Re: Playlist format, iTunes 4 good news

Chris -

Comments are inline below.

On Fri, 2 May 2003 10:42:19 -0500
Chris Connors <[email protected]> wrote:

> The playlist format has been corrected since b17. If useragent is  
> Windows the playlist looks like this:
> 
> #EXTM3U
> #EXTINF:137,Blue Cafe - The Style Council (CafÈ Blue)
> http://localhost/netjuke/var/music/MIX/The%20Style%20Council/ 
> Cafe%20Blue/04%20Blue%20Cafe.mp3
> #EXTINF:266,The Paris Match - The Style Council (CafÈ Blue)
> http://localhost/netjuke/var/music/MIX/The%20Style%20Council/ 
> Cafe%20Blue/05%20The%20Paris%20Match.mp3
> #EXTINF:344,My Ever Changing Moods (12" version) - The Style Council  
> (CafÈ Blue)
> http://localhost/netjuke/var/music/MIX/The%20Style%20Council/ 
> Cafe%20Blue/ 
> 06%20My%20Ever%20Changing%20Moods%20%2812%22%20version%29.mp3
> #EXTINF:261,You're The Best Thing - The Style Council (CafÈ Blue)
> http://localhost/netjuke/var/music/MIX/The%20Style%20Council/ 
> Cafe%20Blue/10%20You%27re%20The%20Best%20Thing.mp3
> #EXTINF:200,Headstart For Happiness - The Style Council (CafÈ Blue)
> http://localhost/netjuke/var/music/MIX/The%20Style%20Council/ 
> Cafe%20Blue/12%20Headstart%20For%20Happiness.mp3
> 
> I think this should be the default for all useragents since players  
> seem to accept this format gracefully, playing the list even if they  
> can't display the added EXTINF? Not sure if this is true on linux  
> variants, but Audion, iTunes, MacAmp, WinAmp, and WMP all handle these  
> playlists in this format. (Although MacAmp creates a track entry called  
> "#EXTM3U" - whoops.)
> 

I'll do some more checking, last time I tried to start pushing extm3u data at some user agents they were choking. I'll put it through my set of test clients and see what comes up. I may just add an option to user prefs to enable/disable them if it's still contentious.

> Good news too: iTunes supports EXTINF now, and displays the info in the  
> playlist. iTunes also no longer adds these urls to your "Library" (the  
> main reason I never used itunes for "Internet Content"). Finally, when  
> the track is played, iTunes is able to detect the actual id3 tags in  
> the stream now. Finally!

Hehe, maybe I can actually use iTunes on the iMac in my living room instead of god awful Audion. I was wondering when the Mac OS was going to get a player that didn't suck for streaming.

> 
> b18 is a massive improvement over 17. I like the ability to have  
> themes, although I'd like to see even more css based control over the  
> elements, a la moveable type.
> 

We're way ahead of you here. Florian has forked off a set of sources from CVS as of a few weeks ago to pursue adding even more finely grained CSS control. He's hacking away stabilizing that while I continue bug triage and release preparation. b19 will see the complete realization of the theme system (which is built on the same foundation we are currently using -- so user created themes will be forward compatible).

> It wasn't clear to me that the "Browse" button was toggling a  
> preference at first, as nothing appeared to happen when you click it -
> until you select a genre or something.
> 

Unless you have sub-genres :) The main genre browse interface will 'flatten' out when you enter browse mode and you will begin seeing pages of tracks instead of the explore pages. If you have any ideas as to how I can make this more accessible/easier to follow, I'm all ears. I will document it thoroughly before the release, but getting people to read the docs is another matter.

> Not sure what the album art support is beyond what was already there -  
> is it getting art from the track, or mining it from amazon, for display  
> in some location I'm not aware of?
>

I actually haven't touched the album art stuff yet. I may just go ahead and do it -- this pre-release has gone smoothly and it's not going to be very much code to start displaying some of this metadata. I'll take it under advisement. I split what was going to be the b18 release into two releases because we had just wrapped up large chunks of code and noticed, hey what do you know, this thing is pretty stable right now. The long awaited ice-cast control, resampling, etc. will be the main gems in the b19 release. I'm sitting on the fence about the artwork. But I did say that Netjuke was feature frozen -- but I guess I can make and break my own rules. :)
 
> Great work, looking forward to b18 "release" (perhaps it's time to  
> reconsider the numbering scheme, since these "betas" are basically  
> releases.)
> 

I discussed this with Stephane when I took over the project. Basically he elected to use a beta release strategy over the traditional Open Source tenths (0.1, etc) development versioning. At this point, it would only be confusing and I can forsee only a few more releases before I'm ready to call this thing 1.0 and start major reworking to prepare for the 2.0 tree.

Blake

> Chris
> 
> 
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