Video Chart Hits

[wwwombat]

Been away for a while... knocking the house down (done) and awaiting rebuild means I'm without Internet connection in my temporary abode at the moment other than for my iPad which doesn't want to surf the freebox website without error (don't know why - anyone else with an iPad tried and had success) or work (which blocks the website under the categorisation of "Entertainment;Audio/Video Clips"). Currently posting this at a friend's place.

I've previously written about the trouble I've had with getting the VIDEO section of CHART HITS to work like the audio section and how I was non-plussed why only certain videos were being shown on these pages. One day these pages did start working somewhat like I wanted. I originally thought this was a particular (beta) version and I managed to eradicate it by installing other versions over it.

Seems that was all a furphy. I have to 'fess up and say that, for whatever reason, I got into the habit of removing the videos.cvr and videos.rec files from the E-Touch directory before regenerating the audio library (in which I had the CLEAR boxes ticked on the 3 GENERATE libraries in the ADVANCED section) and then generating the video section later.

Turns out if I exit Config8.exe and re-enter it and once again generate the video section then the VIDEO section of the CHART HITS now sorta works. Note it does not seem to work if I generate the video section twice in the first iteration - I must exit it and regenerate the video bit a second time. I see I now have what appear to be identical videos.cvr/cvx and videos.rec/rex in both cases but of course I don't know why this works or why it doesn't work when I do the first double-video generate... it's just the only consistent way I can get it to work.

Now, why it'd be interesting to hear thoughts on the above, I do still have a few idiosyncrasies with the VIDEO CHART HITS which I wonder if they called be looked at (and my best guess as to why they may be occurring). Please be aware during all of the discussion of the below foibles, the corresponding AUDIO CHART HITS section for the same song/monthly chart works fine. Also please be aware that all of my audio/video files are named the same (title_track artist) except for the obvious .mp3/.avi/.avi.tag suffixes and internally both the audio and video files are identically tagged with respect to title, track artist, album, album artist, year and genre - I checked, checked and checked again! Finally I do have "EXACT MATCH ON DECADES" set because I need it to definitively point to the track that the chart references (unlike the album display which knows what should be selected, the chart hits seems to rely on the results of a search and I think, without exact match, only the first couple of words of title/track artist are used to return a hit which can sometimes (admittely rarely in percentage terms) be erroneous - try explaining that to a person who just wants to hear the song that actually selected.)

In case it matters, the following applies to E-Touch 8.0.03 beta 10.

Here's some concerns:-

1) I had the same problem way back when with the audio section (now corrected by EXACT MATCH ON DECADES) but the video chart hit for ARIA OCT 2000 for Madonna - Music brings up the cover and video for Britney Spears featuring Madonna - Me Against The Music. I suspect EXACT MATCH ON DECADES is either NOT in force for the VIDEO lookup and I'd like it to be, or it probably is but Madonna - Music still returns this as a searchable hit (but then why does the audio one find the correct version?)

2) A few VIDEO CHART HITS that I do know I also have the corresponding music video for are Chris Brown - Yeah 3X, Prince - 1999 and Steps - 5, 6, 7, 8. These show in audio but not video. I suspect two different bits of codes for audio & video lookup and the video one doesn't like numbers.

3) A recent hit Snoop Dogg & Wiz Khalifa featuring Bruno Mars - Young, Wild & Free shows in audio CHART HITS but not video CHART HITS even though I have them both. I do NOT suspect the ampersand here (a regular repeat offender in past searches) but rather the length of the artist field which is 45 in this case. In another video page close by we reference "LMFAO featuring Lauren Bennett & GoonRock" which still has the ampersand but comes in at 41 characters. It IS selectable in both audio/video flavours unlike the Snoop Dogg which permits audio selection but not video selection.

4) Britney Spears - ...Baby One More Time appears in the ARIA charts for March to May 1999. In March/April it is in position number one and the video selection is not available, in April it is in position 4 and IS selectable.... all are spelt/tagged/chart-specified the same way and, of course as usual, the audio section works fine. I don't know why this is other than some vague recollection aeons ago similarly in audioland about position 1 being treated somehow differently.

5) Coldplay - Yellow. ARIA charts March 2001. Again video not selectable... I just don't get this one at all... the tag looks right, it's selectable and playable by the normal video album section. Other 1-name artist/title (with the exception of the numerics above) seem to work. This one just won't show up. With this and other errors are there any sort of debug options I can specify to see what sort of query code is being generated and ultimately not satisfied?

And now just a perennial pet peeve I'm always hopeful of being fixed. This applies to both audio and video selection in all areas (when the single track is displayed for selection)

6) If the Artist (haven't checked for song title) has either a period(.) or comma(,) in it i.e. R.E.M., A.B. Logic, or Living End, The (yes... I've always hardcoded my filenames/tags with the " ,The" at the end instead of letting E-Touch do it anything to it) then it always shows up in the ALSO AVAILABLE section. Not a world-stopper but it looks untidy.

Other than that, it's getting more towards what I desire in a jukebox (although I'd still like more focus on Album Artist but that's a subject for another day)... the jukebox is currently housed at one of my brother's places (I've called in many favours to store all my stuff whilst the house is being rebuilt) and by all accounts it's getting a good and enjoyable workout.

[Barcrest]

Some interesting issues there and a nice breakdown of what you are experiencing, I will take alook at these issues and see if i can see what is happening. I am also in the process of moving and as such things are a bit up in the air for myself too right now. Hopefully some of these will be straight forward to fix and I can get a beta out by the weekend.

[wwwombat]

Well... the good news is a day or two after my previous post I was able to access these forums via my iPad so I don't know what was going on there.

