XXHighEnd

It's a pleasure to announce the first version (all still beta :)) with a "Library" function;
Although it took a lot of effort to present what is there now, it really just is a beginning with a lot more to come. Also, please note it is not tested upon any of "your" libraries, and it will be unavoideable currently to have some issues in various areas.

One of the major reasons for issues as such, is that I just wanted you to have this first version, while it is up to, say, creativity to extend it. This means that the basis for rather infinit extension is in there, but the withgoing complexity had to be dealt with too. So currently it's a kind of mixture from possibilities and beneficial features.

The possibly most important feature might be that everything and all can be combined. This is in today's functionalities, but also with future gadgets. Example :
The Library Area contains search results. No matter how they came about, you can select them and load then into the Playlist Aera (Load button). But, when the result (-item) is coincidentally an Album, all the tracks of the Album are loaded. On the other hand, when the result consists of Albums, you should be able to "active search" by means of Album Name (the more letters you enter, the more close you come to the Album Name you want). This is what the Library Area does, but it's also a difficult task to program, depending on the result list in there.
For future versions think of Keywords defined by yourself and attached to Albums and Tracks by you, working out the same.

Currently, many of the kind of Search Criteria depend for workability on the size of the images (coverart) you selected. Start small. The larger the image sizes, the longer it takes to present the results. With the default right after getting this version, however, all works okay for the largest size.

The speed (or better, slowlyness :yes:) is one of the other "fast implementation" issues. I'm fairly sure it can be improved to a certain extend. Note though that exactly these kind of matters are very time consuming. So not now.


The reason behind the Library Area -besides being able to find the music- is to enable a kind of random selection of all the material we have. This goes from selecting all tracks longer than e.g. 7 minutes via selecting all with "sun" in them, to each second track of the Albums we have. Or a combination of that. It can be quite reveiling. Selecting tracks with "blues" in them 95% of cases gives songs about (the) blues, while "guitar" presents tracks most often emphasized on the guitar as an instrument, like  "bass" might give you an interesting evening of music with a "bass" as the main instrument, while "drums" actually does not bring what you expect from it, unless you have recordings of chinese drums and like those. "Remix" will give you dance or hiphop and the like ...

Enough said. It's all obvious once you get the hang of it (and start to learn your own collection).
However, take your time on reading the ToolTips on the various controls underneath the Library Area. They eleborate a bit on how to set things to your conveniency.


Some other matters :

First of all, nothing happened on the issues which arose at version 0.9k, let alone the Bug List. This includes the possible degraded sound on Engine#1 since that version, as it was reported. However, for that Engine things may have changed again unintendently.

Then, XXHighEnd is now more oriented towards 640x480 resolution. You can still drag it all away to your likings, but since HTPC screens might not be larger than this, it should be kind of workable at this resolution (size).

As you can see below, coverart may now be shown as large as it can fit on your screen, which is done by means of
a. the height of the form
b. the width of the left-bottom area.
The latter is done by means of a draggable "splitbar" which is at the position of the mouse pointer as shown in the bottom picture below. You catch the splitbar when the mouse pointer changes into two small bars with arrows to the left and right (which could not be caught by the image copy program which was used here).
Since the images need to remain square, its the combination of both height of the form and position of the split bar which determines the size of the image.

During playing with - and exploring things, do not uncheck the Test Checkbox as you can see in the pictures below. It will prevent from outputting more than 100 items in the result list as shown in the Library Area. That's always much less than the 50,000 you might have with choosing a too large image size nothing can cope with.

Get yourself familair with when - and when not things change in the Library Area. Example : changing the Picture Size (as per the slider in the right bottom) only has effect after pressing Search again; there's more of these things.

Do not forget that within the Library Area you can actively search (by just typing) in the items (from left to right), which usually is an Album Name, but which can be different once you check the Grp checkbox. When you do that indeed, do not forget to select the "View Setting" as per the combox at the right and set that to OneLine/Group.
Also, when nothing happens at the "just typing" as mentioned above, just click onto the Library Area to make it active.

Lastly, at selecting the items from the result (by Click, ctrl-Click, cltrl-shift-Click as usual in Windows), get familiar with pressing the Load button in order to load the items in the Playlist Area for Playback (when one item represents an Album, all the tracks from the Album are loaded).
Cue Files (the large WAVs) can be loaded, but the individual files are not being extracted in this version (like dragging a large WAV from Explorer does since version 0.9k).

Important : The zip at the bottom now contains an additional nopicture.png. This is for showing explicitly there was no coverart found for the Album concerned (see last screen copy below the second picture at the right with the red cross, with the text "Akoest" just visible). So do not forget to include this file in your current XXHighEnd folder, or otherwise search results will be incomplete (searching stops at locating this file while it's not there).

Even more important : Currently some raw intelligence is applied in separating Artist Names from Album Names, while all includes your structure applied (also see Most convenient Storage Structure ? (http://www.phasure.com/index.php?topic=67.0)). Please note that your deviations from the applied intelligence here will be the cause of Search Results not showing the proper data, when the Grp checkbox is checked and the View Settings have been set to "OneLine/Group". Better solutions for this will grow in time. Do not hesitate though to show your setup when things are not working out.
See, as an example, the one but last screen copy below and the Ben Harper albums; the first two are stored in a Ben Harper folder, while the next two are stored at the one-higher level, the Ben Harper determined by the part before the " - " as you can see it in the folder name (that's what it is). If you have that differently, things currently won't work. But please tell what you have then.


Anything else ? probably yes. If so, it will be added here later.



PS: The zip to download is 0.9la which is right at the bottom of this post. It replaces 0.9l which has been there for 30 minutes and which was not the latest version. It was downloaded by one person already ...