Messages

51

Seedling's Software / Re: New App! WTF!? Music Info

« on: January 09, 2008, 10:44 AM »

version 1.0.3.17 posted with some additions and fixes

-seedling (January 09, 2008, 01:33 AM)

what are the changes, seedling? too lazy to d/l & read the changelog..

-lanux128 (January 09, 2008, 06:13 AM)

Sorry, was falling asleep at the computer last night

+ added an 'additional search folders' list that will be searched along side the main search dir
* fixed the mouse clicking on the chart issue (where you could move the chart around when you're not supposed to be able to)
* other internal fixes / improvements

52

Seedling's Software / Re: New App! WTF!? Music Info

« on: January 09, 2008, 01:33 AM »

version 1.0.3.17 posted with some additions and fixes

53

Seedling's Software / Re: Mixtape Maker: Updates and Latest Beta Versions Here

« on: January 08, 2008, 07:12 PM »

i like that idea, that could really widdle down specifically what you're looking for.  it can be done.  i just need some time atm to do it.

54

Seedling's Software / Re: New App! WTF!? Music Info

« on: January 06, 2008, 06:20 PM »

ok get the new build. this one addresses some scanning problems with year tags that are not correctly done as well as some internal fixes.

55

Seedling's Software / Re: New App! WTF!? Music Info

« on: January 05, 2008, 06:36 PM »

Good job! Now those files are recognized without problems...

... and I unearthed another bug . Seems something is wrong with the recursive search, because although it works in my main music directory, counting every file located in the nested directories, when I input the main directory (My Documents) containing the two separate music directories that I have, only one is searched! The other one does not show its results in the graph.

-Lashiec (January 05, 2008, 02:13 PM)

Not sure why this is happening because that's exactly how I test (having multiple subdirs, etc) I'll check it out some more just to be certain there's not some weirdness happening.

EDIT: And another one, this time a exception. I have various pictures for each album I have together with the music files, and it seems the program doesn't like cover pictures, at least one of them, because it throws a "External Exception EEFFACE" when it gets to this picture, and it seems the scanning routine gets stopped there, as the status bar shows it's analyzing this file. I wonder if this could be caused by the fact that this picture is duplicated in two different directories. The exception only occurs when I select "Genre" in "Display chart by". And pushing "Stop" button does nothing.

-Lashiec (January 05, 2008, 02:13 PM)

If all of your songs are mpeg-4 audio, there might be some issue with picture tags.  I'll have to tag some m4a files I have with pictures to see if I can recreate the incident.

56

Seedling's Software / Re: New App! WTF!? Music Info

« on: January 05, 2008, 01:20 AM »

ok Lashiec (an others), i've include mpeg-4 support!   from tests i've done from mpeg4 compressed files i've tested on it works (please read the readme.txt for more info)

also, i've stopped including audio filetypes that are non-taggable; suchs as ac3, wav, and vqf. this will eliminate any amount of large amount of 'non-tagged' resultes.

fixed the chart-display issue where only a % amount of relults were properly marked on the chart.

let me know if i'm missing anything else. (still working on other things, like include/exclude dirs).

thanks for you interest!

57

Seedling's Software / Re: New App! WTF!? Music Info

« on: January 04, 2008, 10:06 AM »

Minor Bug:  It doesn't handle bad year data well. I had a tag that was 199x and it popped up an error dialog and seemed to stop the scan.  It would be nice to know which file (so I can fix it ) and also if it would continue scanning ignoring that file.

What I would really like is something that could fix & rationalize the metadata for my music collection.

-srboisvert (January 04, 2008, 09:09 AM)

keep in mind folks that this is basically a build#1 type app and does what it does with properly tagged or non-tagged files
but keep the bug reports coming, i really do need them.

i'll look at this issue as well.

i've been working on implementing thehandling of mpeg4-audio files and am real close to that.  once i get over that hurdle (for you iTunes people) i'll start addressing the other issues as well as extending the applications capabilities.

thanks for your patience. and, again, keep the bug reports coming

58

Seedling's Software / Re: New App! WTF!? Music Info

« on: January 01, 2008, 03:50 PM »

what do you use to encode your mp4's (aac)? (and what extesion are they? 'mp4','m4a',?

59

Seedling's Software / Re: New App! WTF!? Music Info

« on: January 01, 2008, 01:59 PM »

ok, i guess i'll have to make some flac files for testing then.

also, according to the audiolib it does support ID3v2.4.x tags, so i'm not exactly sure what's going on there.

Which tagging program do you use to tag your files?  I'll try to tag files with various methods and try to get to the bottom of things.

thanks for your feedback!

60

Seedling's Software / Re: New App! WTF!? Music Info

« on: January 01, 2008, 01:32 PM »

Could you add a feature to exclude certain directories from the recursive directory scan?

