Dopamine

[dakn]

On 31/12/2016 at 4:53 PM, Raphaël G. said:

It's supposed to shuffle your whole collection? It doesn't?

Sorry I forgot to reply to this. It only shuffles the collection by whole albums, not songs, which doesn't seem correct to me?

[dakn]

3 hours ago, Raphaël G. said:

Hey folks, I have a question.

 

I got multiple requests for folder play, but as I don't need such feature myself, I'm wondering how it can be useful. Why should a music player replicate ones folder structure? Isn't that just the same as opening Windows Explorer, browsing to the desired file, and double clicking it? Or right clicking a folder, and choosing "Play with ..."?

Honest question. I'd like to understand why some people find a player without folder play "worthless".

I'm totally with you on this. Folder browsing is a very old fashioned method and for those that don't organise their music with tags.

[Zequi]

3 hours ago, Raphaël G. said:

Hey folks, I have a question.

 

I got multiple requests for folder play, but as I don't need such feature myself, I'm wondering how it can be useful. Why should a music player replicate ones folder structure? Isn't that just the same as opening Windows Explorer, browsing to the desired file, and double clicking it? Or right clicking a folder, and choosing "Play with ..."?

Honest question. I'd like to understand why some people find a player without folder play "worthless".

The only reason I can think of is some people don't have their music properly tagged. When that's the case, library view scrambles all your files. 

 

I have no use for that feature but what I really miss from my previous player is double clicking a file in explorer and Dopamine loading all the content of the folder. 

I have a lot of personal files (Band practice, audio memos, etc) not on my library and opening the whole folder instead of just the file was really useful for me. No idea if other Dopamine users would use this feature, though.

 

 

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

16 minutes ago, dakn said:

Sorry I forgot to reply to this. It only shuffles the collection by whole albums, not songs, which doesn't seem correct to me?

I'm not following: would't that be the same? (please tell me what I'm missing :)). When pressing "Shuffle all", Dopamine takes all songs (whether or not they are part of an album, doesn't matter) and randomizes the order, then it plays the first song in the resulting randomized list. 

14 minutes ago, dakn said:

I'm totally with you on this. Folder browsing is a very old fashioned method and for those that don't organise their music with tags.

Thanks. That's also what I was thinking. I got quite some requests for it though. I can't understand why someone who doesn't use tags, would need something like Dopamine.

7 minutes ago, Zequi said:

The only reason I can think of is some people don't have their music properly tagged.When that's the case, library view scrambles all your files. 

 

I have no use for that feature but what I really miss from my previous player is double clicking a file in explorer and Dopamine loading all the content of the folder. 

I have a lot of personal files (Band practice, audio memos, etc) not on my library and opening the whole folder instead of just the file was really useful for me. No idea if other Dopamine users would use this feature, though.

 

 

I'd like to know more about that "loading of the whole folder" feature. Which player did that? What exactly gets loaded and how is it displayed? Does that player open up some kind of Explorer-like view of that folder?

[dakn]

2 minutes ago, Raphaël G. said:

I'm not following: would't that be the same? (please tell me what I'm missing :)). When pressing "Shuffle all", Dopamine takes all songs (whether or not they are part of an album, doesn't matter) and randomizes the order, then it plays the first song in the resulting randomized list. 

Thanks. That's also what I was thinking. I got quite some requests for it though. I can't understand why someone who doesn't use tags, would need something like Dopamine.

When you press shuffle it will play tracks 1 to 10 of the first album (for example), in order, and then tracks 1 to 10 of the next album. The only thing that gets shuffled is the album order.

 

Try it.

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

10 minutes ago, dakn said:

When you press shuffle it will play tracks 1 to 10 of the first album (for example), in order, and then tracks 1 to 10 of the next album. The only thing that gets shuffled is the album order.

 

Try it.

It doesn't do that here. But looking at the code, I'm wondering what I was thinking, because how it is written right now, makes it very unreliable. So it's definitely possible it acts that way on your collection.

