Two wishes for jEmplode:

1. A "set playlist order" function that works (it doesn't seem to work for me).
2. Serendipity back -- even if it just displays recommendations and isn't integrated to a file sharing system.

FWIW,
jim

I dont know if its just me, but with v54 I cant seem to get setting Ignore as Child to work. I select it and then hit ok and it doesnt keep it, its back to off..

My top wishes for jEmplode:
0. Track Properties dialog boxes could really use 'Save and Next' and 'Save and Previous' buttons. If you're editing something for each track in an album, these really save a lot of time. I've grown addicated to them via Foobar2000 and Tag&Rename.

1. After pressing CTRL-L, the cursor should start in the "Name" field, and pressing Enter should save the new playlist. I'm tired of pressing CTRL-L, Tab, typing the name, and then Shift-Tab, Shift-Tab, Enter.

2. After creating a new playlist, the left scrollable pane should focus on the new playlist. Usually, you're going to do something else immediately after creating a new playlist.. and it's a safe bet to change the user's context to that new playlist.

3. non-Latin characters like ä and å do not display properly in jEmplode, but they work fine on the empeg itself.

4. I sure wish I could drag songs and folders directly onto a playlist in jEmplode, rather than having to open that playlist and drag things into the right pane. Fixing #2 in this wishlist would make this mostly a non-issue, though.

5. In the 'Columns' dialog box, it is strange to have to double-click a checkbox to activate or deactivate it.

6. I would like to be able to tell jEmplode to not report playlists as duplicates. If I'm adding a new album by Finntroll, it's mildly irritating to be told that 'Finntroll' is a duplicate. I may be the only one adding whole folders like this, though. Not sure.

7. Undo last action without reverting the whole empeg database.

Track Properties dialog boxes could really use 'Save and Next'

I think that emplode has this implemented by pressing 'Alt+3' instead of 'Alt+Enter' to bring up the properties dialog. It's similar to Winamp. Rio Music Manager does the same. Does JEmplode?

jEmplode doesn't ... So are the semantics that you select a single tune to edit, and Alt+3 edits the next one in the playlist? Does it work if you multiple select tunes?

No, you select a bunch of tunes, and rather than changing them all at once (like Alt+Enter), the Alt+3 properties dialog changes the first one when you press Enter, then displays the properties of the second one, then the third, and so on.

It's useful if you want to correct a bunch of track numbers in one go, e.g.

Ah .. I see. Thanks.

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3. non-Latin characters like ä and å do not display properly in jEmplode, but they work fine on the empeg itself

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They look okay in my JEmplode (v54, 2004-02-14) - I suspect your Java install is faulty. What do you see when you use these non-ASCII Latin characters? (From your examles, I see that "non-Latin" must be a typo/thinko - ä and å are in the "Latin-1 Supplement" block of Unicode)

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7. Undo last action without reverting the whole empeg database.

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Yes, yes! I'd like Mike to take his time and support multi-level do/undo/redo using the undoable Command pattern. (If he's feeling really nice, they could be logged to disk and, optionally, replayed after a JEmplode crash)

My absolute top wishlist is:

1. Don't add any new unstable and destabilising features! I like it to work

That said, a number of lesser wishes transpire up to my conscious layer:

• Write something useful to the window titles when transferring - apps such as xcdroast have the %-complete at the beginning of the title, so that when the window is offscreen, you can still get an idea of progress from a pager, task bar or other window list. At present, some of JEmplode's windows have no title at all.
• Get the "Total" progress bar correct on download. I tried download for the first time just now, and the total progress was stuck at 0% until the first track finished, then went to 100% for the remainder.
• Correctly set ctime on new playlists. At present, ctime is set on tracks, but not playlists. This makes it hard to find recently-created playlists.
• Animation editor would benefit from an option to upload the last frame as the static logo, as this is a common requirement. It would also be nice to override the frame count limit (with appropriate dire warning, of course). As I've mentioned elsewhere, I have a long animation that plays as TTS Clock starts, but I re-use lots of frames to keep the total size low. JEmplode limits the total framelist rather than the distinct frame count - these are two different maxima, for two different reasons. I can have a long (time) animation, but I still don't want to tread on the kernel.
• Separate "remote control" utility (perhaps also usable on its own?) to send player commands. At the moment we have play/pause on the toolbar, with three out of the four possibilities for playing FIDs; it would be nice to have some of the other commands there (particularly for those of us with dead remotes...) Are the usable commands the same as those available on the serial console?

Having a way of marking tunes as not in an album, and using that as a criteria for being in a soup or not. Then those of us with singles and albums could have album based soup views. Perhap there's an ID3 tag I could already use for this? I'll check it out when I get home.

Matthew

I use source="single" (for singles) and source="" (for other non-album tracks). But I don't use on-player soups, so I don't know how well this'd work for you.

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They look okay in my JEmplode (v54, 2004-02-14) - I suspect your Java install is faulty. What do you see when you use these non-ASCII Latin characters? (From your examles, I see that "non-Latin" must be a typo/thinko - ä and å are in the "Latin-1 Supplement" block of Unicode)

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My empeg is in the car, and I'm feeling lazy.. but I'll post a screenshot next time I have it inside. I assumed everyone had this issue. I'm using Java 1.4.2_03, and I've seen this improper-display quirk on every machine I've used jEmplode with. I might just be doing something wrong, though. I've always called these characters non-Latin, but I guess I've been using the wrong term.

Anyway.. If you would, could you try creating a playlist with some characters like this in it?
Älvefärd
Åsmund Frægdegjevar

Those are both album titles that don't display properly in jEmplode, but look fine on the empeg. (For me.)