Also if too many different results then it looks all scrunched up is their a way to get it to still show all of the graph but not scrunched up without limiting the graph to the top whatever.

-hamradio (December 31, 2007, 11:59 PM)

i will be adding the ability to exclude as well as include other directories into the mix.

as far as making the chart display everything without scrunching up, well that's kind of impossible. if you have 100 lines of data and a limited screen space then you will have a scrunched display. i don't really see any other way around it.

61

Seedling's Software / Re: New App! WTF!? Music Info

« on: January 01, 2008, 01:29 PM »

Well, I think I found a couple of bugs. I have a bunch of MP3s using the APEv2 tagging, and they're showed as non tagged. FLAC files are not even recognized.

-Lashiec (January 01, 2008, 12:26 PM)

The APEv2 bugs might be due to the audio lib i'm using. I have the source so i may have to update it myself to make it more compatible. but i will have to study APEv2 tags before i can make the adjustments.

as far as the FLAC files go, would you tell me what file extension they have? aren't they just *.flac files? if not, they may be eliminated in the file extension check (so let me know what extension you're using).  i use this first to help speed things up. if i ran each file through the libs to check for validity it'd slow things down a lot. the reason i did this was to avoid checking every single filetype it came across (i.e. *.txt, *.doc, etc.)

EDIT:

re: APETags. i forgot, these are looked up by a 'SeekField' command so it looks for fields named specifically "Artist","Genre","Year" and are case-sensitive. so if your files are titled in any other fashion, then it will not find any info. please share how your file's tag titles.

62

Seedling's Software / Re: New App! WTF!? Music Info

« on: December 31, 2007, 07:31 PM »

What formats does this support? I downloaded it yesterday and I see it reads MP3 (no ID3v2.4, unfortunately) and Vorbis, but seems it does not like MP4 and FLAC. Also, does it write something to the registry? Is it written in VB? (shakes before the vision of CLSID entries)

-Lashiec (December 31, 2007, 01:42 PM)

The audio lib I used supports the following:

ID3v1
ID3v2
ApeTags

According to the lib it 'should' support built in tagging systems for: WMA, FLAC, OGG

formats:
AAC, AC3, APE, FLAC, MP3, OGG, VQF, WAV, WV, WMA

(I know some of these types don't even support tags, but i have a plan for that in later builds)

NO REGISTRY ENTRIES USED AT ALL!!!

Whenever I put in a saving-type system it will use all local files in the same dir, count on that! (I too hate registry filling stuff)

And it's written and compiled using Borland C++ Builder

63

N.A.N.Y. 2008 / WTF!? Music Info entry

« on: December 30, 2007, 07:07 PM »

Here's a little app that'll give you the lo-down on your music collection.  Shows stats based on artist, genre, or year.  I intend on building this this up in the future, but for now it's a neat little app to let you know what you got.

get it in this thread:  https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=11587.0

Happy New Year!

64

Seedling's Software / New App! WTF!? Music Info

« on: December 30, 2007, 07:05 PM »

My NANY contribution!
check out: https://www.donation...ndex.php?board=234.0 for more info on other great NANY entries!

Hi all!  Here's a little app that'll give you the lo-down on your music collection.  Shows stats based on artist, genre, or year.  I intend on building this this up in the future, but for now it's a neat little app to let you know what you got.

Enjoy!

Download:

65

Seedling's Software / Re: Hi Everyone / Random MixTape Maker ideas

« on: December 17, 2007, 06:56 PM »

that's strange -- because it handled the "Gould" search fine, yet Gould only appears in the ALBUM field (unless it also checks for filename - as "gould" is there too).

-parpfish (December 17, 2007, 04:40 PM)

yeah, the way it works is it looks in the concatenated 'song title' text (which consists of artist and title BUT if there is no tag present to fill this info, it reverts to a locating the text in the filename)

The biggest hitch re. the results was where there was more than one Keyword Search term. Unless I got the delimiter wrong (used a comma) it seemed to ignore the second term (see results).

See for example the 'Velvet Underground, Debussy' keyword search results.

what is probably happening here is that you're putting a space in between the comma and the word. as the code is written now a proper keyword search term would be 'Velvet Underground,Debussy' NOT 'Velvet Underground, Debussy'

i'll have to write some sort of trim-space-between-delimiter code to filter out the natural instinct of placing spaces between commas.

By the way, does the program concatenate the metafields into a string and then search that string -- or am I way off?

not really, the song (or file) is stored into a memory structure which holds (separately) all info about that file.