I'll fix that

[dakn]

Just had a check at what it's doing and it adds the whole collection to a playlist but only starts playing at a random position in the playlist but doesn't actually shuffle from there.

 

You would expect the playlist to be in a random order and start from the top?

 

I get the same result whether in Artist, Genre or Album view

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

2 minutes ago, dakn said:

Just had a check at what it's doing and it adds the whole collection to a playlist but only starts playing at a random position in the playlist but doesn't actually shuffle from there.

Indeed. I triggered "shuffle" before "enqueue". Silly, it should be the opposite 

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

7 minutes ago, dakn said:

Just had a check at what it's doing and it adds the whole collection to a playlist but only starts playing at a random position in the playlist but doesn't actually shuffle from there.

 

You would expect the playlist to be in a random order and start from the top?

 

I get the same result whether in Artist, Genre or Album view

Well the fact that it doesn't shuffle is indeed a bug. The order in the playlist is not randomized, because people wanted drag and drop reordering in playlists. If I showed songs in the randomized order, the combination with drag and drop would give "interesting" results. So it is normal that shuffle all will never start at the first song of the displayed list. It'll start at a random one, and randomize from there.

[dakn]

Ok, that's fair enough. It means I don't know what's coming up next but I don't mind surprises!

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

I just released Dopamine 1.2.4 (build 862). This is the change log:

 

– [Fixed] Artists are not sorted alphabetically
– [Fixed] “Shuffle all” doesn’t shuffle

 

Download here

[Setnom]

12 hours ago, Raphaël G. said:

Hey folks, I have a question.

 

I got multiple requests for folder play, but as I don't need such feature myself, I'm wondering how it can be useful. Why should a music player replicate ones folder structure? Isn't that just the same as opening Windows Explorer, browsing to the desired file, and double clicking it? Or right clicking a folder, and choosing "Play with ..."?

Honest question. I'd like to understand why some people find a player without folder play "worthless".

In my case, it's useful because it is the way I have my music organized. Everything is tagged as well. Example:

 

- Main music folder
     - "Artist" subfolder

          - "Year - Album" subfolder

               - "CD #" subfolder if there's more than one disc

 

When it's a movie soundtrack or compilation:

 

- Main music folder
     - "Year - Movie OST" subfolder

          - "CD #" subfolder if there's more than one disc

 

It would allow me better discoverability and replicate the exact sorting/navigation method I have my files organized in, but through Dopamine. For example, when I don't know what I want to listen to, and therefore have no album/artist/song to search (and don't want to use shuffle all), that's how I use WMP to find music. I just scroll through the folders until I find something I would like to play. It's easier on the eye because it's exactly like I have my library organized.

 

It absolutely is the same as using Windows Explorer, you're right. But doing that inside Dopamine, it would make the software richer and more feature complete.

 

We can edit tags outside Dopamine using Windows Explorer as well. We browse to the desired files, go to "Properties"->"Details" and edit the tags there. So, why is this feature useful in Dopamine when I can use native OS tools to achieve the same? Because it made Dopamine more convenient and richer to use.

 

For me, it's a comparable situation.

 

But hey, this is not a must-have feature for me, it's very secondary. Given the chance between "folder view" and "fading transitions between songs", I would totally support the implementing fading between songs. t's just something that I would like to see implemented, not something that says "until you do this, I refuse to use Dopamine". I use Dopamine nonetheless.

[ViperAFK]

19 hours ago, Raphaël G. said:

Hey folks, I have a question.

 

I got multiple requests for folder play, but as I don't need such feature myself, I'm wondering how it can be useful. Why should a music player replicate ones folder structure? Isn't that just the same as opening Windows Explorer, browsing to the desired file, and double clicking it? Or right clicking a folder, and choosing "Play with ..."?

Honest question. I'd like to understand why some people find a player without folder play "worthless".

The main use case I can think of is if for whatever reason the user doesn't like browsing music based on how it's tagged. It's not something I've ever found much use for though

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

Hi everyone!

