Music Player and the MVP

[tkgafs]

Over time I have pretty much tried all the music plugins as this is really my main use of gbpvr and my mvp.

They all have good points and bad points and my favourite is still the jukebox it did one simple thing really well with no frills.

Most peoples problem with it seems to be that because of its age it only has minimal skinning capabilities, I have never really seen skins as particularily important, surely most of the time you are watching a recording or listening to music hence you dont see the skin.

My biggest problem with all the music plugins when they are working on the mvp is getting them to start before the MVP times out and goes to contacting servers.

I have a fairly large music collection [around 8000 tracks] and the plugins all seem to scan a large chunk of this before they start playing anything and quite often the mvp times out before the plugin starts.

I pretty much always play music randomly and use "music player" as my plugin of choice to do this now which works reasonably well if I start the plugin up wait about 1 minute and then press the green button to go to jukebox mode, in other words give it time to get some tracks read in, before starting it up.

What I'd like to able to do is just start the plugin up and have it start randomly playing when I press the green button, is it possible to preload all the tracks into a database ?

I also feel that the randomness of the plugin is not as random as it might be but its hard to be certain of this, its just that some tracks do seem to come up quite often, and other tracks never get selected.

tkgafs

[Jeff]

You can configure the music player to load all directories on startup. Go into the config app and check the “Load all files and directories on initial startup” option. By default this is not checked. I always have it checked when I use the player and the lists always are filled when I navigate into the player (and I also only use the MVP). This does slow down startup time some since CPU resources are being used to load the list in a background thread.

As to randomness, it might help if I give some background into how the music player selects random tracks.

When you press the green button, if the play list is empty and the jukebox is not visible, the highlighted directory is set as the “base directory”. The highlighted directory can be either one of the main music lists from the left hand list or a directory (with sub directories) or a single album from the right hand list.

Once the base directory is set, the plug-in the selects random tracks as follows.

First it selects a random number between 1-N (actually between 0 and N-1) where N is the number of items listed under the base directory. You can think of this as selecting a sub directory under the base directory. If the plug-in was filling the list in the background and hadn’t gotten to the point of filling in the list of files under that directory, it will fill it before going on.

Once a directory is selected, the plug-in selects a random index into the list of items under that directory. If it found a song, it queues it. If instead it found a sub directory, it navigates into the subdirectory and, if has not yet been filled, fills it. It then tries again, selecting a random index into the list under this new directory and queues it if it is a song or navigates down into it if it is a subdirectory. Eventually it either finds a song, or, if it can’t do so after trying this process 50 times, it gives up. So if you have all your mp3 files next 51 levels deep in your hierarchy it will never find anything. Other than that it should find a music file within a few random guesses.

The .NET true random number generator is used for this, so it is possible that the same number will come up multiple times in a row. That is, the number really should be random and thus the next roll of the dice has no memory as to the previous roll and a number has the same odds of being selected each time, so you certainly can (and do) get the same thing selected twice in a row at times.

Jeff

[tieke]

Thanks for explaining Jeff -

It means that generally the result is less random than if all tracks were in the root directory. For instance if there are ten subfolders in the root directory, the chance of any one of these folders being picked would be 0.1 - if one of the folders contains only one song, then that song will get picked on average 10 percent of the time, whereas if one of the folders contains 100 songs, an individual song in that directory would get picked only 0.1 percent of the time.

It works for me, as I would never randomise all my songs at once, so generally start random play down a folder or two - I too have around 8000 tracks, and full random play would set a very strange mood - part of a beethoven mass, followed by punk, followed by portugeuse pop wouldn't be all that easy to listen to!

[tkgafs]

It works for me, as I would never randomise all my songs at once, so generally start random play down a folder or two - I too have around 8000 tracks, and full random play would set a very strange mood - part of a beethoven mass, followed by punk, followed by portugeuse pop wouldn't be all that easy to listen to!

Thats actually exactly what I like about it !!!

although some folders do have to be marked not to be selected if I have friends round

Tkgafs

[nightwalker]

I agree, generally i let it go and run the full gambit of genere's. it makes for an interesting listen sometimes. I'll often hear something during random play that i've forgotten about and it spurs me to go and play a bit more of the same.

On that note.

Jeff, I'm beginning to think that most of my problem with music player is not waiting long enough for all the files to be indexed. Currently i have 13765 files in 1025 folders and i'm only about half way through ripping my CD's. I get errors on screen but as you know nothing shows in the logs. I did finally get the jukebox functon to come up and play a little something, but i can't figure out how to add to the songs that are already playing. So far the only way i can find to get back to the files and folders is to stop jukebox and that of course wipes out any selected songs.

Any thoughts?

[Jeff]

I only have 370 folders and 4883 files, so you ddo have quiet a bit more. That said, the plug-in should handle the case where you start using theplug-in before all the lists are filled. I've also never seen a case before where GBPVR puts an object not found error up on the screen wothout also showing it in the log file. Maybe sub could help look into that one.

You can add to the list of song playing by using the back button to get to the main list and then adding files to the queue by pressing the yellow button or enter. That will add the selected song, album, or directory tree to the queue.

Jeff

[sub]

I've also never seen a case before where GBPVR puts an object not found error up on the screen wothout also showing it in the log file. Maybe sub could help look into that one.

If you get an error message shown on the main menu screen, it'll also be in the log.

[nightwalker]

Jeff:

Thanks for the hints, i'll try it again Going to just bring up the music player and let it sit and load for a bit and see if the error comes up after i'm sure all is loaded. I have no idea why the error on the mvp screen doesn't get logged, sometimes it locks things up and i have to reboot the mvp, other time i can press the back button get out of the music player and go right back in again. when it happens that way the music is playing the whole time. very strange indeed.