MediaFlow

This is amazing! Only wish it were a little smoother….kind of slow on my tablet with vista and 2gb of ram. I realize vista is probably the reason. Otherwise great work…..one thing I noticed though is that if I click the skip song button the cover does not change.

Thx JohnM

For me it works like a charm, in Ubuntu 8.04LTS. Its a really nice feuture, smooth and nice looking.

A couple of things you could add. It would be nice if it displayed the albums on the same order as the library does, for example I organize my library by Genre it would be cool if the albums were on that order. It would also be cool if you added a full screen mode or something like that but it would have to have some kind of view to see the songs in the album. Like fliping it backwards or something like that.

Good job and thx on a great add-on

WOW!!!

That is all I was going to say, but thought I would add a suggestion for the sake of perfection:
Consider the ability to edit the songs when we are using that view., but, not a big deal, as what you have done is a huge leap.

Very nice extension JohnM you do a really great job !

I’m impressed! Good job!

Great, mega-great! i have coverflow under ubuntu hardy now. I waited so long for this feature.
An auto-play option by clicking on the album would be very nice.
And a little db, or keep in ram option, to avoid this long loading, each time one changes the view.
If there is more than one jpg in the album folder it shows none of them. Perhaps this is an Album Art Manager problem?
JohnM,
THANKS ALOT.
Regards,
Nilsja

JohnM, one more thing: when selected a albumart with mouseclick, the songlist jumps to one of the last songs of the album – the first one would be much better.
playing around with this extension for hours now.
thanks again.
nilsja

JohnM,
perhaps it is also possible when switching back from eg browser to library, that the cover switches to the matching song that is just playing?

btw John, you should remember to give the original authors of imageflow credit ;)

Nice add-on, I can’t wait to see what other features you’ll add :)

one more idea: ability to change the background color. would be good for use with other feathers.
is it a problem on my computer, or is it the extensions fault that i cant rightclick on songs in the MediaFlow view?

another idea: is it possible to make it for opengl. I found this project – maybe it is usable:
https://launchpad.net/gloobus
Great addon – keep on!
BB

JohnM:
- The context menu seem already there in 1.3.
- The play on click doesn’t work proper. It just starts playing the first song in list, not the album where i clicked on.
- I meant the click on library, no matter were i was before, so also in the same tab. It would be good if it automatically jumps to the now playing album.

i think here is the bug buried: the scrolling of the list to the actual selected albumart doesnt work anymore. On double or middleklick, not the first track in list is played, but the selected song starts playing. But in this version, the sync between cover and tracklist doesnt work.
By choosing a cover, the first song of this album should be selected/marked. I think the doubleklick should work than.
Thanks,
Nilsja

Hey There.. i seem to have a problem with this add on and i really really want it…looks fab…. the scrolling is fine but when you right click on an album nothing happens… and if you middle click it plays the first song in my whole collection or the last album i looked at using the panel view??? does anyone else have this…ive only had songbird a week and ma absolutly loving it..just wish this one would work…. hope you can help

oh by the way im using songbird 0.5 with a vista pc should of mentioned that maybe before!!!!

hey johnm.. ok so i got 0.6r2build… worked like a charm… except.. the album art manager didnt,, ggrr then after bout 30 mins..the whole thing went crazy…so i had to delete it and re-download 0.5 .. gonna wait to 0.6 official release.. pity….looked great… be cool if it worked by artist instead of album title though….

hi JohnM: after installing 0.6 everything worked fine. i love it. but in 0.5 definitely not. perhaps you should mention that in the desricption to avoid a lot of frustration :)
for rightclick on albumart a queue to the “now playing list” http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/96 would be great.
for me full screen isn’t such important.
i think middleclick should also directly start playing the backmost covers. is that possible?

one more thing: if a album played through and a song from the next one starts, the albumart should also move to the next one.

I just installed Songbird/0.6rc3 (20080605012245) on Ubuntu 8.04 (64bit) and everything seems to be working fine except when the Now Playing popup shows up in the bottom right, its a light gray with light gray text that is near impossible to read. The album art shows up properly though. Other than that, its working very well.
*A problem I do have though with this add on – while I understand that the author is not getting paid, there NEEDS TO BE DISCLOSURE that the “Click here to see other albums from … on Amazon” contains an AMAZON ASSOCIATE ID. (and there needs to be an option to change or remove it).*

Schmick extension :o)
I do have a couple of problems with it though:
1. It doesn’t follow the currently-playing song
2. It sorts by album name, not by artist, and there’s no way to change this.
Using Songbird 0.6rc3 on Ubuntu 8.04×86_64

@JohnM – Yeah, I’ve now figured out why my post didn’t show up under the album art manager thread. :(
Maybe I should learn to post when I’m not so tired. My sincerest apologies. The work you guys are doing is awesome, I just found that bit of amazon associate to be a little troublesome – but in no way has any relation to you. Keep up the good work!

@JohnM
“MediaFlow updates when the tracks in your library/playlist change” that does not work automatically on song/album change. one have to click for it. Would be nice if MediaFlow updates when a album played through and the next one starts.
apart from that – perfect!
thanks,
nils

just discovered songbird and all the related stuff…. INCREDIBLE!!!
I have a problem with the MediaFlow plug-in: the View>Media Views>MediaFlow menu does not show on my system based on Ubuntu 7.10.
Any info you need just let me know
=)
thanks,
hugh

@maraja
on my ubuntu 8.04 it works perfect. but only with songbird version 0.6*. to activate the MediaFlow view, you must be in the library first. or did you disable javascript in songbird? i think it should be enabled to run this extension.
@JohnM
Its a very cool feature to change the albumarts in realtime. i think if the autoscroll option comes, this extension would be absolutely perfect and final for me.
or do you plan cherrys on the cake like custom commands with variable handover eg the album folder for “burn this album on rightklick” ?

One thing I would love would be for the addon to remember the size of the album art. When I use it I like to resize the app so the art is smaller. Maybe you could have the size of the app be stored to a file so when I restart it will be the same until I resize it again. Hope that isn’t too confusing, should be a fairly easy fix. Thanks.

I’m running a distro based on 8.04 Hardy, and the covers do not “flow” as the title suggests. It takes approximately 9-10 seconds to switch from cover to cover. I’ve tried 0.6rc4 and 0.5. This is on my desktop, with a 2.2 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, and a Nvidia 8500 GT video card.
Even more baffling is the fact that it works like a charm on my laptop, which has a 1.73 GHz Pentium M with 2 GB of RAM and built-in Intel 600 GMA.
Are there some kind of dependencies for this add-on that I’m missing (I have the album art manager installed in both cases)? This should work way better on my desktop, shouldn’t it?

Pardon me for the double-post, but I meant Intel 900, not 600.

i’ve just installed it for songbird 0.6 on mac os x 10.5.3, and it is just not working. no album covers appear at all. and in itunes, i have album covers for everything.

this is wonderful but scrolling is VERY slow and painful, ive got a quad core with 3gb ram but it maxed out my cpu and is unfortunately unusable. Heres hoping for speed optimisations!!
Keep up the good work John!

JohnM: I’m running a 32-bit Linux Mint Elyssa system, and the cpu is most definitely maxing out on scrollage. Desktop environment is Gnome, I have compiz running…if there’s any other information you need, I will certainly provide.
Your reference to a drawimage function and canvas 1.9 went completely over my head. If someone wouldn’t mind clarifying…or telling me not to sweat the details, whatever.
Just a note, the version I used on my laptop was 0.6rc3, which I have not run on my desktop yet. I’m assuming that since 0.5 didn’t work for me, I doubt rc3 will do any better.

Its 0.6, linux (ubuntu hardy) and 32 bit. Any ideas whats clogging up the system?

oh by the way, I just saw this website for a similar plugin for banshee, appears to have the same problem, but you can do some crazy zooming thing. check it out:
http://fleow.berlios.de/

Hi, Just wanted to say this is a fab Addon but it’s unusable for me because it is so slow. The frame rate is about 3 fps and the CPU is maxed out. Seems that others are having this problem on similar setups too so I guess you know about it. Anyway, if it helps I am on Ubuntu 8.04 with Firefox 3. I use Gnome and Compiz is on. I am on a Dell Precision 390 with a dual core 2.4GHz CPU, 2Gb of RAM and an Nvidia Quadro FX 3450.
If you’d like to know more or have me run some tests I’d be happy to help.
Keep up the good work on this amazing addon!

JohnM, thanks for your reply. I will try a few things tomorrow:
1. The new version of Firefox3 is out tomorrow – will see if that makes any difference.
2. I will turn off Compiz completely and see if I get any improvement.
3. I will try it within KDE instead of Gnome.
I’ll let you know how I get on as I really think you have the best addon here.

Well, let’s see if I can confirm. Running Ubuntu 7.10, Gnome and no Compiz. Also getting ridiculously slow scrolling.

I am running a P4 1.8 GHz w/ 1GB RAM which is probably a bit lower-end than the rest of you.

Running top and scrolling through the albums in Songbird brings Xorg straight to the top, taking up to 80% CPU. The minute I stop scrolling, Xorg drops toward the bottom of the list again..

dberg918: What OS/distribution are you running on your laptop where it works like a charm? I don’t think you mention it above, is it identical to your desktop?

Following a few tests I’ve not had much luck getting a performance boost. Disabling Compiz seems to make no difference. I now have the new Firefox 3 but no change (if it should influence songbird at all).
Finally I tried it on KDE and the performance was worse unfortunately. I was getting about one frame every 6 seconds and it actually froze the whole system at times.
I have also tried it with just a small collection but this seems to make no difference either. Such a shame but if nothing can be done I’ll just have to live without this addon.

@JohnM
on my thinkpad with ubuntu 8.04 scrolling is smooth.
The context menu of the albumarts only works for remove and edit, not for play.
What do you think about the idea of single middleclick on album art to play it? (also the backmost ones).

Is it possible to display only the albums in a particular genre or band name? Also, if I choose a certain band, I would like to see them displayed in order of release, not alphabetical.

Great add-on, but it takes up half my screen real estate. I always resize it to take up only 1/4 of my screen, but every time I restart song bird it is back to taking up half the screen. Any way to lock the size of the various panes in song bird so I don’t have to every time I restart?

