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02-24-2018, 02:05 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-24-2018, 02:08 AM by pjgregory.)
NowPlaying.jpg (Size: 90.64 KB / Downloads: 19)
Inspired by an entertainment screen on a recent long haul flight, I have revamped my music player IV.   One neat feature on the flight display was a recomended album window.  I would like to have a second small CAB as part of the Now Playing screen, but simply use a random number to select a few albums.  Generating the random number is easy, but the CAB only has a ScrollToChar() command.  I can use the random number to generate any of A to Z, but then I just get a limited number of selections.  There is a MediaRTV:FirstIndex command to read the album position but no way to write a value.  How about adding a ScrollToIndex() command to the CAB?
PJG
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Nice looking UI, thanks for sharing! I like the idea of the random playback!
What is the "Normal" button, is that a toggle for Normal playback or Shuffle?
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I'm not completely sure what you need. Can you explain it in a little more detail?
BTW, there is already a random play from category capability in any V2 compliant media player. If that category is all music, then it's basically from all available music. It will just keep the playlist filled up with a certain number of items. Would that provide what you need?
Dean Roddey
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Oh, wait, you want to fill that right hand side up with some randomly selected titles? It looks like you've already got that. And you want to find that album in the overall CAB and select it? Why not just invoke it from the right hand list? You already have the info you need to just let them select one of those and load it up.
Dean Roddey
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02-24-2018, 11:59 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-24-2018, 12:02 PM by pjgregory.)
The right hand pane of the now playing page is a small CAB with just four albums visible.  When I load the now playing page, I select a randon character from A-Z and scroll the small CAB to the character.  This gives me only 26 possible combinations.  As I have over 500 albums, if I could scroll to an index, then I would have about 500 possible sets of 4 albums which would give much more variety. I can already select one of the four albums to start playing or add to the playlist, without going back to the main album selection page.
I know that you can get random tracks within a category, but I would juist like to be reminded of some of the albums I have, but don't play much.
Batwater: Yes the "Normal" button selects between normal sequence play and shuffeled within the playlist.
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What about a 'search' that just returns N randomly selected titles? Then you could just have a 'Suggestions' button that invokes that search on the CAB, which would load it with those randomly selected titles. Then everything else works the same.
Dean Roddey
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You never answered, so just checking back? Would a 'find N random titles' search be something you could use? That would seem to make everything pretty well balanced. You could just have the browser loaded up with a small set of randomly selected titles. If you don't want one of those, just hit the suggestions button again and get some more. And have an 'all music' button to get back to the main list.
Dean Roddey
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(02-26-2018, 06:45 PM)Dean Roddey Wrote: You never answered, so just checking back? Would a 'find N random titles' search be something you could use? That would seem to make everything pretty well balanced. You could just have the browser loaded up with a small set of randomly selected titles. If you don't want one of those, just hit the suggestions button again and get some more. And have an 'all music' button to get back to the main list.
Sorry Dean, I missed this.  Yes that would be great and would do exactly what I want.  I have posted what I have working so far so have a look.
PJG
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While I am working on the CAB again, there are are a couple of things that would make it all the more useful.  
The first, which may just be a problem with how I use it, is selection of groups of albums.  The primary selection is the SetCategory(cookie) command, which gives a subset all the albums.  There are then a series of search commands such as SearchByAudioFmt(..)   Setting this should AND the condition with Category.  So
SetCatgory(RockCookie)
SearchByAudioFmt(>, 16,4400, ByArtist)
should show me all the albums in the Rock Genre, above a certain bit and sample rate, sorted byArtist.  It seems that these two commands are actually exclusive, so when I set one, the other become invalid.  So I either get all the Rock albums OR all the high resolution ones.
The second thing is to add a second sort order command  i.e SetSortOrder2(neworder2).  This would apply a second sort to the order produced by the first.  So if you have
SetCatgory(RockCookie)
SearchByAudioFmt(>, 16,4400, ByArtist)
SetSortOrder2(Title);
Then when I scroll through the list, I will have a selection of all my high resolution rock albums, sorted by artist and then by title (or year or whatever).
PJG
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Those are search commands, not filter commands. There could be filtering versions of them, but those would need to be different commands. I think you'd still want the search commands since folks may want to see all of their their titles that are a particular format and whatnot. It might require some changes to the CAB which really 'thinks' in terms of searches and search result sets.
Dean Roddey
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