Down the home stretch.
The music system now defaults to sorting by album (then artist, track number, track name.) You can click the column headings to get it to sort by 'track name' or by 'album'.
And the search engine was not constraining it's results properly in some cases, most notably when searching while in a 'by artist' view. Now you should only get results from the restricted collection of music defined by whatever view you are in. (If I am looking at /music/jim/artist/beatles and I do a search, I will only get results back from hits on just the set comprised of my beatles songs.)
Assuming everything is working correctly now, the only thing left is to add the ability to order the tracks inside a user created playlist (this will happen when you click through 'edit this playlist'.)
I've only done limited testing but I believe the reordering of tracks within user created playlists is now working.
It's not as smart as on the /subscription page though, where you can put in, say, two or three of the same numbers and the system sorts out any overlap or gap issues in the range of numbers. Here in music it just accepts whatever you give it. I don't think that will be a problem. But what it does mean is if you have 50 songs in a playlist, and you want to add a track towards the top, you do have to manually change every number below it.
Oh, and if you don't specify tracknumbers for playlists it defaults to the order in which you added songs to the playlist.
I'm gonna correct something I just said on another page and move this here. I thought a partially-loaded file was playing while it was downloading from the Tree but that's just because I did a test with a small file. With the Monotrona file, if I just click the link I get the hourglass and I assume it's downloading (silently) and eventually will appear as a Quicktime bar on a browser page. With Realplayer, which I turned off, I used to see a meter with the progress of the download. my .mp3s are supposed to play in Winamp now but for some files I get the Quicktime player--such as DMTree music files. Jim, did you set something that makes QT the preferred player for our music files? It doesn't matter for me, so much: I usually save stuff I know I want to my drive rather than just click on the link, and when I do that I type in the file extension (to override the persistent Realplayer) and it saves it as a Winamp file. I'm just curious if you did something on your end or if this is just the usual proprietary file extension battle that goes on every day in my computer. Illiterately,
No I didn't set anything. The server does send a mime type in the header, but I'm sure this is just a generic audio/mpeg-2 or something like that. Whatever the vanilla Apache mime header is for mp3s. Certainly not quicktime or any specific product.
On my machine I get the quicktime browser plug-in. It's not an actual stream, but for me I can play it as it downloads (an actual stream has all sorts of negotiations going on between client and server to try to ensure a hiccup free playback - this isn't doing anything like that.) That's what I meant by stream (also, by not right clicking and saving as, it's streaming in the sense that it's not going to be saved to my hard drive except in the sense that I could go into my browser cache and dig it out.)
Can you really not play the track before it is done downloading in the windows quicktime player?
Well, the QT player I downloaded is 2 years old. But no, I don't like it because I see no evidence a song is downloading until the playbar magically appears in the middle of the browser (along with a pop-up prompt about MIME types that I always get and always click "yes"). If it's taking several minutes it drives me crazy. Like I said, my computer is a battlefield of player types--I never know what I'm going to get before I click a link (real, QT, winamp, Windows crap media). That's why I prefer right-clicking and saving. I can direct it to the right folder and see the progress of the download. If I don't like the song I just delete it.
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The music system now defaults to sorting by album (then artist, track number, track name.) You can click the column headings to get it to sort by 'track name' or by 'album'.
And the search engine was not constraining it's results properly in some cases, most notably when searching while in a 'by artist' view. Now you should only get results from the restricted collection of music defined by whatever view you are in. (If I am looking at /music/jim/artist/beatles and I do a search, I will only get results back from hits on just the set comprised of my beatles songs.)
Assuming everything is working correctly now, the only thing left is to add the ability to order the tracks inside a user created playlist (this will happen when you click through 'edit this playlist'.)
- jim 3-27-2004 6:28 pm
I've only done limited testing but I believe the reordering of tracks within user created playlists is now working.
It's not as smart as on the /subscription page though, where you can put in, say, two or three of the same numbers and the system sorts out any overlap or gap issues in the range of numbers. Here in music it just accepts whatever you give it. I don't think that will be a problem. But what it does mean is if you have 50 songs in a playlist, and you want to add a track towards the top, you do have to manually change every number below it.
- jim 3-27-2004 7:18 pm [add a comment]
Oh, and if you don't specify tracknumbers for playlists it defaults to the order in which you added songs to the playlist.
- jim 3-27-2004 7:20 pm [add a comment]
I'm gonna correct something I just said on another page and move this here. I thought a partially-loaded file was playing while it was downloading from the Tree but that's just because I did a test with a small file. With the Monotrona file, if I just click the link I get the hourglass and I assume it's downloading (silently) and eventually will appear as a Quicktime bar on a browser page. With Realplayer, which I turned off, I used to see a meter with the progress of the download. my .mp3s are supposed to play in Winamp now but for some files I get the Quicktime player--such as DMTree music files. Jim, did you set something that makes QT the preferred player for our music files? It doesn't matter for me, so much: I usually save stuff I know I want to my drive rather than just click on the link, and when I do that I type in the file extension (to override the persistent Realplayer) and it saves it as a Winamp file. I'm just curious if you did something on your end or if this is just the usual proprietary file extension battle that goes on every day in my computer.
Illiterately,
- tom moody 3-27-2004 10:38 pm [add a comment]
No I didn't set anything. The server does send a mime type in the header, but I'm sure this is just a generic audio/mpeg-2 or something like that. Whatever the vanilla Apache mime header is for mp3s. Certainly not quicktime or any specific product.
On my machine I get the quicktime browser plug-in. It's not an actual stream, but for me I can play it as it downloads (an actual stream has all sorts of negotiations going on between client and server to try to ensure a hiccup free playback - this isn't doing anything like that.) That's what I meant by stream (also, by not right clicking and saving as, it's streaming in the sense that it's not going to be saved to my hard drive except in the sense that I could go into my browser cache and dig it out.)
Can you really not play the track before it is done downloading in the windows quicktime player?
- jim 3-27-2004 10:51 pm [add a comment]
Well, the QT player I downloaded is 2 years old. But no, I don't like it because I see no evidence a song is downloading until the playbar magically appears in the middle of the browser (along with a pop-up prompt about MIME types that I always get and always click "yes"). If it's taking several minutes it drives me crazy. Like I said, my computer is a battlefield of player types--I never know what I'm going to get before I click a link (real, QT, winamp, Windows crap media). That's why I prefer right-clicking and saving. I can direct it to the right folder and see the progress of the download. If I don't like the song I just delete it.
- tom moody 3-27-2004 11:14 pm [add a comment]