A-umlaut, A-ring, and the AE ligature are all in ISO-8859-1 as well.

Here's a screen grab of me editing such a playlist.

What do you get? Do you get garbled strings, or do you get some kind of "blank" character indicating that the fonts your Java is using don't have the required characters? If the latter, you probably need to configure Java to use different fonts. I'd offer some advice, but I've never had this problem, and fonts are generally very platform dependent (you didn't say what platform you're using; someone else may be able to offer help if they have this information).

Mine is kinda stupid... but:

* - Having the Jemplode link at the top of the BBS, or the "Bleeding Edge Downloads" section of http://jempeg.cs.caltech.edu/ list the most recent release along with clear install instuctions for current users. I'm always digging through threads to get links and never really sure on what files need to be replaced or not..

I guess I frequent the BBS in "bursts" so I often miss out on things.

I don't think it's stupid at all, I agree completely and have mentioned this to Mike before. I'd like to see jempeg.org simply link the latest Jar, wherever it is. And just don't bother with the big installer packages, just make people install the Sun runtime and then grab the Jar. Couldn't be simpler.

I think that's my number one wish for jemplode, too - clarify the installation and distribution. I don't think the installers are necessarily a bad idea. They could be pretty useful in a few cases, like if there's any particular directory structure jemplode wants to see, or to make sure to get links in Windows start menus, or if you wanted to distribute a total package of all the jemplode/rmml jars. But, they are certainly problematic if they never get updated.

One other thing I miss is having the .app version for OS X. Sure, I can load the dev tools and use the MRJPackageBuilder or whatever it's called to figure out how to do it myself, but it was a lot easier when Mike did it for me.

Thanks for the screenshot. I'll capture one of the issue on my system tonight. I'm running Windows XP SP1 English, Java 1.4.2_03, Intel Xeon.
I don't get blank characters.. They are garbled, seemingly 'split' into two separate characters. I'm sure a screengrab will be able to explain it better.

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I don't get blank characters.. They are garbled, seemingly 'split' into two separate characters. I'm sure a screengrab will be able to explain it better.

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Sounds like Java is using UTF-8 for fonts, but the fonts are 8-bit, perhaps? I don't know much about Windows, and nothing about how its font mechanism works, so I can't actually be any practical help, I'm afraid.

I think others have working Java fonts on Windows, though. Anyone?

I don't know much about Windows, and nothing about how its font mechanism works

Windows (NT/2K/XP, anyway) uses UCS2 (or was it UTF16?) for output. For legacy applications, it has code pages, mapping 8-bit character references into UTF16 (or was it UCS2?).

Not all fonts have all of (or even useful bits of) the code points defined by Unicode in them.

Problems with Java and fonts are probably down to the JVM using the 8-bit font stuff, rather than the 16-bit font stuff.

Peter knows more about Unicode under Windows than I do -- he did most of the Unicode support in Rio Music Manager.

OK. Here's what it looks like on my system:
http://hellninjacommando.com/misc/broken_latin.png

I haven't used jEmplode in a while, so I'm working from memory. Apologies if it's been fixed or if I'm just wrong.

As I remember, jEmplode sorts newly imported playlists alphabetically by filename. For many people, this is not the correct order. Having jEmplode automatically sort new playlists by track number would probably be the best for the most people. But you could keep the old function by having a default sort-on-import setting. I'd default it to track number, but allow filename to be an option.

On a related note, many people at one point imported a bunch of albums and got the sort order wrong. It'd be nice if there was some way to resort a bunch of playlists at once instead of having to go to each one and perform a good number of actions in order to resort them. I can't imagine a good GUI for this, but the function would be well appreciated by some, I'm sure.

Edit: Uhh, nevermind.

Yes, that looks like you have ISO-8859.1 fonts that Java thinks are UTF-8.

Anyone know how to fix this on (IIRC) Windows XP?

Something that's been mentioned before, and would probably form a significant project, is to provide a (text) scripting interface.

This would, for example, allow users to iterate over all the playlists in the /albums playlist, and sort them in tracknr order (to use an example that's been requested recently).

Scripting would allow users to add this kind of stuff more easily than hacking the Java code, leaving you free to code more cool stuff.

There is already a plugin interface which would allow you to create your own java program and distribute a .jar file along with jemplode. It's documented here. I guess I would rather see Mike work on some other requests other than a scripting interface first (especially a comprehensive website with all relevant links, documentation, betas, etc.). The plugin interface would suffice in place of a scripting interface for now anyway.

But I agree about custom code/scripts for JEmplode, it would make things a lot more flexible.

Then someone needs to write a jEmplode plugin that implements a scripting interface.

What font does jEmplode use? All the major system fonts in WinXP contain the full set of European Unicode glyphs.

Wish from another thread:

That the Album soup view on the RioCentral uses the Position column to keep track of the CD track order, and doesn't just assign the positions based on alphabetical order.

I noticed this problem when using jEmplode v54 to copy tracks from the RioCentral to the empeg. Not sure if the empeg also has the soup ordering issue or not, will investigate later.

-brendan

I've been using jEmplode for what feels like forever for my empeg, and ever since I've started using it, I've always had one and only one real request - when downloading music back off of the player, and using {tracknr}, would it be possible to have jEmplode pad the field with a leading zero for numbers less than 10? It drove me nuts enough that I decided it would be better to force it by adding a zero manually ( {artist} - {source} - 0{tracknr} ) and deleting it manually from the finished files for tracks higher than 10! BTW, thanks for all you've done for the community, I sold several people on the Karma by letting them know that it DOES support hierarchial playlists via your program! =P

{tracknr:2}