@JohnM
the first middleclick on a cover directly plays it, but doesnt jump to it in the mediaflow view. fruther middleclicks don’t do anything, no reaction, no error.
in general these errors appear by playing a album with doubleclick:
“Error: observer.onDataChanged is not a function
Source File: chrome://songbird/content/bindings/observesDataRemote.xml
Line: 204”
“Error: this._that.rebuildTip is not a function
Source File: chrome://songbird/content/bindings/playerControls.xml
Line: 1371”
these first too errors appear very often, the next one just one time:
“Error: [Exception… ”’JavaScript component does not have a method named: “getSupportForURI”’ when calling method: [sbICoreWrapper::getSupportForURI]” nsresult: “0×80570030 (NS_ERROR_XPC_JSOBJECT_HAS_NO_FUNCTION_NAMED)” location: “JS frame :: file:///opt/songbird/components/sbPlaylistPlayback.js :: _callMethodOnAllCores :: line 900” data: no]
Source File: file:///opt/songbird/components/sbPlaylistPlayback.js
Line: 900”
the one-middleclick play always works on the selected albumart in the front, but for the backmost ones only one time. and this one time, it doesnt scroll to it.

Very great job!
Just one problem on my computer: right click for choose: “Clear Artwork” and abort by clicking “no” clear the artwork anyway !
Just want to know if it’s only my comp!

poupougnac, same on mine. albumart is gone. after clear artwork – “no”.
JohnM: I have to correct my sentence “fruther middleclicks don’t do anything, no reaction, no error.” to: further middleclicks on the backmost….
regards,
Nils

Ok that what I thought, I’m sure this will not be a big deal for JohnM. Thank you for your work JohnM !

That right, I’m going to tell them that thing!

Hi and thanks for working on a project for a community!
I’m using version 2.0, on my windows box (xp), and there seems to be some weird behavior with the middle click as stated in previous comments. Middle click on current album cover will play the album, or rather progress through it from 0 as intended. Middle click on any albums behind the frontmost will not step to them and play, however, middle clicking on an album in the background followed by a standard single left click will act like a middle click or double click should: move to front and play.
Even more interesting is say I middle click any of the 6 albums to a side, then proceed to single-left click a DIFFERENT one, it will show the cover as expected from a single-click, and if i do it again to another one, it works, but as soon as i single-left click on the on I had placed a middle click on that seemed to do nothing, it will switch to and start to play.
If i middle click on say, album 2 and 4 to the right of middle in that order, it would only switch AND PLAY on the 4th one when i single-left click it, i.e. the last middle-click is the only one retained.
Also, “flow” following currently playing song would be nice as others have suggested.
Play from the right-click context menu does nothing.
Album applet uses shuffle a little differently. When you select an album from the scroll it shuffles through the songs on the album as though it’s doing a repeat none shuffle of the one album.(Although first chosen song has a bug in the way it’s picked when switching albums) It would be nice to be able to use MediaFlow to change through the available styles of shuffle/album play as a single solution. Perhaps when shuffle is active, either middle click behaves differently, playing the whole album selected on shuffle instead of jumping through the whole library? Furthermore, if one had shuffle on and wanted to spontaneously listen to a full album (i.e. friends over and wants to hear new album) you could have a context entry to queue the album without shuffle?
I don’t know the difficulty of these options and which way would work best, but it would be nice to have all available via a mouse without having to turn shuffle on/off, or create a whole new shuffle option in songbird to change it’s behavior.
Thanks for taking the time to read this ;x
Doom0r

omg, i'm actually listening to The White Stripes when I found this (Conquest)

awsome addon!

I installed this addon on latest nightly (it is 19th July), and it totally crashed the library. I know that this addon isn't optimised for nightlies, but to prevent further crashes you could set max version to 0.6.*...

Really nice add-on. I think it could be awesome if there was an option to browse the library by artist, in addition to album. I am used to search artist that way, but I'd like to use this mediaview for that. What do you think?

Addon is broken in latest 0.7 nightly's. Shows up blank and there are many XPCOM errors in the Error Console.

Tyler out!

Too slooooow on my PC (ubuntu 8.04 Core2 + 1Go Ram) ... Xorg grow up at 100% cpu..

yeah, too slowww on my pc too (ubuntu 8.04 hardy heron)
1gb of ram
Pentium 4 3.2Ghz (dual core)
512 mb of vieo - Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTX.
I think this problem must be solved hurry, because most of users use linux.
so if you make something that doesn't work well on linux people won't use it.

great

@JohnM:

Thanks for the upcoming improvements (artist sorting). I'm really looking forward for that :D

I got the latest version today and it's working with the 0.7 pre again. And it seems to work better than before (less resources) too.

Really good job, once again.

Great add-on!
Got some issues while searching in my media library though.
First it shows every album in my library, but when I then search for example an artist I would like media flow to only show pictures of albums for that artist, on my computer it still show every album in my library...

I don't know if someone already brought it up, it will be nice, if the album preview would change when you're listening to a new track. The pop-up does show the album, but mediaflow does not follow, at least not on my system...

thanks otherwise and sorry for my english

its awesome

I am having trouble with this add on i cant enable it apparently. When i go to view media views is greyed out. I know that i installed it.

This add-on is just what i was looking, but i definitely miss a couple of things:

1. Like thx84 mentioned, it would be great if media flow could accompany the tracks being played.

2. I chose media flow to be my media view in the Now playing tab, but it doesn't seem to be functioning. This would also be an important feature, as i see it.

Keep up the good work!

Yes, I have been using the Now Playing List extension. I forgot to mention it.

I open up a new tab and then choose Play Queue from the menu tree on the left. I make a selection of mp3 from the library, I add it to queue and then start playing it. In the Now Playing tab i choose Media Flow as my media view, but where I was supposed to see the album covers (like in the library tab), all I see is black.

I hope I have described the situation correctly. Thanks!

Thanks. It's exactly as you said. After refresh, the album covers immediately show up. Keep up the excellent work. I'll be waiting for the next version.

I need help. Ive gone to the album art manager website and I dont know which version to download. I tried 1.4.2 and follow the prompts from there. I clicked "save" and then finnished but nothing to my knowledge happened, nor did anything change in SongBird. I would really like to have the MediaFlow application work for me but Im computer illiterate and I just dont know what to do. Please help!

Hey JohnM, about the choppy animation in Linux, were you able to narrow it down enough that you could file a bug report somewhere for Mozilla or Cairo? Just hoping we can help them fix this problem...

JohnM
     I have version 0.6.1
     How do I install the extension from within songbird

JohnM
F***'n YAY!
I got it installed! I gave your recommendation a shot and tried to figure it out for myself and it worked. You'll have to excuse my excitement but when you're computer illiterate like me and you get something to work that no one else had a problem with but you, its a big deal (lol)! So thanks!

Is there anyway you can get this add-on to recognize existing cover.jpg in the album's directory already please?

I've enjoyed using this Add-On and I just want to make a request. Is it possible for the MediaFlow to update the album art when Songbird changes songs? What I mean is that if Song 1 finishes and switches to Song 2, Media Flow displays Song 2's artwork. At the moment, I have to click on the Song Ticker to update and was wondering if this can be done automatically.

Hi JohnM, and thanks for a great add-on!
one thing though, if you'd alter the perspective on the covers behind the selected one, it just might improve on the "flow" feeling. But that's my thought, I don't know how it'd look in final.

Looking forward to fullscreen view,
Schwadegan.

looks like great add-ons...but i've installed both albumapplet and media flow and neither work. when i switch to albumapplet it simply changes to "list" view. when i switch to media flow, its only a black bar with the album name at the bottom. i can scroll, but no album art anywhere...any tips?
i'm on Ubuntu 8.04.
also, just gonna throw this out there...what about a "full screen" media flow view? is it even possible?

ps. i'm running songbird 0.6.1

i goofed...didnt install album art manager...sigh. works fine now! LOOKS GREAT!
how bout a fullscreen mode? keep it up! i'll be able to quit itunes if you keep up the great work.

Excellent. Better than a giraffes neck. Congratulations to those who did all the work. Cheerio Jobsy boy with your boring junk

:o)

Great Addon, which is highly needed in the media player business to succeed. But I have kind of a bug to report. When you filter your list after Artist and have Soundtrack's in your library, the view gets messed up, by creating a placeholder for every track, that has a different Artist, where it should only handle the Album, not every track separately. When you switch to Album view, everythings ok. But for me, an Artist sorted List is always better.

Maybe this could be handled differently?

Most awesome work till now though. Keep it up!

Tyler out!

running songbird .7 rc3

I am finding that the album art getting a bit messed up. EG:
All artists that have an album called Greatest hits, are lumped together under ONE ARTIST album cover in Mediaflow.. ..however, the Songbird display pane shows them properly. EG: Lulu would be in the mediaflow display as the song I selected , while Gloria Estephan is playing and displayed in the songbird pane.

This happens with albums with the same name, though they have different artists.

Hello John,
Very nice add-on! Just a thought- maybe you can add space up at the top of the album to even out with the bottom margin? It looks a little squished in my player as-is. But it is very nice to see my album covers again!

Great addon! But is there any chance to make this faster?
It moves staccato on my PC (Celeron M, 1,6Ghz, 1,5GB RAM, XP).

Would it be possible to give us some options?
For example switching the mirror-effect off could help a lot. Or set down the details a little bit, or something like that.

Thanks and keep on the good work!

I see you have explained why the plugin runs so slow on Linux (Ubuntu).
Could you maybe make a menu, with options so that slower computers can run this plugin in a another resolution or something.... ? Just an idea....

Keep up the good work!

Any chance on having it automatically flip to the new album cover on song change?

Its not really like Coverflow :'( so only 4 Stars! (It could be smoother too!)

I'm running version 2.6 on SB 0.7.0, but for this and previous versions, I've noticed that the aspect ratio of the album art is squashed, or is being forced to fit a CD jewel case shape, rather than the square album art that almost everyone will already have stored. Hopefully this can be fixed, or available as an option in future revisions?? :) Cheers!

First: I really love Songbird! Really good and in the future brilliant music player. The only thing I really miss in this version is the ability to order my music first on artist and second on album. I hope some developers can do something about that...

Any chance we can have the option in media flow to have the filter pane as well below it. WOuld be so nice.

thanks

For what it may be worth.. and I suppose in line with Maxo's request..this has not always happened, but currently, when the song changes, the album switches to match that song. Don't know why it has started happening as I did NOT do an update.. though i did re-import my library.

