Posts made by TakeFive

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%&nbsp;#&nbsp;%length%]&nbsp; 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.

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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

Public exposure was deactivated, sorry. Fixed now.

A first version of a different script from the one mentioned above. No more freezes, but this could be related also to the new official version of Strawberry. I'd recommend you to update it beforehand. Read the comments about that and the script limitations at its beginning.

https://pastebin.com/Y2GxuzaY

You're very welcome to bash it and share any fixes or ideas.

It doesn't feel right to fill this thread with noise. Continuing in General Discussion: https://forum.strawberrymusicplayer.org/topic/5717/gaps-between-tracks

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Detachment of offtopic comments from the Feature Request thread about an option to insert silent intervals between tracks: alternatives using shell scripts ( https://forum.strawberrymusicplayer.org/topic/3417/optional-gap-between-each-song-playback ).

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A little update on the variant that would not need to modify the playlist: right now it has been running for several hours without a glitch but it is dangerous. When the problem arose, not only Strawberry got frozen but sometimes mpv (pipewire), kid3 (gstreamer) and even the whole audio system stopped producing sound.

Everything can be restored, though I have yet to find a precise procedure to do it (no single recipe works every time) and understand the problem better to reproduce it at will. I'll tell you about that, either because the script seems safe to test or as a case of a problematic situation for the devels to be aware of.

After that I'll give a try to the rebuild & replace way (gap fellows: don't hold your breath) if nobody has come up with their own suggestion.

@Cooker_8872
Use System Settings (systemsettings executable, maybe systemsettings5 or 6). Filter "Window rules" and Add New... / Detect Window Properties (click on Strawberry) / Add Property / "+" of Fullscreen and choose Apply initially: Yes.

A more direct way: click on the Strawberry icon of the upper left corner (leftmost on the title bar) and choose More Actions / Configure Special Application Settings...

You can also select Configure Special Window Settings for other windows; for example to remember the position and size of the equalizer.

It was a good experience. Depending on the user's mood, the kind of music and the task being performed, it benefits from longer or shorter silent periods. I found it quite convenient for active listening, where it provides time to reflect, and it was funny with my Christmas playlist: medium-to-long length made me smile when I was doing something else and the favorite tune popped up unexpectedly.

Interestingly, I never felt impatient during the sessions where music was just a background, regardless of the gap duration.

I started a bash script to have that funcionality in Linux, though in a different way from what I had suggested. It will be far from perfect and won't work in every scenario, but it's doing the job for me and I'll share it here when finished.

For Windows and with the help of AI, I can build a .bat script that performs the outlines suggested above if there's anyone interested. Feel free to ask.

@grepper
It makes sense for concerts, radio programs/podcasts, pieces of a medley or classical works delivered in separate tracks (so, navigable), and continuous things like those. There's little joy in noticing an audio hole in the transition, even a small one (or worse, a loud blip generated at the cut point), and creators of the tracks still have the chance to increase the duration of the silence before the signal begins or after it ends.

But yes, those who like having time for the vibes to dissipate would need the opposite. I got curious about this and I'll build an ad-hoc playlist to try it, expecting a sense of surprise at first. Seems fun.

Very niche indeed, and an interesting need. Some thoughts:

• Abrupt beginnings and ends of the tracks would be softened using Options/Backend/Fading. You probably tried it but prefer gaps.

• 30 seconds to 2 minutes of silence is a lot, and sounds like long unattended sessions.

• There's no gap feature in Strawberry, and I don't have a suggestion for dynamic processes like those of Smart playlists where the playlist is continuosly modified.

• But I could think of an alternate way for already populated, static playlists. I imagine having written a script (say, bash for Linux; or a .bat or a .py for Windows), and this:

  • Click on Dynamic-playlists/50-random-tracks.
  • Select all tracks and drag&drop them to the desktop icon of the script.
  • The list is read, the script builds a new playlist interspersing entries of a 30-second-silent audio file and asks Strawberry to load it (strawberry --load)
  • The current list is replaced.

The script could present a dialog to choose the gap duration, or there could be several variants of the desktop icon if that's preferred.

There would be a problem in Windows: the maximum length of command arguments is 8 KiB, not enough for long playlists (2 MiB in Linux, should be safe). But if the user guesses how many tracks can be selected safely, the playlist could be drag&dropped in several chunks. In this case, the script should not replace the current playlist but append the tracks.

Another way: save to a predefined location the current playlist and double clic the desktop icon. The script would not receive the paths as command arguments but from the file, so no problem in Windows.

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.

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.

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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

• In track 19, change "INDEX 01" to "INDEX 00"
• Copy the "INDEX 01" line of track 20 and paste it below the "INDEX 00" of track 19.
• Subtract one unit from the last number of the new "INDEX 01".
  Those are not hundredths of second but CDDA frames, with frecuency 75/second. Subtracting one from "INDEX 01 03:00:00" gives "INDEX 01 02:59:74"

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.