- although that’s outside the things that are available for free, and it wasn’t quite as functional as I’d like.

Keepass (I seem to recall) has a linux variant. For that matter, although we’re all wary of the company behind the product after lots of us (yes, me included) had our lifetime licenses summarily revoked, Roboform’s security and functionality was years ahead of everyone else.

If these products delivered what people wanted, everyone would have them already. Something. Any-bloody-thing. No, what people want is not to have to think about it, and to be able to use PASSWORD123 on every website, banking service, data repository and fire alarm they ever meet or, better yet, nothing at all, and still to be able to complain, loudly and bitterly, that they’ve been let down by IT when their security is breached by some script kiddie with nothing better to do for ten minutes.

THAT is what most people want. Clear text is just madness.

I think, if I’m honest, most people want to feel secure without having to take many actions to ensure their own security. I KNOW I take password security more seriously than almost every normal (ie non-techie, non-geek) person I’ve ever met, and even I have a few frequently-used passwords stored in a CHS database. But there are people (no names, no pack drill) I know who COMPLAIN when their (carefully chosen and configured) DNS service stops them from routing a url via one of the snoopiest websites known to man because it means they can’t always click on a link in an email to a “bargain” new shiny thing.

There IS an overkill issue. Throw enough computer power at any stored, encrypted password and it’ll -- eventually -- be hacked. We tell people this and then that they have to use passwords they’ll struggle to remember and the last bit -- there’s a thing they can use to remember their passwords for them -- doesn’t make them feel that there’s a solution to the problem, it makes them feel like they’re handing over even more control to the technology brigade. And we wonder why people write their passwords down?

184
This isn't really that new, people have been asking for a Master Password feature, (ala Firefox), in Chrome since about 15 minutes after it obtained the ability to store passwords.

Google's response has always been the same: not interested.
So don't let it store passwords at all, and do something with lastpass / roboform / password gorilla / keepass / whatever instead. Or, hell, run your browser from a Truecrypt container.

There's always another way to skin any given cat. :)

185
Still, can't imagine computing without that Powerdesk explorer GUI.
-Midnight Rambler (August 13, 2013, 11:52 AM)
PowerDesk was my first proper Explorer replacement; can't remember what version, but it was before VCom. Ontrack, wasn't it? Anyway, I too really liked it.

Then they (Vcom, that is) broke something and professed absolutely no willingness to mend it again. (It was something important to me but clearly not to them -- might have been .dbf viewing, might have been the synch tool, I can't remember now.) To say their support leaves something to be desired is about the most generous a statement I can imagine.

I played with a variety of desperately inadequate alternatives for a while. Then (cue sound of heavenly choir) I found Directory Opus.

Then, more recently, I found XYPlorer. (I like it quite a bit more than Opus for portable use, although the learning curve is perhaps a bit steeper, and I’d had it for quite a while before I started discovering its true power.)

Both of those two are so much better than Windows Explorer it'd make your head spin. And I don't even remember why I was so impressed with PowerDesk anymore, back in the day.

I’m completely aware that YMMV applies here in spades :) but I’d be interested to know if your preference for PowerDesk is just about familiarity, or if it genuinely has acquired functionality or something ergonomic that gives it an edge over the other (increasingly extensive!) non-Microsoft competition.

(And it’s okay if it seems stupid but marvellously great -- like, I think the ability to double-click on the desktop to open an Opus lister is a tiny bit brilliant, for instance!)

186
General Software Discussion / Re: Replacing the Control Panel
« on: August 19, 2013, 02:08 AM »
What are some simple command lines that would be good to have handy to have available on a basic system menu?
Have read all this with a combination of amused fascination and horror. You, sir, are a brave man. :)

Is chkdsk <driveletter> /f worth including?

Something I'd find useful -- a way to get at some of the control panel stuff when the logged-in user is restricted but I have an admin password I can run stuff as.

In these situations, I generally do runas /user:<whatever> cmd.exe and then try to remember which of the .cpls do what (control.exe whatever.cpl) since they're almost completely impossible to identify function from name. (If you don't already know, you'll never guess what main.cpl is for!) So something along the lines of what you're doing I could run from a stick and that I could fire an admin account at without having to log the user off -- now that'd be really useful :)

187
Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: M3U8 playlists
« on: August 06, 2013, 04:56 PM »
I have the update available. You can now open .m3u8 files though it will not know the artist or album since there is no direct location for the files.

http://cl.ly/422W24212u3e
Brilliant -- thanks!