I switched off the reflection-effect for the albums by editing the add-ons code!
It runs very much smoother and much faster now! JohnM, please, please add an option to switch off reflection. That would help many people with similar problems...

PS: I just read, that you are busy, at the moment. Can I send you a patch? I could write a patch to read a value like "extensions.mediaflow.reflection = 0" from about:config very soon as a workaround, and an option-window later.

Thx! You got email... the option-window part come later, perhaps at the end of next week.

Hi JohnM,

some month ago, i explained how to install this plugin, or better java for songbird, here as a comment. Now its gone. Is it possible to find these old deleted posts?
I'm trying to install it for my sister...

Works really well when paired with: FocusTrack http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1315

AWSOME :D Better than Itunes :P

Really nice extension. However, I have a small issue with 'Various artist' albums where the individual tracks have ID3 tags of each artist. Despite the album art showing correctly in AlbumArt extension for the album or for the artist, MediaFlow shows a 'missing art' blank record image. This happens when viewing by artist or by album. If viewing by artist, clicking on any of the images takes you to the (alphabetically) first artist on the album.

I'm running 0.7 on XP.

Any thoughts?

My mediaflow is slow... What can I do?
I have an AMD 3400+ 2.2ghz, 2gb ram and an ati x1650 under Windows XP sp3 and Songbird 0.7.0

I found a solution for slow scrolling in Linux here:

http://blog.songbirdnest.com/2008/05/28/mediaflow-is-purtylicious/

Karsten Otto Jul 8, 2008 2:04 pm Permalink

Regarding the problems with compiz and the sloooow media-flow, I’ve found a solution that might help others overcome the CPU problems when using media-flow:

Hard-/Software setup:
Ubuntu Hardy Heron, 8.04
GeoForce 6600GT using EnvyNG Hardware Drivers
Compiz libraries installed

Solution:
Install xserver-xgl using the package-manager, after X-relaunch, the original server will be replaced and Xgl will kick in. Afterwards, MediaFlow in Songbird will work fluently.

Conclusion:
In my opinion, the MediaFlow plugin cannot use OpenGL functionality on it’s own, therefore relying completely on the X-Server’s capabilities. My compiz installation was not harmed, e.g. the avant-window-manager (relies on compiz) still works fine.

I hope, this can help some of the (frustrated) user of Songbird’s MediaFlow plugin. Generally, I think Songbird in itself is a great piece of software. I’m relieved to finally have found a piece of software for media-management and -playback, that utilizes the general approach so often seen in other operating-systems.

Keep up the good work. I’m looking forward to the next versions.

NICE!!
Finally I can start using this plugin on Linux!!
xserver-xgl solves the problem completely!!

Very good indeed!

Awesome! This is an excellent add-in.

Awesome add-on. However I do have a slight issue...

When I edit the rating of a track the CPU usage maxes out and the UI on Songbird freezes. When it becomes responsive again the albums have multiple artworks showing. I can't work out how they are separated as for some albums there is an artwork for each track and for others there are only two or three.

When this happens resetting the view by selecting MediaFlow from the view menu resolves the issue until the next time I make a change to the rating.

The versions that I am using are:

• Songbird: 0.7.0
• MediaFlow: 2.6.2
• Windows XP

Looking into this further the issue only occurs when using a smart playlist so I assume that this is related to the way that Songbird refreshes a playlist after a change.

Again, kudos for a great add-on

This completely crashes my songbird 0.7... Or rather; it slows it down so much that its stops responding and goes black. I just dont understand why... im using ubuntu 8.04 and my computer has 4GB ram and a 2,4GHz cpu... What am i doing wrong? :P

Really cool

nice

Hello,

I just switched from windows xp to ubuntu and have been using songbird for my music...I love it, and I love this add-on. Nice work! I have a question though...I really like the entire look of songbird on the picture of this add-on and I'd like mine to look pretty much exactly like that, but being very new to it, I have no idea how to recreate it. Which skin are you using, or are there other settings that you have changed?

Anyway, very cool add-on!

Nice!

Update your screenshot ;)

I really like this extension, but it has corrupted (no covers viewable), and I have not been able to revive it. I've uninstalled and reinstalled both the extension and Songbird to no avail. All that is visible in the MediaFlow pane are left and right arrows with a divider between them. It makes me wonder if there is a configuration file in the profile to delete, but I don't see anything like mediaflow@songbirdnest.com in the profile. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

@drdale: You should first make sure, that the problem lies inside the profile. You can check that by creating a new profile through the profile-manager and testing the extension there. If everything works fine, then indeed the problem is in the profile.

i installed this at least 6 times but i get nothing! in my view>media views> ..... its empty! theirs nothing their! it said to restart songbird and every time i do it brings me back to this page. why? why isnt it installing?

There is room for improvement but you've done an excellent job!

Well done! I am looking forward to the new releases.
A few things I would change:
Scrolling performance is not very good right now.
The scroll bar that keeps changing its size while new albums are added to the list is a bit annoying in my opinion. I would prefer a forward/back button that discretely disappears when the mouse leaves the cover art windows.
Keep up the good work!

@atreiu: Creating a new profile fixed the Media Flow problem. Sometimes I miss the obvious. Thanks for your help.
Now it's on to fixing all the media re-import errors. I guess I should not have imported my whole collection at one time.

You guys got a lot of work to do. Unbelievably slow compared to iTunes CoverFlow on the same hardware. It's really unusable. I certainly don't have the fastest computer (It was $2000 five years ago) but Coverflow runs almost seemless on this computer.

Hey. Could you add this function: Instead of showing the album, show the tracks within the albums. So you can use this to browse all your music.

How do I add my own album art so it displays when I play a song?

Hi JohnM

I like your Addon very much!
I am a Web-Developer, so I like to integrate this engine to a web-application - can you give me some advice how it works? Would be great joy to me!

cu

weakon

I second kokotoni's comment about the distortion of the images. I would love to see an option to preserve the original aspect ratio of the album art, or even an option to make it a square aspect ratio. My album art just looks weird stretched the way it currently is in MediaFlow.

Slightly OT question - what theme/add-on is being used in the screenshot for MediaFlow?

Shizzle, nevermind...slight oversight on my part :)

hey johnm...thanks a lot! i like it.

i second the comments about distorted aspect ratio, but i am willing to wait for you to work on it at your convenience, seeing as you are doing this for us for free and i certainly couldnt do it myself.

@JohnM

Seems as though mediaflow is not keeping the aspect ratio for the images. It is not outright a huge catch, but if you would like an image, let me know.. but for comparison, keep the 'album art pane opened along with Media flow, and compare.

Thanks for your great work.

may I also add:

First, Shame on me for not seeing the aspect ratio issue mentioned before.

Secondly,
There was a time when, to get album art to cycle through the albums with song play, I simply would initiate the playback in the album art view, or by clicking on the album... However, currently,clicking on the albums do not initiate song playback... nor does righclicking on the album and selecting play.

I realize that you do not have time at the moment, but just passing on.

Hi, nice idea, but there are just a few covers shown... most are just black vinyls? what did i wrong? installed add-ons: last.fm album art, vinyl album art, focus track. even if the last.fm album art add-on shows the cover, this add-on doesnt... can anyone help?

I hope i am not speaking out of turn, but here is what I know so far...

There was a time when Album art manager (which is not compatible to songbird 1.0) was used to retrieve album art from the web etc.. but the way i think it is now.. If you do not have the album art already, there is NOT an automatic fetcher for the missing album art.. so you may have to do the copy and paste manually.

Also, Last fm art is just a display thing and is not integrated into the metadata or folder, which is why Mediaflow would not pick up the art that is being shown there.

I think the Vinyl is just a way to show your missing album art, as opposed to the typical cd look.

I am also here hoping that it will be addressed soon.. but, if none of the addons handle it, then Songbird has that feature on the roadmap... I think in the February Release...

http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Roadmap

JohnM: Could you please tell me which settings I have to change to get album art show like squares, not recentangles, I hate when every cover is resized like for example like 200x180, not 200x200. Please? I tried to modify flow.xml but I'm not so good at this. Also I don't like scrollbar but I got that myself. JohnM, please help me out here?

@ JohnM: Okay, thanks!

@JohnM
I posted this over on songbird blog, and since I believe that your product depends on what songbird itself finds in album art, I thought I will post here for whatever it is worth:

Strange thing here:

Apparently, I have album art in my metadata somewhere or something, but they are not showing up in Album art of mediaflow…However, the strangest thing:

When i use this SOngnotifier addon: http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/39

It Picks Up The Album Art That I KNEW I had, but just not seeing in songbird!! IS this something that songbird needs to duplicate? Or is he pulling the art from the web? I doubt he is pulling from the web because they are the exact art I had before.. some were manually placed.

Thank you JohnM. Funny that it has album art that I manually selected.. or maybe that is what I thought I did :) . Senility setting in here :)

Is it currently possible (or would it be possible to have this feature added) to add the MediaFlow panel above the Filter Pane. That way you could still chose songs using the filters and MediaFlow would rotate to the corresponding album...

I also have a request along filtering lines ... would it be possible to have an option to make Media Flow work as a filter as well i.e. tracks from the album shown are the only ones that play ?

I want Filter Pane implemented as well. Two the most imporant upgrades would be:

 * square artwork (keep aspect ratio)
 * + Filter Pane

Those two would make me use this plugin as main media view. And worth of full 5 stars :) and happy me :)

Awesome feature that reminds me of Cover Flow in Apple's iTunes. I only wish full screen Media Flow playback can be added in a future update (full screen Cover Flow wasn't when Cover Flow was originally made part of iTunes 7.0.0 but later was added), also tried using it in Mozilla Songbird on my Mac Mini running OS X Tiger 10.4.11 and although Cover Flow works on my Mac in iTunes fine the Media Flow doesn't work so well on Songbird 0.6 (latest Mac version) on my Mac -- the background appears but the artwork doesn't -- as I scroll I see the files listed on the bottom but at the top in the Media View pane I don't see the artwork but as I scroll the name of the currently selected file appears in the Media View pane. Hopefully, this can be fixed in future so Media View also works well with Mozilla Songbird for Apple's Mac OS X. By the way although I still have Tiger on my Mac Mini I expect to upgrade to Leopard by the end of the month. Oh and happy holidays to everyone in the Mozilla community!