Also something I couldn't figure, was the method behind the search. Does it allow for Boolean AND/OR and "containers" (i.e. search ALL FIELDS containing:  [Bach AND "C Minor"] OR ["Velvet Underground"] Thus finding matches for both "Bach pieces in C Minor" and "The Velvet Underground").

it's really a simple match finder. it looks merely to see if a given keyword is found in any part of the 'song name' (artist/title) OR filename. if exact word method is applied it looks for common characters before and after the found word to determine if it's a standalone word. but to answer your question more directly, ALL keywords are tested against the picked song. (i.e. even if you have 100 keywords, it'll try all of those keywords until a match is found or the keywords are exhausted)

I have no idea a) if it can do this already, or b) whether that is hard to impliment.
But it strikes me that if it were to allow for a "Boolean logical search" in all text fields that would be pretty powerful and flexible! The user would be able to pretty much control the degree of a) Certainty (MUST HAVE), b) Bias (KEYWORD with Filters) and c) Randomness - which, I would have thought would cater for pretty much everyone.

well, in a way the app already does this when it tries to allow a file through its filters.
the point of writing this (in the very beginning) was to search directories and fill up a playlist completely at random. then i started playing with filtering those randomly chosen picks with user-defined limits (such as genre, time allowed, etc). i just kept adding more and more filter-features in order to assure that you'd get the 'type' of playlist you wanted in the end.  and while this may not be as powerful as a structured database query engine or anything, it gets the job done by just not allowing randomly picked songs into your list unless they meet the criteria setup by the user.

i guess i could tweak the inner workings of the app to allow for these exact types of setups, but again, when using the app the way YOU want to use it, you can pretty much acheive the kind of outcome you want.

Not quite sure what "exception" you're referring to?

hehe, it's just a write access error that pops up every now and then when creating a list. not sure what's causing it (just a bug)


Thanks again for all of your interest and both positive AND critical notes on this thing.  I'll keep working on it as long as there is a demand for it.

66

Seedling's Software / Re: Hi Everyone / Random MixTape Maker ideas

« on: December 17, 2007, 03:42 PM »

thanks for the results! i think the main reason there's problems picking up some of the songs, is because i'm haven't checked for the 'album' metadata. i've only tested for: artist, title, and genre (and of course lyrics albeit separately). i'll add album checking as well. i guess what i need to do in the future is really add options to search all possible text fields with keywords. that's prolly the better way to go overall.

i also noticed a strange exception occuring during playlist making on one of my machines, but can't seem to get it to happen on another. are you experiencing these problems?

67

Seedling's Software / Re: Hi Everyone / Random MixTape Maker ideas

« on: December 16, 2007, 09:52 PM »

ok, new version posted in the beta thread. please check it out and post any bugs found.

i'll get to the .m3u drag-n-drop shortly.

68

Seedling's Software / Re: Updates and Latest Beta Versions Here

« on: December 16, 2007, 09:50 PM »

Random Mix Tape Maker v1.8.30.82 posted!

Keyword priority search option has been added.

A LOT of code was re-written! Because of this, realize that this is very much a BETA release! If anyone finds any bugs with it please try to recreate them and report them.  I'm only a one-man testing machine, so any help is appreciated.

69

Seedling's Software / Re: Hi Everyone / Random MixTape Maker ideas

« on: December 14, 2007, 11:16 PM »

Would it be possible to implement dragging and dropping a playlist onto the blacklist window?

-Daleus (December 14, 2007, 08:00 AM)

that shouldn't be a problem at all. drag and drop support is already on the black list, but for now it only adds files or folders. i'll just add a handler for .m3u files.  i'll put it on my to-do list this weekend.

70

Seedling's Software / Re: Hi Everyone / Random MixTape Maker ideas

« on: December 13, 2007, 08:55 AM »

i can certainly see the benefits of setting things up in the way that you put them; and to that end i will implement (in the next build) an option to use keywords as a priority search.  i do not want to make this the default mainly because it defeats the over all randomness of the default app. but it will be implemented as an option if any user chooses to use keywords in such a fashion.

you'll have it by the end of the weekend

71

Seedling's Software / Re: Hi Everyone / Random MixTape Maker ideas

« on: December 12, 2007, 10:18 PM »

thanks again for the feedback.  i'm glad that someone else is using this and really checking it out (and being vocal about it) cuz i'm so used to using it 'my way' i never notice 'strange' behaviour of other methods.

let me explain as best i can in its entirety how this app actually works, cuz you have it partially correct.

