BlueTouch V3 beta

[SilverEagle]

hotspur wrote:
> Of course, I was able to come up with a few suggestions on improving it ;)

May I offer a suggestion of my own? Learn javascript & XML...
(sorry, couldn't resist )

> 1. For albums with 'Various' as the artist, I'd like to emphasis the album name more strongly.
> ...
> Swap the positions of the artist name and album name

That would be the easiest solution. I'll give it a spin and see how it works out.

But I know this skin's compilation support is not very good. Most obvious is the naming of albums, Silverjuke natively knows why it has combined certain tracks and comes up with desciptions based for instance on genre and periods, like "Rock (1990-1995)". Sorry, I just can't be bothered to recreate that. If there was a decent way to ask Silverjuke I would use it, but it is just one of those things I would have to mimic from scratch.

Personally I am totally album-based in my music use. To disclose some age-related personal information here: when I see the album images in jukebox programs I always picture them in real-life to measure 12-inch...

All this means this skin is 100% album-based in its concepts. For a lot of people this works, for some it is incompatible with their music collection. But for me a jukebox program being able to handle large collections of unrelated songs should support all sorts of art besides albumcovers. Artists, genres, and maybe even periods are all valid starting points and should relate to distinguishing images. Compiling a more-or-less related set of tracks and randomly selecting an album cover is not good enough for me, so I never use Silverjuke's combine facilities for anything else besides "a directory is an album".

The few collected track I have I sorted myself into directories and tagged them manually with an albumtitle and image to my liking.

OK. That's enough with the rambling

> 2. With shuffle enabled and a modest sized queue, the names and total number of remaining tracks can jump around a lot.
...
> could we have the option of hiding this info entirely

Good idea, I put it on the 'probably-to-do'-list.

Cheers,
SilverEagle

[hotspur]

SilverEagle wrote:
> hotspur wrote:
> > Of course, I was able to come up with a few suggestions on improving it ;)
>
> May I offer a suggestion of my own? Learn
> javascript & XML...
> (sorry, couldn't resist )
>

Ouch. But I deserve that one.

I am working on it, though. I already use some simple XML at my job, but the javascript is coming slowly.

> But I know this skin's compilation support is not
> very good.

> The few collected track I have I sorted myself
> into directories and tagged them manually with an
> albumtitle and image to my liking.

I avoid SJ's compilation feature entirely.

All of the 'Various' albums I have in SJ are soundtracks, samplers, or self-created mix tapes. Everything is directory based.

>
> Personally I am totally album-based in my music
> use. To disclose some age-related personal
> information here: when I see the album images in
> jukebox programs I always picture them in
> real-life to measure 12-inch...

I'm of 'longbox' age myself. I actually kept all those stupid things for over a decade, stuffed in the back of a closet.

> All this means this skin is 100% album-based in
> its concepts.

My friends and I are all album-based, which is why the BlueTouch skin is such a good fit. It's easy to create custom albums to organize all one hit wonders, and the search feature ensures users can find that specific song if it exists in the system.

[Joachim Müller]

> See above: I scan the stuff myself. But I am interested in a problematic file for testing, please PM me for email adres to send it or PM a link to the file somewhere.
I tried to PM you, but maybe that didn't work as expected.

> Sorry, although I understand there is some problem with the translation I am having a problem with translating issue itself...
Maybe I could help with that - I'm familiar with i18n in other projects. Let's discuss this individually by email (see my PM).

> > Size of the album list screen: especially for larger albums it's quite time-consuming that only 7 songs are being displayed from albums by one artist and only 4 songs from a compilation/sampler. Ideally, the album list would cover the entire available window height. Less scroll clicks...
>
> Resizing a window dynamically was problematic originally. I learned a few tricks since then, but it was not that important as touchscreens were not affordable over 1024x768 at the most. That has changed, and improving this area is one of the things this skin needs the most. But resources are always scarce, even if they consist of my own time and energy.
I have been looking into this and resized the song selection screen to fit my personal needs (with a touchscreen resolution of 1600 x 900 pixels). Attached is a revised copy of your skin, with l10n to German and a minimum height of 900 pixels. I also made the song selection screen wider - I'm planning to put artist and title into one line for compilations. I hope you don't mind me fiddling with the code. I had to make some text boxes wider for i18n reasons: German needs more room than English (the German word "Warteschlange" is just much longer than the English "queue" for example). Everyone is free to use my copy of the skin, but please understand that I can not support it - it is provided "as is". I can come up with a dif as well if someone is interessted. There are a lot of comments inside the code and the original lines with teh original dimensions, so it should be quite easy to come up with a l10n that meets the original minimum requirements.

Regards

Joachim

[SilverEagle]

Joachim Müller wrote:
> Attached is a revised copy of your skin, with l10n to German and a minimum height of 900 pixels.
> ...

Nice! I'll take this to email so solve issues, but I really think a German translation is very welcome. Pity there is no native support for multilanguage skins though...

[olli84]

Hi!

i want to add some round buttons in the "line" BELOW your volume slider, to play some jingles... in what file do i have to change that?

Thanks

[Guest]

sadly on here you can wait but very rarely does help come
sj got a load of potential and like yourself people with
some cool ideas just ashame that theres no or very little responce
might be a good idea to set up a wish list ARE YOU TAKING NOTE SJ STAFF

[SilverEagle]

olli84 wrote:
> i want to add some round buttons in the "line" BELOW your volume slider, to play some jingles... in what file do i have to change that?

Same file as that slider (scrollbar target 'volslider' in overlay.xml).

SilverEagle

[Joachim Müller]

Joachim Müller schrieb:
> Album art sometimes fail to show (see attached screenshot "Smashing Pumpkins" and "The Smiths" although there is a file "folder.jpg" and although the album art is embedded into the individual mp3 file headers

Finally I was able to figure this one out - turns out that the image embedded into the mp3 file itself had been assigned the wrong cover type: instead of being a "Front Cover", it was set to "Other". Must have happened when using some exotic tag editor, so the problem lies on my end. Ideally though, the skin would try to perform a fallback if an embedded cover image of the type "Front" ist not found and try any other embedded image.
Meanwhile, the fix was pretty straightforward, using the excellent - I scanned for the broken album art files and changed the image type.

HTH

Joachim

[SilverEagle]

Joachim Müller wrote:
> Joachim Müller schrieb:
> Ideally though, the skin would try to perform a fallback if an embedded cover image of the type "Front" ist not found and try any other embedded image.

Normally I would say you are right, but this beta skin is just an ugly workaround as SJ 2.x does not allow access to the images it uses internally. As I still have good hopes this might change in a future SJ 3.x version I do not want to add more hacks. There are a lot more limitations like filtetypes, no support for remote files or zipped files, etc. For now I prefer to limit myself to supporting the basic minimal needed variants to get the beta skin going.

SilverEagle

[JoneK]