Sorry for the double post but just got another suggestion -- for Mac OS X users there is a visualizer plug-in for iTunes users called JewelCase (is not yet iTunes 8 compatible) that lets iTunes users see their album artwork in a spinning virtual CD (for more info go to www.opticalahchemy.com) for a while I have written the developer of how great it would be to also have a Windows version for Windows using iTunes loving users. Unfortunately the developer has been unable so far to add Windows releases of JewelCase and now has become too busy with other projects to even continue in the near future updates to JewelCase to be compatible with newer releases of iTunes on the Mac even. It would be nice at the very least for a JewelCase like plugin to exist for Mozilla Songbird and be cross platform. Media Flow is great now if a JewelCase like feature could also be added for Songbird users that would be cool.

Sorry for the triple post just noticed Media Flow needed Songbird 1.0 and updated to Songbird 1.0 on my Mac and now Media Flow works fine in both Mozilla Songbird 1.0 for Mac OS X and Windows.

Very Nice but there ist one bad ting:

When I start playing a Playlist, the MediaFlow stays at the first track of the Playlist.
Should it not follow with the several tracks?
Its silly to see only the first Albumcover of the list, while other songs beeing played....

@fretrunner: there is an additional add-on for this functionality. It works great with MediaFlow :-)
FocusTrack: http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1315

just thought i would post to say its now working on linux since the upgrade to 1.0 without the sluggish CPU maxing out effect. Nice effort!

would it be possible for mediaflow to fetch covers from metadata?
I have just about all my covers in metadata since it's...well metadata. Filesystem tends to be unstructured and non-standard, especially since i use my library from different plattforms.

Great add-on nevertheless!

seems like mediaflow does fetch covers from metadata. But not until i've touched (play or edit) the first track of the album. Strange but i can live with it.

Thanks again for a great add-on.

atreiu, I just discovered that myself.

Mediaflow currently requires focustrack.

JohnM
Thank you.

Sadly at this point all I get is a small floating scrollbar on my newly installed MediaFlow. Any suggestions?

Sorry, but It's just not as smooth as coverflow. Don't get me wrong though, ot still is a damn good job on your part.

Just a quick update to my earlier post of all I am getting is a little tiny scroll bar. I looked in the Error Console and I am throwing this:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [nsIPrefBranch.getCharPref]" nsresult: "0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://mediaflow/content/media-page.js :: MF_onLoad :: line 162" data: no]

Hope that helps.

Cameron

Yeah, that plugin rocks. Thank you.
I had problems with the slow scrolling in Ubuntu as well, but taking the OpenGL 3.0 (beta) display drivers solved the problem.
Now there just needs to be a cover fetcher :/

Thank you very much JohnM I just added the string value to about:config gave it the value of NoClue and it now works perfectly! Thanks for the speedy response!

excellent update, thank you very much.

Good update. Is there a way that i could change the background for mediaflow specifically for one of my feathers? For instance, if someone installs my add-on Aero Bird, and they use media flow, they'll see some aero styled graphics instead of plain black in the background.

@JohnM: I have the same problem as LIB53. It's easy to change the background of the MediaFlow-Displaypane via css, BUT then you'll have a problem with the reflections, because you are using a black gradient to smooth out the mirror-effect. I didn't find a way to change the color of this gradient via css, but a non-black background looks just ugly, if I can't change the black gradient, too. Any ideas?

PS: Just a thought: Is it possible that you use a transparent gradient for the reflection? So mirrored CoverArt will be faded out into transparent, instead of being faded into black? That would solve this problem. :-)

Thank you for fixing the aspect ratio on the cover art.

A few things:
1. This is still running really slowly; scrolling through the album art stutters very visibly. My graphics card is by no means a gaming card, but it works fine for most 3d graphics so I don't see why this should be so slow.

2. The option for max number of covers to display doesn't do anything. I tried reducing it from 9 to 5 in order to see if it would help with the stuttering, but I still see the same number of album covers.

3. Scrolling through the album covers seems to skip every other cover; I can click on the ones that are skipped to bring it to the front, but clicking on the scrollbar skips over every other cover.

Information: I'm running the latest nightly build 909 on Windows Vista 32 bit. My album covers are separate jpg files within the folders for each album (since flac support for embedding album art isn't very good)-could this be the problem with the stuttering? It runs slow regardless of whether I have 100 covers in my current playlist or just 3.

This is very good already, it just needs to be a lot smoother for me to be able to use it.

Woah, thanks for aspect-ratio fix! now it's almost perfect :)

Am I only one but it seems ratio is still not right? height is more than width? just a bit?

Now when I look more closely it seems not. SORRY, I was already almost used to previous aspect ratio. This messed me up :D Sorry again. Do you know where I can hide the scrollbar? in last version I put class to scrollbar in flow.xml and hide it from flow.css by display:none parametr. Why come it does not seem to hide in the new version? JohnM can you please tell me this, then you are free I promise :)

Sorry for fourth post! I managed to hide scrollbar myself. Now this is perfect, thanks! :) *****

@JohnM: Yeah, I thought this would be difficult... Transparent gradients would allow even background-images for the MediaFlow, that's why I asked. But using the background-color will be good enough. :-)

@ JohnM

Ah, I see now. I thought the option was to limit total number of album covers displayed at once, not number on each side.

A suggestion: you should save the loaded album covers to some sort of cache since right now, every time you switch between playlists or do a search, coverflow has to reload every single album cover which is slow.

Also, for some reason, there are limits to how large I can resize the coverflow pane. Even when my window is maximized and I clearly have plenty of room, I can't increase the size of the coverflow pane beyond more than a third of my total screen height.

hello john,

thank you for the update! i'm agreeing with halluci~ i would like to be able to make the size of the coverflow pane as big as i want; even shrink out the playlist altogether as needed.

also, should the albumart move to the next album being played when on shuffle? i'd like to see all my art, not just the first album always....

@halluci: Scrolling (with a trackpad/scroll-wheel) on Windows/Linux depends on what you have your mouse settings to. If you have you settings to a higher number like 3 or a higher speed scrolling, then it will scroll that many covers per instance. It should be the same as in iTunes to test it out if you have it installed on Windows at least.

Is it just me or do the albums really look much sharper and nicer, now? =)
I love the new update & new function! Thanks a lot, John!

What's the deal here? All of my music folders have a folder.jpg. After I installed MediaFlow, more than half of the albums were randomly missing art or just had a black spot instead of the graphic used for no album art. What's with that? What decides whether MediaFlow uses one folder.jpg over another? How does this add on have a 4/5 rating when it essentially doesn't do what it was made to do? Mysteries that some may never discover...

I didn't say anything about MediaFlow not fetching the album art itself, I know it doesn't do this. What I am saying is that it's not displaying the art I already have in my music folders. Well, it displays some. For others it gives the "no album art" graphic and for others it's just a blank space. Isn't the purpose of the add on just that - to display the album art for my music (which again, I'll add, is on my hard drive, sitting in each album directory). I was really excited about the add on and I appreciate the work and all, but it's just not working for me. Sorry I wasn't congratulatory on something that's not functioning correctly.

I can "correct" it by dragging the album art into the player - but this is rather tedious if you have 2000+ albums.

Hi JohnM, After installing the new update I noticed one thing wrong: when I search for a certain song, artist or album it doesn't show me the results unless I refresh the page.

This doesn't happen if I'm using the List or the Filter Pane Views and it didn't used to happen with MediaFlow before I installed the new update.

I don't think it's also caused by any other add-on. I've installed BirdQuizz recently, so I thought it could be the one causing this, but it's not. I disabled it and the problem persists.

I don't know if it's important to mention, but I'm using Vista.

I hope you can see what's happened.

Happy new year and keep up the excellent work!

Hi JohnM, awesome plugin - main reason I've switched to Songbird and when others see me using it, their first reaction is how amazing the MediaFlow window is.

Just wanted to confirm what ruipenunes said above. I'm experiencing the same problem (on Windows XP).

Just updated to the new version a few minutes ago and when doing a search - MediaFlow does not refresh the view like the previous versions did. I have not installed any new plugins apart from updating to the new MediaFlow version. Hope you can find the problem.

Many thanks for the plugin and Happy new year !

@DLawton: I think you didn't get JohnMs explanation correct. Your problem, as you describe it, has nothing to with MediaFlow nor with Covers fetched through the Internet. Your problem is, that you MUST tell _Songbird_ for all your Tracks, where your Cover for this Track is. Some of the Covers might be linked correct already, but some might not. If the Track is not linked correctly with the Cover, you will see no Cover. Not in the small Album Pane, not in den Album View - Addon, not in the MediaFlow - Addon, not in any other Add-ons that use the Album Cover. It's a Songbird problem, not a MediaFlow problem. You can discuss this on the getsatisfaction-site, here it is not appropriate.

PS: As far as I know, a solution is already in the pipe, in the form of Songbird 1.1. which will have an Album-Art-Manager included, so hopefully we can automatically assign the Covers of our 2000+ albums. Imho, you just have to be patient and wait for the next Songbird version.

So Songbird does not have the basic functionality that every single other program like this ever coded in the history of mankind has - being the ability to understand that "folder.jpg" is the cover art for that particular album, and Mozilla expects us to individually drag thousands of images in Songbird to update it correctly? Seriously how hard is it to code that folder.jpg = default for album art.

Even if that's true, I don't understand how randomly some of my cover art is appearing without my intevention, while the mast majority isn't. Is Songbird coded to randomly roll the dice on every album and if it comes up with a 6 it'll use folder.jpg and anything else you're screwed? Is this some strange form of musical russian roulette?

hi johnm,

i installed your update that includes your changes to album height, and i found focustrack and installed that too. so, now mediaflow is doing exactly what i needed. thanks so much for both, and happy new year to you!

p.s. love it!!! :)

um..the last update broke songbird library search for me in every view except list view so i had to roll back to 2.7

maybe this just affected me, but i thought I'd mention it anyway

the new version does knock out the mediathek search function :-( searching the mediathek does now only work in list view, and not anymore in mediaflow view

It takes a long time (10-20 seconds) to start up and isn't very smooth when it does - I have machines with onboard video and with supermegapower cards in and it looks like it's struggling on all of them. Doesn't seem to matter if it's on linux or windows, whether with a large library or not.
This isn't a complaint - I don't really like this kind of extension and don't intend to reinstall it anyway - just an observation. Several extensions seem to take a long time to get going, and I guess this must be a limitation of songbird's current machinery.

