One of the columns you can view in emplode is "Created", which shows the creation time of the file on the empeg.

About half my files are missing this tag. Anybody know why? Was it implemented in a recent build?

See if you have any songs that show "n/n" for track number. All my songs have always been tagged with a total album track count, but this seems to have only been implemented in beta7. So only a couple of tracks show up like this for me right now. I hope that in a newer release we'll be able to rebuild all this info (without having to reupload...)

Bruno

I didn't see any of the "n/n", but I don't think that's really related to this issue.

The "Created" tag is a time stamp of when the file was created (uploaded) to the empeg. An example of the tag is as follows:

01/07/2002 01:59:23 AM

This is similar to the Last Played Time. The reason I ask is because I came across this page in the FAQ and was reading about the shuffle modes and how you could customize them.

I thought it would be cool to create a new shuffle mode called "Most Recently Created" (or something like that). CTIME is one of the variables you can use in your shuffle modes.

Although I don't fully understand how the variables work (maybe one of the programmers can help...), I came up with this definition for "Least Recently Created".

shuffle0=Newest First,CTIME=32000

I ran into two problems while trying to test. First is the above problem. Since half of my tracks don't seem to have a Created time, the shuffle seems to be randomly picking from those first.

To get around this problem, I decided to create a custom playlist with a bunch of tracks that had varying creation times. I then noticed my second issue. Although it seemed to be working, a couple of tracks were out of place. It seemed to think that 01/10/2002 was older than 11/17/2001. I wonder if they're using a standard UNIX time comparison.

Well, at least this was sort of working. I then tried negating the CTIME, hopefully yielding my "Most Recently Created". But, nothing seemed to have changed.

So, can anybody assist me with these? Has anybody else here created custom shuffle modes?

My point about the track numbering was that it seemed to be introduced in beta7. If you had also noticed that on those same tracks, I think it would be pretty safe to assume that beta7 brought the "created" tag as well.

Can't hook up my player right now to see if any of my tracks have that tag populated. I'll check tomorrow.

Bruno

The issue with timestamps is probably the usual one - USA does dates in a very nonstandard way. The two logical and easily searchable methods are dd/mm/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd, but US standard is mm/dd/yyyy which has least significant figure in the middle. Empeg being British made is probably sorting on year then month then date. Although it maybe isn't bounds checking, just figuring 17th month comes later than 10th month. The old hands I'm sure will correct me if I've got this all wrong

Rory

"Least Recently Created"

This doesn't work at the moment, as only 16 bits of the ctime are used. This is a bug in all 2.0 betas so far, but will hopefully be fixed before ship.

You only got a few files with ctimes, because only 2.0 betas (not 1.0) set ctime when a file is imported.

The n/n thing is unrelated; 2.0 betas just import the TRCK field of the ID3v2 tags as a string, and some taggers must these days be putting n/n in the string (as allowed by id3v2 2.3.0)

Peter

Deleted: Yeah, what Peter said.

The dates are stored as Unix time_t, and then formatted for display using your current locale settings.

They sort correctly -- except for the precision loss mentioned by Peter.

So I guess my next question is whether I'll be able to do this in a later (non-beta?) version of emplode?

I think it would be cool to have a shuffle mode that would play your most recent additions to the player.

The n/n thing is unrelated; 2.0 betas just import the TRCK field of the ID3v2 tags as a string, and some taggers must these days be putting n/n in the string (as allowed by id3v2 2.3.0)

2.0b3 imported only the first number. I did a new complete upload with b3 and my tracks show up with only whole numbers. b7 on the other hand brought in BOTH numbers.

In the list view it shows for instance 2/13, but in properties, in the track field it shows only "2" - as it should. Editing the track field will cause the "/n" to be lost from the list display.

In any case, I'm hoping you guys do plan to support the "/n" at some point in the future. I'd like to be able to display it to know how many tracks are left in the current album (when playing multiple albums in one large list).

Bruno