 

Development on the next version of Dopamine has started. The first preview is ready for consumption: 1.3 Build 871 (Preview)

 

This is the change log:

 

– [Changed] Updated the Spanish translation
– [Changed] Song title on playback info panes now scales to the available width
– [Fixed] Tray controls don’t respect the position of the Windows Taskbar.
– [Fixed] Added optional ‘Remove from disk’ option to the song context menu
– [Fixed] Date in the Song Information window is not localized
– [Fixed] WASAPI Exclusive mode plays high pitched sound

 

Enjoy!

 

Download here

[dakn]

I have just reinstalled Dopamine 1.2.862.4 and the Date Added view is now back to being based on when added to the database instead of date created. Is this intentional?

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

1 hour ago, dakn said:

I have just reinstalled Dopamine 1.2.862.4 and the Date Added view is now back to being based on when added to the database instead of date created. Is this intentional?

Yes it is intentional. I had complaints that, when users added new files to their collection, they didn't appear at the top of the list when sorting by date added. Because the date created in the files was older. This happens when you add a folder which existed for a longer time, but which wasn't in the collection before.

 

I'm not sure what I should do here. Whatever I chose, there's always someone who doesn't like it.

 

Maybe I could use a combination of both? E.g.:

 

- When doing full indexing: use the date from the file

- When adding new files: use the current date

[dakn]

48 minutes ago, Raphaël G. said:

Maybe I could use a combination of both? E.g.:

 

- When doing full indexing: use the date from the file

- When adding new files: use the current date

This is exactly how it was working for me. Even if I added files that had a creation date from years ago they would always be the latest, unless I deleted the database and re-scanned.

 

It might not have meant to be adding the new files with older dates as latest, but it was, and I was fine with that as it seems correct.

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

32 minutes ago, dakn said:

This is exactly how it was working for me. Even if I added files that had a creation date from years ago they would always be the latest, unless I deleted the database and re-scanned.

 

It might not have meant to be adding the new files with older dates as latest, but it was, and I was fine with that as it seems correct.

That's strange. When using the file creation date, they should never have appeared at the top. I have no idea how that could have been correct on your system.

 

Edit:

 

What is exactly the problem right now? Is the problem, that files cannot be sorted by the date they were added to the file system?

Because this should still work now: files which are added later to the collection, appear at the top.

 

[dakn]

The problem is when I rebuild the database from scratch, it adds tracks as it finds them, so what was previously the latest stuff could be the oldest as it's found first during the scan.

[dakn]

Just tried rolling back to an earlier version but it wasn't early enough, but basically my collection ends a as Z to A for Date Added as it naturally goes through my collection alphabetically adding it.

 

Just checked Zune again and it definitely adds stuff based on the date created as I added some new stuff today that's dated a few years old and it placed them in that area of my collection.

Edited January 8, 2017 by dakn

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

25 minutes ago, dakn said:

Just tried rolling back to an earlier version but it wasn't early enough, but basically my collection ends a as Z to A for Date Added as it naturally goes through my collection alphabetically adding it.

 

Just checked Zune again and it definitely adds stuff based on the date created as I added some new stuff today that's dated a few years old and it placed them in that area of my collection.

I've reopened the GitHub issue: https://github.com/digimezzo/Dopamine/issues/248

 

[dakn]

Thank you, and sorry to be a pain...

[+Raphaël G. MVC]

On 1/8/2017 at 9:35 PM, dakn said:

Thank you, and sorry to be a pain...

No problem. Something good shall come out of this

[+Zagadka Subscriber²]

I can't see, to find this anywhere... I'd like to hide the window on the taskbar and keep it accessible from the icon in the system tray.

[ViperAFK]

19 hours ago, Zagadka said:

I can't see, to find this anywhere... I'd like to hide the window on the taskbar and keep it accessible from the icon in the system tray.

Settings | Behavior | check Minimize to Notification area and/or Close to notification area