Search is disabled for me as well, so it's probably affected everyone. Just a heads up.
Keep up the good work! This is by far my favorite add-on (and will be even more so when full screen is implemented :p ).

Yes, search seems to be disabled.
Another small bug: when you have two or more albums with the same name ('live', in my case) by different artists, mediaflow always scrolls to the first album in the library, not the 'correct' one.

Great plug-in though, keep up the good work!

I love this add-on as well, but I can also confirm that the latest release has disabled the search function (on Win Vista 32-bit).

Looking forward to the next update, or better yet, when it's fully incorporated into Songbird ;-)

Hello and first thanks for this great add on

but i want say that there is some little problem using it on linux

when i want search my library using it
it's going very slow
and sometimes make crash the application....

i have no flash plugins installed on it

i don't know if it's only for me
but hope one day i will work better ;)

Just saw your conversations with DLawton... and felt sorry for you... So I just wanted to say Thanks for the add-on and keep up the awesome work! : )

Yeah should really feel sorry for the dude... who am I to try to report issues / suggest ways to improve the add on.

Hi there,
I have a problem kind of weird.

When I switch to Media Flow my filter panes will not go away.
I tried reinstalling Songbird and Media Flow and still the same issue.
I use CCleaner to clear my registry of that kind of stuff, just wondering if anyone can help.

I am sorry, I figured it out.
Likely sounded like a dumb question.

If anyone else runs in to the above just:

Right click in MediaFlow > Settings > Hide Filter Panes.

OK, Thanks amazing add-on looking forward to using Songbird and MediaFlow.

Hi JohnM,

First of all, thanks for this brilliant add-on. It was the first add-on I installed, and it is not going to leave! :)
I used your flow.css to change the background colour to white, which worked perfectly, but now I would like to have a dark border around every album art. Some of the artwork have a white background and look bad on the white background of the flow. Is there a css class somewhere where I can add the border code?
Thanks in advance

it's nice looking but it's unfunctionally slow on my lenovo T61, C2D - T7300, 2G mem, nVidia Quadro NVS 140M on Ubuntu Hardy.

Latest update breaks search function in Media Flow View. Otherwise, BEST add-on! Thanks.
Songbird 1.0, Ubuntu 8.10.

is it possible to have the album art displayed in a jewel CD case, as the other coverflower applet did ?

Hi, very nice extension, my preferred media view most of the time.

However, I seem to have uncovered a bug. I find that if I switch to the Album View (i.e. the media view extension of that name) and then back to MediaFlow, I get an extra column in the filters pane. I currently have 6 columns - 4 Artists and 2 Albums.

I'm going to see what happens if I quit/restart and also if I disable Album View.

Oops, forgot some key information:
  Songbird 1.0.0 build 860 (i.e. current public release)
  MediaFlow 2.9

And it maybe relevant that Album Art is not compatible with 1.0.0 and so is currently disabled.

is it possible to download covers with this extension? if not, is there another method to download automatically? thanks

@NMLZ : Try the website Discogs.com
It has loads of artists and their albums and often including the album art

@Bazzz : I was looking for an automatic way, since I have hundreds of albums ... manually it would take forever. Thanks anyway!

hi, version 2.9 (still present in 2.9.1) introduced a small bug to my setup: when filter planes are hidden in media flow view the 'search library' function ceases to work. happens on windows XP and on ubuntu intrepid. keep up the good work!
Windows XP Version: Songbird 1.0.0, Build 860 (20081124135419)

MediaFlow 2.9.2 works beautifully for me, search is working with or without FilterPane showing

My platform, Vista 64, Current Songbird 1.0.0, Build 860, FocusTrack 1.0.4, VinylArt and Sheen 'feather' 0.0.0.3

Thanks for developing this addon, the Beers and Everything on Pizzas are on the way.

Hey I have a suggestion. Would there be a way to increase the size of the text (album name) within mediaflow without increasing the size of everything in songbird? I'm thinking for when the mediaflow window is made huge so it can be seen from afar. Also, would it be possible to show the artist name down there too? Thanks man :)

Hey... Aso from me first a big Thank Your for that plugin... I know this also has been mentioned already. But in my case there are also some blank items... Only the title of the album is seen. The album art view in the service pain contains an album image... This is a more or less randomly process... Any ideas?!

@ Angryman You say the 'Art' no show is random, but wondering if there is a commonality between File type and the art not showing?
If it's not very many and you can pin point the issue to a given file type or types then the 'cover.jpg' etc... in the music file folder should work
Just an idle thought

Hi,

I think it could be great if MediaFlow could choose the correct album cover when SongBird is playing music randomly.

Xuo.

This addon is just too slow to be used

nottRobin,
That sounds quite harsh, conclusive and too global, when so many of us enjoy using this extension. :( ....We have to remember that the author's work is voluntary and by himself :)

JohnM:
Having said that though (hehe), from MY experience with mediaflow default settings:
I would agree though that it could have a smaller memory footprint when loading the art, because i have seen songbird usage fly from ~55mb to as high as 300mb, when switching to mediaflow view for the first time. However, when it finishes loading, the memory usage comes back down to ~65mb if left alone. Of course when you start scrolling through them again, it goes to ~120-180mb and pretty much stays there after that, even after switching from mediaflow.

On the bright side, the next release of Songbird (in February) will have better memory management, but even with it SO FAR (Using nightly build), Mediaflow still causes the memory to become quite volatile. (I just chalked it up as a price for eye candy and convenience)

I have a relatively powerful computer system, so it does not affect me at all, but just giving feedback for whatever it may be worth.

hello !!
sorry but i made mistake
that was the now playing list plugin who made the search so slow....
i disabled it and now it's ok !!

thx again for great add on
and sorry for disagreement....

I'm contemplating switching from mediamonkey to Soungbird. The only thing holding me back is the that I like to browse by album art.

So I was very pleased to find this plug-in. Except that it doesn't seem to want to display all my art :-( [n.b. it all displays fine in mediamonkey]

I think:
Flac - pick up fine
Mp3 - picking up fine
M4A - not picking up the art

Operating system: Windows Vista.
(Aside: looking into this also noticed that songbird doesn't seem to be able to read the album artist meta data of M4A files)

I have just tried to add album art to one of these (apparently artless) M4A albums. It worked. However, I don't really want to have to re-add the album art of all me M4A albums as I have loads. They were all ripped from CD's using itunes (I use EAC now) - could this have something to do with it? Does itunes add album art in an annoying way?

Sorry for bugging you. It is a core songbird problem
http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/display_embedded_album_art_for_m4a_aac_files?from=new_topic&utm_medium=topic_search&utm_source=topic_search_songbird

Hello
There is a pb with Media Flow and the latest nightlies (I forced the install, of course!)
Clicking on a cover does not take you to the album, it just plays the song you were on before.
And there is this error:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE) [sbILibrary.getItemsByProperty]" nsresult: "0x80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://mediaflow/content/media-page.js :: MF_selectItemsInAlbum :: line 487" data: no]

Thanks

Would it be possible for mediaflow to work with vertical filters?

This seems very heavy... takes half of processor when changin track with shufflefocus on. Is there a way get animations off or something to smoothen up when playing shuffle on?

Do you have anything in the pipeline yet for the Songbird 1.1.1b1 release? If you need any help testing your addon with the latest code branches I would be more than happy to help!?

@JohnM,

I posted a while back about albums being lumped together... I don't know if you addressed it as yet, but I made a change to my library since then and the problem went away.. However, I made a recent change again and the problem returned. I have no idea if it is related or just my lack of observation
.
This is the case for albums with the same name for multiple artists, such as: Greatest Hits. Songbird Album view area shows the correct Album Art.

Ok, so this is the Library layout format that worked:
Music/ARTIST/ALBUM/TRACK

The one I have now that is not working is:
Music/Artist/Track

I changed because it is a pain in the rear manually accessing songs by artists, and would often end up with empty folders.

Here is an image:
http://i39.tinypic.com/168ae6e.jpg

I hope this helps. Focustrack is enabled. When it changes to a song that does not have greatest hits... it shows as it should.

muy bueno pero no me permite instalarlo

How long has the Media Flow been grayed out to install it?

JohnM - no worries. Thank you for the clarification. It is one of my fav. features :)

You really should update it real soon!

this is relay awesome but u have to modify to work with 1.1 beta2

Consider this another offer to test this with the current beta... This is my most-used add-on and I'd love to help make it as good as it has the potential to be by testing it out.

Great work! Keep it up! =D

El reproductor de musica que todos esperabamos y que pocos se habían preocupado por hacerlo; Se extrañan: el ecualizador, el reproductor de cds, el ripeador de pistas.
Pero como consola de musica esta completisimo

another option for view of my musics.
so nice!

I really like the add on, but there is one thing...I know people have mentioned sorting the albums by artist, but what about only showing one image for the artist rather than every album I own? Maybe this defeats the purpose, I don't know. I just really enjoy the scrolling feature, but I don't necessarily want to scroll through every album. Maybe the ability to click on the artist, then move to the albums of the artist. Anyway, just a thought.

I completely agree with starke, it is very slow, and displays way too many covers this way. Of course this should be an option that is off by default but is definitely a required feature. This is what I like about WMP11, they show only 1 album cover per artist, then once you select that artist, then you see the covers for all their albums.

I'm still loving this addon!
Just want to make a suggestion. When you do add more options, can one of them be to get the album artwork, since I know songbird has built in support for that now. Thanks so much for this addon! :D

Love this addon, thanks for the great work.

One thing I noticed though is when I use it with the FocusTrack extension, if I have two albums by different artists, but with the same Album metadata value (i.e. "Greatest Hits") then MediaFlow always shows the album artwork for the first album. Not sure if that is an issue in MediaFlow or FocusTrack.

Hmm, maybe I am doing something wrong.
But titles of the album are not centered underneath the albumcovers.
They seem to be aligned somewhat to the left.

Hope someone can help me fix it?

letmelikeit: There's a good chance that it might be an incompatibility with another Add-on. Can you disable every other Add-on (and Skins, too)? If this solve is, then re-enable them one by one and see which Add-on caused this.

Could you make it work more fluently like coverflow?

Well, I dunno what I did wrong but it doesn't work for me with 1.1.1 on Ubuntu 8.10 with Nvidia-180.29-glx... I just get blank black screen. Since this plugin is the only reason why I would have used songbird anyway, I think I'll have to go back to banshee. ((

Agh, nevermind, it works with 1.2.0a, though.