Too busy myself to do much testing for the next day or so, but I'm sure it'll be fine -- many thanks again!

188
Living Room / Re: When you make your 100'th Post
« on: August 06, 2013, 08:14 AM »
Aw, shucks  :-[

189
Living Room / Re: When you make your 100'th Post
« on: August 06, 2013, 06:05 AM »
oblivion/Tim @ 300:
Thanks  :-[ I seem to be doing my best to fail to notice all my own milestones :)

And of course Ath, not only numerically, makes my contributions fade into the background :)

190
Hi Oblivion!
Try using a coma (","), it should work.

Aha. I was experimenting with semicolons. Thanks!

191
Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: M3U8 playlists
« on: August 06, 2013, 05:24 AM »
I can make it auto-refresh the drive list, but removing the drive letter from one and not the other when selected might not be so easy. I may just have to show a warning if both are set to the same letter. I'll see what I can do and should have something tomorrow.
OK, thanks!

I might be stretching things a little here but do you think the possibility of editing an existing playlist might be do-able? It's probably too much to sanity-check it (ie is it referring to files that actually exist, given that it'd be necessary to go backwards from replacements to drive letters before checking the files' existence) but the ability to reorder, reshuffle, delete lines or add new files would be a useful enhancement...

I completely get that I'm pushing the envelope from what I originally asked for. You know how it is, once you get something that works, the feeping creatures start looking round the corners at you :)

192
I found this little gem yesterday and have found a couple of issues.

The "which windows..." entry in the options allows newlines but doesn't interpret them as separators, with the effect that the ini can get populated with entries that can't be interpreted. It's not clear what the separator should be, either.

Trivial: on the "rules" tab, "Height" is misspelled.

193
Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: M3U8 playlists
« on: August 05, 2013, 04:12 PM »
Also, the app doesn't appear to process Unicode paths but I'm uncertain if that's important to Tim or not.
Not right now, anyway :) I daresay there will come a time when it does matter, but it's certainly not important to me now.

194
Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: M3U8 playlists
« on: August 05, 2013, 04:09 PM »
I have updated to include dropping of folders (including sub-folders) and fixed the crashing bug.

http://cl.ly/083C1i3u2i0k

Thanks! That's pretty awesome :)

A couple of things, though: there should probably be some logic that prevents the same drive letter being mapped twice, to different things. (Maybe the available list of drives in the second box should exclude the current selection in the first box, and vice versa? Does that get painfully self-referential?) Also -- and this is probably unnecessary but I noticed it while testing -- the program clearly only makes a list of available drive letters at startup and any more that become available while the program's running don't get picked up.

In general, though: marvellous! Thanks! This will make an irritating job SO much easier!

195
Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: M3U8 playlists
« on: August 05, 2013, 09:34 AM »
Ok. I'm on it... Here is a screen shot so far. :-)
That looks stunning already :)

196
Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: M3U8 playlists
« on: August 05, 2013, 09:31 AM »
Let me see if I understand. You want a utility that you can drag and drop or select music from one (or both) of those drive letters and have it replace the letters with \MUSIC\ and \<microSD1>\ respectively and be able to randomize the list and save it as a file with .m3u8 extension <MyMix.m3u8>. Is that correct?
I never learned properly not to waffle. :) That sounds about right!

Oh, yes, it'll need to swap backslashes for forward slashes too.

197
Post New Requests Here / IDEA: M3U8 playlists
« on: August 05, 2013, 05:43 AM »
I have an idea for a useful -- and hopefully not-too-complicated -- program.

I have a music player with an expansion slot. If I want to make a "mixtape-style" playlist, it's quite complicated if I want to incorporate music from the expansion slot as well as the internal memory.

If I make a list of files for a playlist while the player's plugged into my PC, the files will include drive letters that the player won't understand.

So I'd like a playlist maker that'll make playlists my player can interpret. To achieve that, it'll need to be able to be told which drive letters map to what folders and where the playlists need to be stored on the player. Ideally, it should either be able to handle drag-and-drop OR have a file browser that can read the music files' tags. (Or even both!)

