musiX

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

Been using music x since the early builds and the pace of which its growing is brilliant!! are you planning in the future or soon-ish about adding something that will let you know when a new build is available?

 

Take a look in the upper right :)

 

 

It'll be available in the next build, with an option to disable update checks, and also the choice to receive notification for previews or for releases only.

[Draconian Guppy]

Any ETA when drag and drop ?

 

pet peeve: lyrics support ? :P

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

Any ETA when drag and drop ?

 

pet peeve: lyrics support ? :p

 

No ETA yet. I can only say that drag and drop will get in there sooner than lyrics support.

[Haggis Veteran]

i really hope you port this :D it looks amazing

[Skiver Veteran]

Take your dirty Linux out of here Haggis!

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

i really hope you port this :D it looks amazing

 

 

Take your dirty Linux out of here Haggis!

 

:) Would be hard to port to Linux, without WPF...

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

Well this is as good as ready:

 

 

Next in line: playlist import/export

 

Build 188 is not available by the way, this was just a test :)

[Draconian Guppy]

No ETA yet. I can only say that drag and drop will get in there sooner than lyrics support.

Cool, looking forward to drag and drop!

[TAZMINATOR]

Good job!

 

I used to create my own music player in the past, in late 90s.   I have it in my storage somewhere.

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

Good job!

 

I used to create my own music player in the past, in late 90s.   I have it in my storage somewhere.

 

Nice! I'd like to see how it looks like. In what language was it created? And which audio libraries did you use?

[TAZMINATOR]

Nice! I'd like to see how it looks like. In what language was it created? And which audio libraries did you use?

 

I don't have the screenshots with me.. I used it for my personal use which I have not put up for public yet since it was not finished..  I used VB ... I used MP3 format... and I was going to add more formats but ended up doing something else and stopped developing this player.

 

Maybe I go back to programming and create new one ... who knows since I have VS.NET now.

 

Edit:

 

I meant VS 2013.. Not VS.NET..    Not sure why I think .NET version..

[Darrian]

I am curious: are there plans for more views, such as stacking songs by album and displaying album art in a grid, or groupings by artist or release year? I understand that there is probaby still much to do and I am amazed at how quickly you are adding features and releasing builds. I wouldn't expect this sort of thing tomorrow. I was just wondering if it's in the plan. 

[Prototype1864]

Wow looks amazing!! the update feature is looking pretty awesome!! :D

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

I am curious: are there plans for more views, such as stacking songs by album and displaying album art in a grid, or groupings by artist or release year? I understand that there is probaby still much to do and I am amazed at how quickly you are adding features and releasing builds. I wouldn't expect this sort of thing tomorrow. I was just wondering if it's in the plan. 

 

Yes I plan to add more views, but I don't know how and what yet. The reason I started musiX is because I wanted a player which is not a bloated juke box. So if these views eventually make it, they will follow the same minimal idea which you already find in other musiX components.

 

Wow looks amazing!! the update feature is looking pretty awesome!! :D

 

Thanks!

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

While programming playlist import/export I added a song count next to the playlist name and increased the default width of the playlist and info panes (I plan on making them resizable soon):

 

[Darrian]

Yes I plan to add more views, but I don't know how and what yet. The reason I started musiX is because I wanted a player which is not a bloated juke box. So if these views eventually make it, they will follow the same minimal idea which you already find in other musiX components.

Yeah, I certainly wouldn't ask you to bloat it.  It's the minimalism that makes it so appealing.  At the same time, though, it's currently cumbersome to find the albums I'm looking for without using search, and that becomes problematic if you can't remember an artist or album title, especially when you have thousands of songs.  Thanks for responding.

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

Yeah, I certainly wouldn't ask you to bloat it.  It's the minimalism that makes it so appealing.  At the same time, though, it's currently cumbersome to find the albums I'm looking for without using search, and that becomes problematic if you can't remember an artist or album title, especially when you have thousands of songs.  Thanks for responding.

 

I'm a fan of the search as I always know what I'm looking for (there's a reason the player is built around that now :)) but I'm also not 100% happy with it and I fully understand your problem (especially with large collections). I'm working towards (in small steps, as it requires some layout changes) adding "artists" and "albums" screens in the top menu (between playlists and now playing). I'm checking out what other players are doing and would like to provide something similar but simpler and straight forward.