Very good add-on that can be improved !
It would be great to have the possibility to change how the jackets are ordered. I would like them in "album" orders.

Bye ! Nice job !

Would like to suggest in a future version of Media Flow enhancing it by providing a Full Screen option. When Apple first acquired the Cover Flow technology (which Media Flow is also based on somewhat) for turning your music library into a juxebox thru which you can browse (navigate/flip) through your collection of albums visually as you would your CD collection with all your artwork and bundled it witth iTunes 7.0.0 and 7.0.1 (which was a bug update to fix stability issues in 7.0.0 that caused iTunes to crash) Cover Floe only had a basic window mode but by the time iTunes 7.5 came out (can't remember which update did it) iTunes already had a Full Screen version of Cover Flow also available.

If possible would recommend adding the FS option also that is still missing -- imagine Full Screen Media Flow included as an option as well -- for those wanting Media Flow but fine with Window Mode they can still use the regular Media Flow window mode but those wanting Full Screen (FS) they can get Media Flow FS Mode.

Great Add-on. I'm on Win 7 and previously the add on seemed to pull the folder.jpg from the individual album folder, now it seems to be grabbing the metadata. A lot of the album covers I have are over a meg, so I use a smaller version in the metadata so as not to add the extra megs to every single song. I currently have about 10,00 tracks, and at an average of 1 meg, that makes an extra 10 gbs for essentially nothing. is there a way to go back to the folder.jpgs? Also I second the call for a full screen option. I have a 32 inch screen, and a full screen media-flow with full resolution album covers would be awesome. If the folder.jpg is not something that is in your planned development. can you tell me which version of media flow and or songbird I will have to go back to?? Either way, thanks for a great add on.
Currently Sbird 1.1.1
and MFlow 2.9.3

I have the same problem as letmelikeit - the album covers aren't centred. They are slightly to the left of where they should be, and get more off-centre if I make them larger.
I think it took me a while to notice it but now that I have I can't help noticing every time I look at it.
I have tried disabling all add-ons, to no avail.

SB 1.1.1
MF 2.9.3

cheers.

I also have that problem with Album Art not being centered. I don't know if it has been there all along, but lately I have been using my albums at a much larger view, and because of that the offset is very noticeable. The album is shifted to the left.

Now that I know it is there, it is possible to see in every size. The gripper and the album title help to highlight this.

To improve performance and simplify media flow for people with many albums, you could add an option to display just the first album cover found for each artist and clicking on that cover displays all the other albums belonging to that artist.

Thanks for giving us the best songbird add-on!

> Note: If you use linux you may notice really slow scrolling. It looks like the slowness occurs with certain proprietary gfx drivers like the nvidia accelerated graphics drivers used for 3d affects and programs like compiz. This is either an issue with the drivers and cairo or the drivers and mozilla. I don't think there is anything I can change to fix the issue.

Well, that's bad, I'm exactly in that case, it's completely impossible to use it, my computer completely slows down when I try and I've got big troubles to close it without crashing everything... :-( GeForce 8600 GT MXM, Core 2 duo T9300, 4G of Ram

I'm so sad, this is really an add-on that I'd like to have, I hope that somehow the problem will be fixed one day... :-(

Awesome update JohnM. Thank you very much for your work.

I don't know if its just me but I get horrible album artwork resoultion.
Also the performance is kinda poor.

I just want to give you a good information.
With Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex +Nvidia driver 1.80, the media flow run very well.
(It was very very very slow with theNvidia driver 1.77

I figured out most of my problems and I would like to make some suggestions:

1.In this screenshot:
http://img172.imageshack.us/img172/8959/86762411.png
I have several albums displayed, can you make it so that when I have MediaFlow set to any "view" ratio, it adjusts itself to always display the number of albums set in the options?

As of now it cuts off the sides to allow viewing of larger album artwork, and does not display the X amount of albums I have set to the side in the options/performance part of the addon.

2. Can you save the divided line that separates the albums and the list view?
As of now, when I close Songbird and reopen it, the divided line always resets to a certain position at the top. Each time, I have to drag it down a little to enlarge the album artwork.

3. When I switch to a playlist or to a new option in the left side bar; when I switch back to the main "Library" option, MediaFlow has to reload all the album artworks.

Can you make it so there is an option to not reload the artworks each time that happens?

Thanks, this is a really awesome addon !

I like this addon very much and was using it for long. now i hav updated to ver 3.0 but what is written as its feature is a bug to me.

This ver treats as a diff album and shows the album cover again if the artist is different. there are songs by different artists in the same album. this way the album cover gets displayed for each song.

Please do something about this...

I think a good way is to write an options to the addon which lets users tune the addon. people like me who liked the way the addon worked before can change it back in the options.

have a tribute album. Hence there are different artists for each song. But the album name is the same. The mediaflow shows me the same album art for each song (I think its because its different artists). So i have 12 of the same images cause there are 12 songs.

how do I only show 1 instance of the same image?
there should be some kind of a check for this. Do not repeat the same image files.

Pro: Fun navigation, I have a sense of real albums as I page through them.

Cons: My main complaint which drove me to register(something I don't like doing) to write this review was when I updated to v. 3.0 I suddenly got multiple copies(think 12+ for every soundtrack) of the same album art showing up on media flow because the soundtrack CDs were done by different people/groups. My collection includes about 20% soundtracks. This made media flow tedious and almost useless. I am dealing with is by downgrading to v. 2.9.3(or whatever come before v3.0).
  
My other minor complaint is that it Takes about 15 seconds to load album art for my100 albums. This havens every time you change anything such as arrange by artist, or album and not just when you load the program.

Other Thoughts: have an option to disable or better yet selectively enable the “Albums of the same name with different artists are correctly distinguished “ feature would be greatly appreciated. If my experiences are at all reflexive of anyone else I think this will be a huge headache to the users.

Hi JohnM,

Thanks again for the most recent update of MediaFlow, things are smoothing out quite well now. I was wondering though, I think you accidentally read over my question of about 2 months ago. I know it's been a while, but I got reminded now when Songbird installed the most recent update.
quote Bazzz:
"I used your flow.css to change the background colour to white, which worked perfectly, but now I would like to have a dark border around every album art. Some of the artwork have a white background and look bad on the white background of the flow. Is there a css class somewhere where I can add the border code?
Thanks in advance"
In short, my question would be: "could you add a css class for the album art image in your css please?"
I was thinking of something like this:

flow{
  background-color: #FFF;
  overflow: hidden;
  -moz-user-focus: normal;
}
.flow-caption,
.preview-desc{
  color: white !important;
}

.album-art {
  border: solid 1px #000;
}

Thanks in advance for your answer

Hmm, I've had a small mishap with the upgrade from 2.9.3 to 3.0.

Some songs which first were perfectly ordered in the same album are now divided, while still in the same album.
So a single album now shows 3 times, or 20 times.

Even when I edit the metatags to give them all the same album title and albumart, it still has this problem.
It doesn't make the navigating any easier than using the normal list which does work properly.

Probably easy for me to say, but, I truly agree that this is the way mediaflow should have been working from the beginning. The way it is now, if i have a, say a soundtrack album, which has different artists, I would tag the 'artist' name as the same for all of them, with the individual artist in parentheses, or something to that extent.

As opposed to how it was where one had to tag different every darn common album name with the artist name, to keep them separate.

hi johnm,
I have the same albumname for 6songs. They all have the artist tag different and they have the album artist tag left blank. In this case the album art is showing up 6 times. is this the way u intended mediaflow to work...

I think that a user would tag the albumname as same for songs from the same album. But if by any chance the same albumname exist by 2 artists, he would tag the album artist as different. thus mediaflow will be able to distinguish b/w albums with same name but diff artists.

The problem with the current v3 is that say I have 6 songs from a cinema. I would tag the albumname with the name of the cinema. The songs would be sung by diff artists so the artist tag of each song will be diff. now if I leave the albumartist tag blank, mediaflow will show the cover for each song. This is exactly the case with me.

Please tell what u think about this....

Sorry JohnM
I must disagree with the way it works for albums with multiple artists.
I have a few albums that are tributes. And it creates a mess in the MediaFlow.
Seeing 10 of the same covers doesn't work for me.

I want to see albums, not individual songs in the album cause someone else played it.
Can you make this optional since it seems to be split as to what the behavior should be.

Sorry to say this amongst all these good comments, but the extension is unusable on my Ubuntu 8.04 system. The whole Gnome desktop becomes almost unresponsive although Intel Core 2 Due CPU and NVIDIA GeForce 8400M with native NVIDIA driver present. OpenGL works excellent in many other applications.

"If you have multiple tracks with the same album name with different albums it is recognized as belonging to separate albums. If they have the same album artist name then they will be recognized as belonging to the same album. This also fixes this issue where you have multiple artists who have albums named, for example, "Greatest Hits"."

This is ur reply to my post. I just suggested a little different technique. My suggestion is that if we have Greatest Hits album by diff artists, we would tag the albumartist differently.

Mediaflow can look for the albumname as usual and group songs with same albumnames together. If it finds that for the same albumname the albumartist is diff it will recognise that the songs is from diff albums.

I think in this way both groups can be kept happy....

@JohnM: No, the problem is that Songbird's list does sort the tracks properly in the same album.
MediaFlow allocates a different album for each song, but only for a couple of tracks.

@SgtH3nry3: are you sure there is no small case differences in the name of the album and the artist, among all the album's tracks? I had some, just corrected them and MediaFlow would display one cover again

Does anybody know how to downgrade? I downloaded release 2.9.3 and now?
Any help is very much appreciated.

@JohnM
Sorry JohnM, but the new version is not usable and I won't re-tag 100+ albums with multiple artists. And arguing that the bug is a feature does not solve the problems for the users.
I really liked the old MediaFlow and I am very thankful for this tool, but V3 does not reflect the user need.

@Raudi
I think you really should retag your albums, and I will do the same for all mine. Compilations really need proper tagging, hence retaggind, often. This is the only way they can be handled properly by any tool.
Unless JohnM says differently!

Bugger - Do you need to have a specific theme selected for this to work?

Or is it because I'm using Jaunty (again)?

