Another super happy user here, taking advantage these days of "Song fingerprinting and tracking"; and remembering the days when that feature didn't exist and how the internal playlists got ruined after renaming files or directories. This is so good... Thank you!
Long live Strawberry!
I would check first if the files are OK. Can they be played normally with other programs? If yes, can you inspect the track properties and tell if the media types match the file extensions, or if the tracks lack extension? Applications like MediaInfo, or simply "file" in Linux will help.
What happens if you copy one of them to a folder that's included in the collection? Or the inverse: copy a recognized track to those folders. Use Tools/Update-changed-collection-folders if necessary. Try also adding their folders to the collection.
These tests may narrow the problem.
About the aforementioned playlist behavior with cue sheets: now it correctly moves to the next track, but sometimes, after having played one from a regular file, it doesn't start the next one from a cue sheet, just stops playing.
When this has happened, Strawberry was not the active window; it had been some time without user interaction. The media files of the stopped tracks were both flac and mp3. I'll report if I find more info.
By the way, thanks also for fixing the UTF-8 encoding.
External User commands would bring a lot of functionality to Strawberry. A placeholder for the URL of the currently played track, another one for the selected tracks and a menubar entry "User commands" to store and launch them would be enough for me.
Having this would be awesome: we could check integrity of the tracks, Realplay Gain them, open them in editors, move files to other locations according to rules, tweak the sound system, schedule the reproduction, display a spectrogram or the images on the directory, query the database... anything achievable with external commands or scripts would be two clics away. And users could share here some of their scripts.
Years ago, I managed to insert in Clementine a contextual menu entry that opened a kdialog menu with my favorite actions for the selected tracks and I used it a lot, so I'm think more people would welcome proper User commands. They mean lots of power at zero cost for the player!
And I'm not sure of this, but I guess such a feature could also make possible a few suggestions of this forum.
</car_seller>
It seems installing the latest development version 1.2.3-2.14 fixed the problem where sometimes the whole media file was played instead of a particular track of a cue sheet. Thank you.
So I felt like revisiting the specs for cue sheets and was surprised to learn there is a way to hide tracks with the pre-gap trick, which I hadn't paid attention to before: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Cue_sheet#A_single-file_cue_sheet_with_a_TRACK_01_INDEX_00_hidden_track
Tried it with Strawberry and I was very pleased to see that it works nicely. The track is shown normally in the playlist, but with zero duration, so it's skipped when playing, while keeping the user aware of it. I play cue sheets a lot, so, from the bottom of my soul, big thanks to the team for your work, and particularly for the support of cue sheets.
For those interested, an example to hide the advertisement of the following section:
TRACK 18 AUDIO
PERFORMER "Johnny Wisehost"
TITLE "Comments"
SONGWRITER " "
INDEX 01 49:23:07
TRACK 19 AUDIO
PERFORMER "Some Radio Station"
TITLE "Intermission advertisements"
SONGWRITER " "
INDEX 01 49:52:66
TRACK 20 AUDIO
PERFORMER "Johnny Wisehost"
TITLE "Comments"
SONGWRITER " "
INDEX 01 50:48:07
Result:
TRACK 18 AUDIO
PERFORMER "Johnny Wisehost"
TITLE "Comments"
SONGWRITER " "
INDEX 01 49:23:07
TRACK 19 AUDIO
PERFORMER "Some Radio Station"
TITLE "Intermission advertisements"
SONGWRITER " "
INDEX 00 49:52:66
INDEX 01 50:48:06
TRACK 20 AUDIO
PERFORMER "Johnny Wisehost"
TITLE "Comments"
SONGWRITER " "
INDEX 01 50:48:07
Had I known about this earlier I'd have saved a lot of headaches, but better late than never.
Curious about the blank spaces as SONGWRITER values? For some reason I needed to do that time ago for the tag to work at all (can't remember exactly why or which player needed it), so the script always inserts it when there is no composer data. Too lazy to check now if it's necessary, but left them in case that helps someone.
// Edited: This should have gone to "Comments and Feedback", sorry. Maybe and admin can move it.
I'm not sure if that happens with a particular album or all of them. And the text of the error may help someone to figure out what's happening. What is it?
Just a couple of tips adding to the suggestion by silver-sun (which is the safest for important playlists, since an external file will survive an eventual database corruption):
Use Undo to fix a mistake during the current Strawberry session. Keep in mind that the undo history will be lost if you close the player.