It would also be nice if it could shuffle a playlist randomly. (For some reason, my text editors don't seem to understand why I might want to sort the lines in a textfile randomly!)

In case this hasn't made much sense, here's what my present workflow looks like:

1. Plug in MP3 player. The PC assigns it to drives F: and K:.

2. Browse files on player from a file manager, select single or multiple filenames, copy the full pathnames to the clipboard, paste them into a text editor. Repeat until all the required music has been identified and named in the textfile.

3. Use search and replace features in the text editor to replace F:\ with \MUSIC\ and K:\ with \<microSD1>\

4. Use search and replace again to replace all \ with / (this is a Rockboxed player and it uses unix-ish path conventions)

5. Tweak order of lines to reflect needs. (If I want random, though, I have to shuffle the playlist using the player itself!)

6. Save file to the Playlists folder on F: as (whatever).m3u8


For all I know, there are 101 things out there that do something like this. However, all I seem to be able to find are playlist makers that make playlists for the device they're being run from -- and as the battery life of my MP3 player is better than my netbook and it doesn't make such an unsightly bulge in my shirt pocket, something like this would be Really Useful. :)

198
Find And Run Robot / Re: Portable suggestion
« on: July 31, 2013, 02:00 AM »
Don't know if it helps, but take a look at Horst Schaeffer's ShortExe:

Thanks -- one for the toolkit!

It's an interesting approach, but it's not a portablisation problem I have here: FARR already makes finding and running programs from portable media brilliantly easy. The issue is just, when you're configuring aliases (or shortcuts in LBC, as the logic's similar) the program defaults to using the drive letter instead of the completely available but apparently eminently forgettable %APPDRIVE% variable. So I was trying to suggest a tiny tweak whereby FARR / LBC could look to see if the drive letter and %APPDRIVE% match and, if they do, use the latter in the created shortcut / alias.

Just trying to save work for me and make some for mouser. Surely no harm in that, he whined, winningly. ;)

199
Find And Run Robot / Portable suggestion
« on: July 30, 2013, 04:39 AM »
I was tweaking aliases in FARR when I thought of this but something similar might also be considered for LaunchBarCommander...

How about a tiny change to the logic that says, when you're adding an alias to a portable copy, via the “search for an executable” button, something like (very pseudo code)

if alias_executable_drive = %APPDRIVE% then replace alias_executable_drive with "%APPDRIVE%"

I get that there will be times when a hard-coded drive letter is a Good Thing, particularly when you’re running portably but expect to be able to find something on the host’s system, but I can’t think of a single instance where the drive letter of the portable device might need to be referred to explicitly rather than expanding the %APPDRIVE% variable instead. (Which might be a statement about my lack of imagination, I guess :) )

I'd also like to be able to ask FARR / LBC to search for all uses of a drive letter -- even if a search-and-replace option would be too much of a blunt instrument, a report I could work through just to make sure I hadn't missed anything stupid would be really useful :)

Partly, this is because I can go for several weeks without needing to remember how to refer to the drive letter variable and by the time I need it again, I’ve always forgotten it!

200
General Software Discussion / Re: The Non-Notepad(MS) Thread!
« on: July 29, 2013, 04:17 AM »
Plain text files are tremendously useful... I never did understand why people felt they needed fancy word processors to keep notes and lists of stuff.
Probably because they like text enhancements and automatic formatting. But at the very least, something tiny that does richtext is good enough for most people’s needs most of the time, I’d have said.

But if you’ve been out and bought a PC with an evaluation copy of Office on it and you don’t understand that there are low-cost or free alternatives, you’re probably also not going to get (a) that you don’t need Word for a shopping list or, for that matter, (b) that emailing .docx files is Irritating, for all sorts of reasons.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I also use a text editor for composing email replies (I don't trust online editors).

It does require that you remember the syntax for text enhancements -- or not use them, of course. (Said the chap writing from inside Jarte :) )

And RJ TextEd is also worth a look.

Not one I’d come across. So I’ve downloaded the portable version.

HOW BIG??!!  :o

Nearly 100Mb once extracted from the (slightly less than half that) zipfile? Good grief. It’d better be good!

(There are times when I remember that the first PC I had regular use of had 640k RAM and a 20MB hard disk -- and that WordStar ran comfortably from a small fraction of that disk space :) Okay, okay, [/old fart mode] ;) )

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