*sigh* Nemmind. it's doing it. I was looking right at it, too. *facepalm*

Hi johnM. really nice work!! I had one suggestion, in the latest release you are mentioning that albums with multiple artists are clearly distinguished. I am from india and i mostly listen to hindi music from hindi movies which more often than not have multiple artists.
So, this creates a problem for me because media flow has one artwork for each and every song which has different artists. you have also mentioned that inorder to group such songs a person has to keep the artist field same. This was not the issue with the previous release,

Can you somehow have an option, like say {check box} group songs with same album name but different artists or something like that..?

Is it possible to have this plugin display the album art in a jewel case? Also, it would be nice to be able to "flip" the art to see the rear cover art - is this possible? Cheers!

JohnM, thanks for showing interest in my css suggestion, I would appreciate it if you could come up with something that results in a bit of colouring freedom.
I noticed that I have the same issue as was mentioned before a zillion times now, and even though I do agree that this is the way MediaFlow should have worked from the start there is one thing that I would like to point out to you. I noticed that your change results in MediaFlow being able to distinguish one album called X from another album called X based on the album artist, which of course is an improvement. However the problem that arises is when an album does NOT have an album artist. Then the album tag is filled, but the album-artist tag is empty (for example because it is VA). Somehow then MediaFlow thinks each of these tracks belongs to a different album. I tested this by entering "Various Artists" as the album tag and then the problem is solved. So what you did is good but I think it is missing one if-statement somewhere. My suggestion would be: if the album tag is the same amongst tracks, and all these tracks have an empty album-artist tag then they should become one album. Now they become several albums. Please have a look if you can see to reproduce the issue and see whether my suggestion is valid.
Kind regards

JohnM - excellent work - I find this latest version fixes most of my issues, most importantly the use of AlbumArtist for compilation albums. Thanks a lot.
But there's always a but... I'm still not sure it's quite right for albums with the same name. I've put in the AlbumArtist (tho I don't think it matters) but when I have my library sorted by Album (which makes most sense) it mixes the tracks up as it seems to sort by Album name and then track number. This causes the MediaFlow display to alternate the different album covers as it thinks it has a different album each time. I'm not even sure if this is anything within your power to change - I'm guessing you are just picking up the data from the library - but I thought I'd mention it. Could you sort by Album and then albumartist and then artist...?
Thanks again - if this is the worst problem I can find it's a great extension.

I dont know if this is true but there appears to be "multiple" versions of MediaFlow in songbird. Not release types or anything like that but when you play a song, change tabs, go to into another mode like purePlayer, and you re open songbird into the default stage in your library, mediaFlow has to reload all the artwork.

If you click on the artist or album in the now playing bar, this reloads mediaFlow into the "older" version which seems to be the one before I minimized.

I don't know if you can understand what I am trying to say but basicly if I am in mediaFlow mode and have my library selected and not a playlist or anything else, then mediaFlow should not reload my artwork or loose the album I was on.

This looks good and is easy to use, but I would like it even more if the action of selecting an album filtered out everything else but the album from the playlist.

Maybe that could be an option?

Hmmm, I can see NOTHING at all when I use this add-on...I dont know what's wrong.

Would not let me edit anything at all through Metadata Editor for my iPod.

Do I need to install iTunes? Wouldn't that automatically sync ALL my files onto my computer which is like 80 GB and its too huge...

Please let me know if you know how to fix this problem. Thanks bunches!

Dear JohnM!
Just wanted to thank you for all your work!
For my linux this plug-in went all the way from unusable and useless to a must have, sweet eye-candy. The performance improved greatly and memory usage decreased. Even though some of it also due to new nvidia drivers. But still you did a great job!

Thank you!

This is truly an incredible add-on. Probably the biggest selling point for Songbird for me (and why I've decided to switch from MediaMonkey).

One tiny little niggling issue though: currently I get better framerates running Crysis than I do with MediaFlow. I'm perfectly sure there is a good explanation for it's performance and was wondering when a fix/work-around would be implemented? I have no idea how all of this works but perhaps running it via OpenGL or DirectX so the graphics card could do the heavy lifting would suffice?

Either way, great job and thanx.

kazemizuhi - have you tried Monkeyflow with mediamonkey ? frame rates are excellent, and there are a number of good features. hopefully an update as well soon

@JohnM

XP Home
AMD X2 3800+ @ 2.3Ghz
2G DDR
7800GTX

Haven't updated my drivers since end of last year/ early this year. I'll go ensure everything is up to date now.

@danhackley

Thanks. Had never heard of it before. I'll give it a try. But I'm still trying to migrate away from MM as I don't like the look compared to Songbird. (still use it for management though)

Excellent add-on, it works very nicely here indeed.

Cosmetically, it's fantastic, but could I request / suggest a useability enhancement? At the moment, I can't see a way to add a selected album to a playlist, or the now playing list. I would suggest that either of these methods would work:

- The ability to drag and drop an album cover to the now playing addon pane.
- Highlight the selected album in the 'filters' view.

Do you think that's possible?

Cheers
Charlie

Hi,
I see the release notes say that "-Albums of the same name with different artists are correctly distinguished"

However, I just downloaded media flow addon (and assume it is the latest), but still see the same album art repeated multiple times.

I have no album artist in the metadata for these songs, and different artists. Only the Album name is same.

Please advise how to resolve this

I'm having problems with Mediaflow2.8 with songbird 0.7.0 on PCLinuxOS

I have several albums entitled Greatest Hits, two of which are by Bob Dylan and the Eurythmics. In total there are 107 tracks associated with these various albums. I have the correct album art set to each album and each one shows up correctly in the bottom left service pane when a track is playing. However when I have Mediaflow enabled all 107 tracks depict the album art for Bob Dylan within the Mediaflow display. I have tried editing the pictures from within the mediaflow display but each time the art gets reset and Bob Dylans Greatest hits is shown for all 107 tracks.

Anyone any idea how to overcome this please?

Regards

Daveleh
Guernsey

Excellent add-on. Highly recommended to anyone with an extensive library!

I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 x64 and have latest Songbird (1.1.2) and your latest Media Flow. However, I'm getting a blank (black) view for Media Flow. I don't even see the CD icons. I've tried the Vinyl update, but that's not working either. Any help would be appreciated. Love the extension!

Jim

@daveleh

What is under the 'album artist' field for these albums? Have you ensured to give each album a different 'album artist'?

Hi kazemizuhi,
I have a bull "album artist" for most of my albums. will this cause the same album to appear multiple times?

Is there any way the album cover could be restricted to look at album name alone and not consider the artist at all?

Sorry... just saw John's update from 17 days ago...

He clearly states this is the intended functionality...

John,
Could I suggest to build in an option in future to link the album art to solely the album name and ignore the artist altogether?

Thanks

Hi kazemizuhi

Thanks for answering.

For each of these albums:

1 - the Artist field contains correct info

2 - the Album Field contains correct info

3 - the Album Artist Name field is blank.

Am I right in thinking that you are suggesting the last field (Album Artist Name) should contain the same info as the Artist field?

Regards

Daveleh

There is a problem where the addon would reload artwork.

Start Songbird. The height of the MediaFlow will always be reset to a certain spot.
By clicking "Library" it reloads my entire Library even though it is highlighted.

I just wanted to say great extension. I have seen a huge increase of performance with this extension. If it was not for this extension I would not be using Songbird!

~r3d

Hi John M

Ok, here's what I have.

I have gone into Library, 3 pane view and selected Greatest Hits in the Album pane. This gives me 127 tracks over 9 Greatest Hits albums by 9 separate artists - Bob Dylan, Eurythmics, Fleetwood Mac, Guns N Roses, Joe Cocker, Mott the Hoople, Neil Young, The Doors, Thin Lizzy.

Playing various tracks from these albums displays the correct album art in the bottom service pane on the left. Right clicking on various tracks and selecting Edit brings up the metadata dialogue box which shows the correct artist, the correct album and the correct album art. Selecting all tracks from one album and doing the same, for instance Eurythmics, tells me that I am editing the metadata for 18 tracks.

When I have mediaflow enabled the 18 Eurythmics tracks display the album art for Bob Dylan. If I now right click on the album cover in the mediaflow pane and select edit I am informed that I am editing the metadata for 127 tracks. All fields are empty except for Album Title which shows Greatest Hits and the primary image location box is empty.

I have created snapshots to clarify here:

http://www.divshare.com/download/7221762-9fe
http://www.divshare.com/download/7221740-9c0
http://www.divshare.com/download/7221741-801
http://www.divshare.com/download/7221742-7cc
http://www.divshare.com/download/7221743-216

Hope that helps

I am very happy to say the the framerate is now pretty good on Ubuntu 9.04 with songbird 1.1.2 - yippie!
Been looking forward to using this addon for a long time and now it seems I can!
Thanks for all the hard work...

Hey JohnM,

Happy Hump Day! Ok, so FYI I fooled around with changing Artist and Album Artist properties on some of my compilations as you advised, and it made no difference if I changed Album Artist to be the same for all songs on the album, I still ended up with the image of the album repeating for every song on the album.

And, this seems to be a change that only happened with the most recent update of Songbird; before this, these same albums displayed just like any other album in MediaFlow; with one cover. So actually I'm wondering what the specific difference is? But if you can create that option to group compilations together in the meta-data, you have one more Yay vote for that here!

Several things changed with the last Songbird update that have regressed the program from my perspective, at least on my OS. Rather that fight with it I just haven't been using it as much. One other thing for example is that my Album Art still keeps vanishing altogether, making finding albums slower, but I don't have time to reload over and over again. Is this problem one that can be addressed within an individual Media View; or is that another Songbird bug, that isn't fixable on your end?

Thanks, John!

Am I the only one who finds that I can't seem to rate songs with MediaFlow displayed?

Reitterating what time-trader said,

For my linux this plug-in went all the way from unusable and useless to a must have, sweet eye-candy. The performance improved greatly and memory usage decreased. [...] you did a great job!

And with what Slate8 posted,

I am very happy to say the the framerate is now pretty good on Ubuntu 9.04 with songbird 1.1.2 - yippie! Been looking forward to using this addon for a long time and now it seems I can! [...]

I must wholeheartedly agree! I started up a recent nightly, downloaded MediaFlow, and my jaw dropped at the ease and speed of using the Album Artwork tools and MediaFlow. I'm impressed. Awesome job!

One random feature request/idea:

Would it be possible to include different layouts/modes/display options? For example, being able to choose from 'Classic' [current] to 'Ring' or 'Slanted' modes? Just an idea I thought I'd share, though I understand accomplishing that would be a huge undertaking. =]

Nice feature on Windows XP it works fine but is a little slow.