We have starred (favorite) playlists, which are kept in the sidebar tab "Playlists" after being closed in the playlists pane (so, there's less chance of spoiling them), and are updated on the fly when open, like regular ones. To add a favorite, right click on the playlist tab and choose "Star playlist"
You may find the combination of external, regular and favorite playlists that suits you best. For example, an external as backup to save every now and then plus a favorite (even also a regular one). Or two favorites: a do-not-touch version for reference/backup and another one to play with safely.
To customize the notification (native desktop, pretty OSD or tray popup), open Settings (Control-P), select Notifications, tick "Use a custom message for notifications" and use the + icon to build your layout. The Summary part will be displayed in bold, and the Body part, in normal text.
Use the Preview button or Apply your changes and start a new track to check the layout. You may use also html tags like in this example for pretty OSD:
Summary:
<div align="center">%artist%</div><div align="left">%title%%newline% [%track% # %length%] CD: %disc%</div>
Body:
Written by %composer%, from %year% album %newline%"<b>%album%</b>"%newline%Played/Skipped: %playcount%/%skipcount% - Rating: %rating%
Personally I'm not confused by the identical icons of the playlists tabs because their order is fixed, but it would also be nice that the Smart playlists tab had its own icon.
You could file an issue in the github repository. Complex look&feel changes are not at the top of the list of the devels, but the replacement of an icon might make its way at some point.
Edit, clarification: I am used to a "fixed" order (I should have said a "years old" one) of the sidebar tabs where the identical icons are not a problem. But the order of the tabs is not static; it's customizable by dragging them, and I see how in that case, while rearranging the tabs layout, having differentiated icons would prevent a bit of confusion.
Hello. The look of the left blue sidebar can be changed by right clicking on any of its tabs. Try Plain sidebar.
Another super happy user here, taking advantage these days of "Song fingerprinting and tracking"; and remembering the days when that feature didn't exist and how the internal playlists got ruined after renaming files or directories. This is so good... Thank you!
Long live Strawberry!
There are many things to enjoy and celebrate in Strawberry, but these days I often find myself elevating my appreciation to the developers who implemented the "Song fingerprinting and tracking" feature four years ago. Being able to rename tracks and directories without affecting the internal playlists saves so much time that I couldn't resist sending a big thank you to Jonas and the collaborators at the upper flats.
And, since there must be more grateful users in this forum, I thought I'd send an open invitation with the title of this thread.
Long live Strawberry!
Darn, I had missed the existing "Thank you!" thread.
Let this die and jump to https://forum.strawberrymusicplayer.org/topic/133/thank-you
My excuses.
In case you didn't read the tooltip of Settings / Collection / Preferred album art filenames (comma separated), it says:
When looking for album art, Strawberry will first look for picture files that contain one of this words. If there are no matches then it will use the largest image in the directory.
It's more than enough for me, because I use subdirectories for artwork, and there's only a front cover image with the audio files. My list of words is front,cover.
There is no Strawberry option "Only use pictures containing this words", so I'd suggest a workaround when some albums don't have a proper front cover and you don't want Strawberry to display the biggest image:
You might add something like def_image to the list of preferred names (for example, per your preferences, file,Front,cover,folder,def_image), and copy the default CD image from github (or create a custom one) to the album folder as def_image.jpg.
A bit of command line magic will copy that file to every album directory that needs it. Or you may go nuclear and copy it to every album folder, to test and delete easily all of them if needed.
Fortunately, it seems nobody broke their systems with the script. If there's no need of improvements, I'll put it on hold as a proof of concept, along with the attempts to the interspersed-track variants. Comments on this are welcome anytime.
For newer testers:
cd ~/tmp
wget -O testscript https://pastebin.com/raw/Y2GxuzaY
dos2unix testscript
chmod a+x testscript
less testscript # ---> mind the configurable countdown_step
echo ; echo
./testscript -h
/usr/bin/env: ‘bash\r’: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/env: use -[v]S to pass options in shebang line
Not nice on pastebin's part to add \r characters to the end of lines of the downloaded file, and I don't see any setting to prevent it.
Use dos2unix myscript or copy&paste https://pastebin.com/raw/Y2GxuzaY to an empty file. Make it executable chmod a+x myscript and run ./myscript -h