DB = directory (an other dirs and sub dirs if recursive checking is on) of audio files
LIST = combined files (either from must have or random picked files)

for this example, i'll use your numbers of max time set to 180min and must-have's set to 120mins
step 1) DB is filled in memory with authenticated, supported media files. (this is only performed again if you change the search directories in order to speed up the process if you want to run it a 2nd, 3rd, etc time)

step 2) if the must have list is used fill LIST with the files in the must have list (subject to exclusive keyword and/or redundancy limits)

step 3) calculate time of files in LIST (if all files in must have pass the above filters (keyword/redundancy(if used)) then this will be 120min)

step 4) fill the rest of LIST by choosing songs randomly from DB and testing each selected file for user limits (genre, keywords, redundancy, min/max time, min/max size, year, etc) until LIST is 180min (or as close as possible).  this is where setting a min song limit comes in handy.  if you have not set a min song length, then it will continue to cycle throughout the entire DB until the list is EXACTLY 180min or the DB search has been exhausted. so, if you use a min song length of 2min, then if the LIST is at a total of 178.1min it will stop right there, cuz it will know that it is impossible to fill the list to 180 exact because by using even a 2min song, the LIST will be 180.1min (which, of course, is >180). if you have a min song limit of even 1min, it can be helpful, but usually (unless your list happens to be 179.1-179.9min long) it will still cycle thru the entire DB until exhausted.

at this point, you'll see that your 'cowboy junkies' song only stands a chance of being added only if LIST hasn't been completely filled AND that particular song has been randomly chosen in order to be tested against said user limits.

keywording (by itself) doesn't guarantee that any song with that keyword will be added (that's what the must-have list is for). rather, it is merely another user-defined filter that says 'ok, if the song that has been picked meets this criteria, then add it regardless of other criteria.'

again, perhaps this is just because i'm the only one really testing this for myself. so maybe i need to reword things to make it clear or provide popup hints or something. (which i'd be happy to do).

i'm out travelling until the weekend (but still checking in) so until this weekend i will not be able to make any adjustments.

i hope the above makes sense.

let me know if i can be of any further assistance.

72

Seedling's Software / Re: Hi Everyone / Random MixTape Maker ideas

« on: December 12, 2007, 12:38 AM »

ok, just did another build (v1.8.29.80). you can grab it from the beta thread for now. i believe i fixed quite a few things. please give it a try and let me know if you're still having trouble.

thanks!

73

Seedling's Software / Re: Hi Everyone / Random MixTape Maker ideas

« on: December 11, 2007, 11:10 AM »

thanks for the encouragement!

looking at how i coded the 'use keywords' options along with 'use ID limits' sub-option, it seems a poor choice really. this is how it all works together:

[Select]

[x] Use Keywords
(x) Use ID Limits

This basically does nothing, what happens is this:

the song is really only added so long as it passes the ID check.  because, after all, we're not using keywords exclusively.

what would make more sense is that if the non-exclusive keyword option is checked, only allow it to be used with the 'Ignore ID Limits' sub-option. because what will  happen then will say: if the song meets keyword criteria, just add it and forego the ID check. otherwise, there's no real point in having it check a keyword if it's gonna be allowed by the ID check anyway. it's just logical. so i'll make this change.

in case i'm rambling a bit and this isn't making any sense, let me provide a little flow picture for you.

again, using these options:

[Select]

[x] Use Keywords
(x) Use ID Limits

and the song 'cowboy junkies - sweet jane' is in your must have list.

as long as the song fits these criteria:
(min/max duration)[if used]
(year range)[if used]
(genre)[if used]
(redundancy)[if used AND happened to be picked in the artist limiting round]
(and of course the time limit for the list itself)[if used]

this song would be allowed without regard to any defined keyword.

using the same options above AND the song is NOT in the must have list BUT it was randomly picked by the process, the song would still be allowed without regard to any defined keyword. because, again, as long as it's meeting ID criteria (genre, year, etc) it'll be allowed.

to recap, i'm going to make the sub-options greyed and only select ignore ID limits when using non-exclusive keywords because there's no real point to using non-exclusive keywords with the 'use ID limits' option enabled.

now, if after i do this and items in your must have list are not being added, then there must be a further problem.  the only condition that must-have items are not included in the list are when using redundancy limits and using exclusive keywords.  the rest of the ID limits should be ignored.

74

Seedling's Software / Re: Hi Everyone / Random MixTape Maker ideas

« on: December 10, 2007, 11:31 PM »

i'll be glad to help.

it's strange cuz i test this out with my 99.9% mp3 collection and use this thing almost daily. i'll debug it with a similar setup to see if i can find any programmatic misteps in logic

are you using v1.8.28.77?


another thing you do is ditch the complete 'cowboy junkies' (unless you KNOW there's a space in your tag) and just go with 'cowboy'.  what exact search does is search for an exact match to a single word or defined phrase (non-case sensitive).

i'll let you know my results in a bit.

75

Seedling's Software / Re: Hi Everyone / Random MixTape Maker ideas

« on: December 10, 2007, 05:44 PM »

I'm using 1.06.68

download the latest version in this thread (at the bottom of the first post) https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=3380.0

in the older version (1.06.68) the keywording would only search for matches in filenames and artist/title tags.  in the newer version i added a separate lyrics keyword check.  it could be that something was broken at the time with that build as well.  try the newer version first, if you still are getting no results let me know.