Like in iTunes, but a little bit to slow. Performance tweak is necessary.

JohnM: Today I found this : http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/apis/o3d/

For me its sound very interesting. What do you think? Is it something useful for your plugin? I hope so :-)

Regards

Can the media flow be changed from album name to artist name so that way they are in alphabetical order by artists?

is there any 3D optimizations in roadmap? iTunes mediaflow-like view with more complex albumart movement (it rotates on scroll) works absolutely fast and smooth (winxp/GF8600), but songbird mediaflow with less complex image manipulations works slower in many times... its make me sad =( i dont like itunes because its haven't many plugins. And i like in songbird but in itunes mediaflow-like view is so kawai-eyecandy. i want same in songbird! is there any hope?

Mediaflow is the dog's danglies, am really loving this addon, well done guys.

Is there anyway I might get MediaFlow to only display the albums that has album art. I still want all my music in the library but I want MediaFlow to display just the once that has covers.

Is this possible to achieve?

Классная штука этого давно не хватало Ubuntu

Does not work.. The window shows up, but the albums are not there.
My music collection is roughly 3750 songs, but that should not make a difference, right?

It is really a shame this don't run smooth. It would be so nice if it ran like iTunes :D
The only thing I like about iTunes actually is the Cower Flow.

FEATURE REQUEST - It would be nice if there was a setting to move to the "Now Playing" album and not just the "Now Selected" album. Then as songs play through your list the wheel updates the album accordingly. I don't like how I have to click the "Now Playing" song in the list to select it in order for the mediaflow album to display in sync.

Sounds cool, but I can't get it working on Ubuntu Jaunty 64bits :(
Once MediaFlow shows up, no cover art appears (I just get a black background and the buttons) and I get the following error:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [nsIPrefBranch.getCharPref]" nsresult: "0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://mediaflow/content/media-page.js :: MF_onLoad :: line 345" data: no]

Any idea? I'm really looking forward to enjoying your add-on!

I don't if it's possible, but it would be awesome if we could have the ability to "flick" the covers, if you know what I mean. For example, like how the iPhone lets you drag the covers. It would be much appreciated. Thanks for the great addon!

@JohnM:
Thanks for your help.
No "extensions.lastAppVersion". Should I get it [how]?

@JohnM:
I added the extensions.lastAppVersion variable as you suggested in your past comment and it worked fine :)
Thanks for that good work, it reminds me my mp3s are in a total mess!

Muy bueno, gran aporte estare probandolo

Is it Impossible to View this or any other Add-on in fullscreen ? I have been searching for a Add-On which is like Harmony but more custumizable.

Here a video of Harmony: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPwJhKgkGrU

Advantages(of Harmony):

-Fullscreen
-Albumtitles viewable on the back by clicking on the Albumcover
(Which would be a good feature)

Disadvantages(of Harmony):

-too many to list

And to think I thought Windows Media Player 12 was cool...
Horror...<shudder>

would be nice if it would be faster, i don't know much about this, but is it possible to have hardware accelerated graphics in a songbird addon?

Just curious, but this is really slow on my Ubuntu Linux with NVidia OpenGL. I've seen the earlier notes on a fix using xserver-xgl. But I just installed "FoxTab" for Firefox, a tab management add-on for Firefox that is really similar to this. And it screams, performance wise. Any chance of looking into that add-on and seeing how they do it? Just a thought...

Hi JohnM

Is it possible to decrease the step-down/scaling in the subsequent album art from the one in focus? I think that the current scaling may be somewhat drastic, which ends up leaving a lot of dead space as is more evident in some skins. As well as the images on the ends are not easily determined... depending.

To clarify, please see this image:

 http://i40.tinypic.com/avlkia.jpg

As always, thanks for all you do.

The image above obviously is when Mediaflow is in a smaller view. This one is when it is in a much bigger view

http://i42.tinypic.com/1zmzhco.jpg

Not as bad as the smaller view, but you could probably see the benefits as well with a less drastic drop-off, being a fuller media view overall.

JohnM,
The add-on is great, yet, I have one suggestions, maybe they have been already made here.
First is, I fancy a library of roughly 1000 albums and every time Songbird is launched or even the library tab is closed and opened again I have to watch the refreshing of EVERY single album art. This takes some minutes do complete and it messes with the library browsing capabilities. Isn't there anyway of implementing a cached mediaflow data, so the refreshing is done at request, or even only at the inclusion of a new album?

Thanks!

I really like Media Flow you rock dude, but i miss the Drag and Drop feature that "FokkerCharlie" mentions.

Would it be possible to drag an album from the MediaFlow to Moshy's Now Playing List and/or perhaps a playlist?

This add-on is f***** great!

Version: Songbird 1.1.2, Build 1042 (20090331141711), on Ubuntu 9.04

However, there are always little things....................

One of the things is speed: As mentioned before, refreshing is not done from cash, which is should!
Another thing is that once an album is selected from the flow to be played, it starts and songbird will continue with the next song automatically. But, when the next song is from the next album from the flow, the graphics is not updated; not in the 'now selected' (bottom left hand corner) nor in the flow on top. So it could well be that the graphics show Stanley Clarke, while Crosby, Stills & Nash is playing.

Could this be fixed please?

EagleMan.

I don't understand why I can't install this. I am trying to add it to Songbird on my Windows 7 RC and Songbird runs fine but I can't install the media flow extension. It claims it doesn't work with Songbird 1.2 but the notes say it should work up to 1.3.0a

Any ideas?

Btw I have this extension working fine in Vista.

Hello !
To begin with : great add-on !

If I may I've got a request :
Is it possible to change the way of organizing jackets ? I would like to organize them by "Album Artists" names. In fact for the moment same jacket appears many times making this addon useless for me.

Is that possible ??

Thank you anyway, this addon is beautiful.

To illustrate my point : http://sd-14692.dedibox.fr/pepou/images/mediaflow.png

Gostei do Songbird, mas estou tendo problema para instala-lo corretamente pois tenho dificuldade para compreender em ingles. Mas vou continuar tentando. Me ajudem.

I'd like to sugest that when you have a "Various Artists" Album appears only one album image, cause i have a lot of VA (like soundtracks movies) albums and when i open MEDIAFLOW appears one album image per artist so appears a lot of images from the same album.

Thanks and sorry about my bad english.

gomesodair, qual a sua dúvida?

posso ajudá-lo, qualquer dúvida me encaminhe e-mail para cleberson_3c@hotmail.com

Wow, this add on caused my laptop to blue screen. I had just finished updating my album art, I turned cover flow on, it didn't respond for a few seconds and then bam, Blue screen of DEATH.

Very nice, but it shows multiple albums because of album artist for me. Is there anyway to exclude album artist and just group it by artist?

Re-installing didn't change anything. I wonder if perhaps there is something about the shared media library that is conflicting with Win7 and Win Vista?
However not a big deal since I still mainly use Vista right now. It will be a problem if I upgrade to Win7 fully and it doesn't work. But seeing as how no other mention of this issue appears I have to assume its something more unique to my machine.

Continue to great work on this add-on to Songbird :)

JohnM,

I realize that you have not responded to my question, so I am hoping that I did not cross a line with you there. If I did I apologize. I do not even know if my request is technically possible or if I am missing something. I do not know what goes into the implementation, because I am not knowledgeable in these things, but just try to give feedback from a user's perspective.

I work in a field totally foreign to these things, and feel too old and lack the time to try to learn what seems so foreign to me.

Anyway, if those posts were offensive to you in any way, I certainly apologize.

Regards.

Dear JohnM,

It has been a while since I used this plugin since I re-ripped my library to .m4a and Songbird does not yet (but soon...) support the format. However, as I recall this plugin was quite well-done (in fact, I think I liked it better than iTunes MediaFlow :D). If you have done something like this already and I missed it I apologize, but I will go forth with my suggestion assuming you have not:

Would it be possible to place the album artwork on a 3D (or at least 3D-imitating) render or image of a standard CD jewel case? As is, the album art looks amazing when thumbing through your collection, but I think it could look even better with this enhancement...

I assume such a feature could get demanding on hardware, especially if, like me, one has every piece of album artwork in HD... but still, I think it would add a nice touch of depth to the virtual library.

Thanks for considering, and keep up the good work :)

Dear JohnM.

I have found a potential problem with the addon, although I am sure it has been posted more than a thousand times I will post it here again.
As a house fan, I love compilation albums. The problem is that every single number in the same album has it's own thumbnail.

I think it's due to the various artist names, is it possible to fix this?
What I think the best solution would be, is to only apply one thumbnail per album.

Also, an nice suggestion would be drag support for scrolling.
This could also be benificial for touchscreen devices, I can already imagine using Songbird and MediaFlow on a mobile internet device or smartphone! ;)

Please issue a compatibility fix to make MediaFlow work with Songbird 1.2.0 asap. Thanks!

I am using Songbird on an Apple Mac Mini running OS X Tiger 10.4.11 (Intel Core Duo 1 based from 2006) and MediaFlow was working just fine with it until I upgraded to Songbird 1.20 Please do it ASAP!

I just get a black screen with this app. I was looking forward to it, it seemed very cool, but it just doesn't work. Using Ubuntu 9.04 Songbird 1.2.0... anything else I need to do to make it work?

Is there a way to force SongBird to add a pic in the album folder as its cover instead of displaying "drag album cover"?
like folder.jpg or cover.jpg

The problem is that i have a huge library of albums and each of them has its album cover as folder.jpg inside the album's folder..and i noticed that SB doesn't recognize either names, folder or cover, to use it as an album art unlike many major media player like Rhythmbox, Amarok or even MS Windows MP.

i'm also getting the black screen, after having to reinstall windows. anyone have a fix for that? i figure it must be fairly common. songbird w/out this addon aint the songbird i know.

these are the errors i get after clearing the old list then immediately rechecking after clicking view-->mediaflow.

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED) [nsIPrefBranch.getCharPref]" nsresult: "0x8000ffff (NS_ERROR_UNEXPECTED)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://mediaflow/content/media-page.js :: MF_onLoad :: line 345" data: no]

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80004002 (NS_NOINTERFACE) [nsISupports.QueryInterface]" nsresult: "0x80004002 (NS_NOINTERFACE)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://songbird/content/bindings/playlist.xml :: destroy :: line 632" data: no]

does that mean something to do w/ the chrome skin?? i dl'd it but i dont have it active.