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

Hello everyone,

 

I've been busy again. Here's what's already been done for the next preview:

 

• Added a check for new versions
• Added ability to skip adding a folder on the welcome screen
• Added a song count next to the playlist names
• Added ability to save to and open .m3u playlists
• You can now rename playlists with F2 or by double-clicking
• Moved the searchbox to the top right (to prepare for new artists and albums screen which will use a common searchbox)
• Added new sort modes: by artist, by year
• Improved the scrollbars (the track is now slightly visible, scrollbars get wider when the mouse is over them)
• Fixed a lot of small issues (can't remember all of them)

Next, I'd like to take a look at drag and drop and file associations.

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

Giant tooltips: be gone! 

 

The tooltips of the songs contained a lot of information, but when scrolling through the playlist, they flashed and flashed because they were shown too quickly. So I removed them and instead put the song information in the right-click menu of a song. See here:

 

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

Alright, I've unbloated the song right-click menu. Seeing the path and file name doesn't add any value anyway:

 

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

No rush, you have an amazing product with a great roadmap! You've shown you listen to your users as well as doing you're own thing, you're a credit to the development world :)

 

I'm taking a development break tonight (I think I have ironed out all the major issues in the current build) and would like to answer this.

 

First of all, thanks a lot for your positive comments and also more generally for all the support and great ideas the neowin members have provided. You are very supportive and constructive. I really appreciate it. You have helped making musiX what it is today.

 

As for listening to users, I think it's a combination of several things. I believe that without users, there is no good software. Also, at work I'm doing customer support for a product which is being developed in-house. I don't do real development (other than bug tracking and fixing), but I'm in direct contact with development, attend to all sprint meetings, and did a part of QA on the previous software release. Acting as a user helps understanding them and also following the development team puts me in between two worlds and helps me find a good balance between development and customer support. Then, the fact I'm a perfectionist also plays a major role. I test, and test and test, and fix and fix, and even then I'm not fully satisfied.

[Skiver Veteran]

As for listening to users, I think it's a combination of several things. I believe that without users, there is no good software. Also, at work I'm doing customer support for a product which is being developed in-house. I don't do real development (other than bug tracking and fixing), but I'm in direct contact with development, attend to all sprint meetings, and did a part of QA on the previous software release. Acting as a user helps understanding them and also following the development team puts me in between two worlds and helps me find a good balance between development and customer support. Then, the fact I'm a perfectionist also plays a major role. I test, and test and test, and fix and fix, and even then I'm not fully satisfied.

 

I'm in quite a similar situation, I started off in the customer services team supporting the product, moved to the Professional Services team installing the product for our customers so got a very good handle on the "real world" that the developers quite often don't see.

Now I'm sort of in a consulting/support role for the developers in which I do a lot of things like QA, Documentation, building the labs they need for R&D etc which has also helped me see why some of the issues I've had with developers and QA in the past are sometimes unavoidable. 

[Haggis Veteran]

same here

 

started off in customer services

 

then became a BA

 

now work on a project for the front end system of the contact centre, signing off requirements, attending sprints etc

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

A gift to start a new week, build 200 is available. This is the changelog:

 

? Added a check for new versions

? Added ability to skip adding a folder on the welcome screen

? Added a song count next to the playlist names

? Added ability to save to and open .m3u playlists

? You can now rename playlists with F2 or by double-clicking

? Moved the searchbox to the top right (to prepare for new artists and albums screen which will use a common searchbox)

? Added new sort modes: by artist, by year

? Improved the scrollbars (the track is now slightly visible, scrollbars get wider when the mouse is over them)

? There is no large songinformation tooltip anymore when hovering over a song (it was annoying sometimes). Instead, the songinformation is now in the right-click menu of a song.

? Fixed a lot of small issues (can't remember all of them)

 

It's available on my blog as usual: raphaelgodart.tumblr.com

 

For the next build i'd like to work on:

 

• File associations
• Drag and drop of playlists from Windows to musiX
• Drag and drop of songs from Windows to musiX
• Notifications when a song starts playing
• Detection of tag changes outside of musiX

In short: better integration.

[Prototype1864]

brilliant update! impressed big time!