Haven't downloaded any fresh betas yet (nor aware that they will address the (mostly) video-related problems listed above) as my download capability is restricted ATM as stated before, but I have a few more problems and questions to add to the pile of all descriptions. I don't know how you track or tackle (or ignore) these bugs/requests but I figure it can't hurt to ask and hope that you get around to it sometime.

1) When loading a playlist and choosing "ADD ALL TO QUEUE" any track with either a comma in the track artists or track title field will NOT get added to the queue. This happens for both audio and video playlists and I assume no one mentioned it before because they don't notice a song or two missing from a playlist of a 100+ or so (or they don't name/tag files like I do)

Again I presume I'm a victim of the "comma delimiter" problem since I pre-tag and filename write my tracks with the ", The" post-pended on artists where I deem it a necessary part of the band name. Even though I could laboriously rename/retag all of my files to not do this (and I do NOT plan to) a comma can easily creep in anywhere, any time not only in other artist names (like Earth, Wind & Fire for example) but would feature fairly prevalently in track titles.

There is no issue selecting or playing the song from the other usual screens.

2) I have a lot of playlists. It seems first time in on "LOAD PLAYLIST" I have to hit the down button to laboriously go down one playlist item at a item instead of a more-desirable one page at a time. Once the playlist is loaded its paging also only goes forward one line at a time (instead of a more-relevant page IMHO as you do on other pages like HOT HITS and HISTORY). Strangely the second time into the load playlist function a "page forward" seems to jump you down to somewhere around the playlist you loaded the first time (it's not top of the "page" but close). I don't see any "jump" difference in displaying the contents of the playlist (it's still down one line at a time)

3) One really strange thing with one (and only one) video tag so far that may also be comma-delimiter related but in conjunction with a period (as I have other videos with the afore-mentioned ", The" which display correctly. The top of the tag file in this particular reads:

<NonMP3Tag>
   <Artist>Lipps, Inc.</Artist>
   <Title>Funkytown</Title>
   <Album>Lipps, Inc.</Album>
   <Band>Lipps, Inc.</Band>
etc.

but the cover display in E-Touch shows the Artist as "L" and the Album as "Lipps, Inc" (no trailing period) and when selecting the cover to go to the sole track display it shows the Track Artist as "L" and the Track Title as "Funkytown Lipps, Inc." The audio file version however shows correctly but I course I don't get the VIDEO AVAILABLE option showing since the tags don't match.

The song is perfectly selectable and playable still for both audio and video versions.

4) I had occasion to do a fresh windows install on my machine recently and, of course, reinstalled E-Touch and I then went into the options to set everything up again to my desires. On the SECURITY SETTINGS tab the "Pin (Albums)" option is unselectable (it's "greyed" out) and therefore if you turn security on, every time you press the ALBUMS buttons you get asked for your PIN... it doesn't matter whether you enter a valid or invalid one (or just press ENTER) you'll get to the correct page but it is annoying. I found out it's line 9  (to be set to 0 if you want it off) in pin_settings.ini in the root install folder but whilst that turns it off it still doesn't ungrey the option.

I'm further confused because the fresh install appears to have ALSO entered registry keys under the "E-Touch 7" branch (even though it's version 8 I'm installing) and I may have thought the value "Show_Keypad_Entry_Album" may have be used (or missing) but it was there and already set to 0.

So now I'm also completely confused about when registry entries are used and when *.ini files are used (when is handy to know sometimes when I've set an option on and can't correct it through the program if the button has gone off-screen or something similar).

5) By default my FILTER button goes to BY GENRE and I have placed suitable pictures in the Genres folder to match all of my categories. On first entry the ALL ALBUMS first genre does NOT display a picture (even though I have an "All Albums.jpg" in the folder). Once there if I press on the other filters of BY ARTIST, BY YEAR, or EVEN BY GENRE again the picture IS displayed. Thereafter every time I enter the FILTER option again (until shutdown restart of E-Tocuh obviously) it IS displayed.

6) I originally set the "Pin (Clear Queue)" option on erroneously thinking that the delegate password could activate it but of course, when i tried it with the delegate password the keypad popped up but the queue didn't clear. In retrospect, since it obviously sits on the left-hand side of that option page it is an administrator function. BUT.... when I try to do the CLEAR QUEUE and correctly put in the Admin PIN it still DOESN'T clear the queue.

(My temporary answer is to not PIN the "Clear Queue" option and then the admin password (which I set on MORE OPTIONS) CAN clear the queue from the QUEUE tab in there and possibly think about putting on a delegate option for the "ENABLE QUEUE SETTINGS so they can do it too)

7) What's the SET QUEUE READ ONLY option for on the QUEUE SETTINGS page. Some other post lead me to believe that maybe the position of queue items could be rearranged (maybe lifting a song up a position or two).... as far as I can see, setting this takes away the SHUFFLE QUEUE and CLEAR QUEUE buttons from the QUEUE page. Is that correct?


I can't for the life of me figure out how to turn songfacts off unless I've deleted or renamed songfacts.dat before I start the program. If there is an option for it in the config I haven't been able to find it yet.

9) I'd love to get into some skinning even if it is just slightly adjusting one of my favourite skins on one or two pages. One thing I'd really like to do (upon request of my family and friends) is to, on the track display, display the YEAR of the track. But I don't know if that information, on a track level, is available to me. Empirically it seems that whatever the first track is on an album's listing sets both the "genre" and the "year" of the album which may be true for what most of you guys do but I group my artist track selections into "Greatest Hits" albums and technically the year and even the genre of the individual tracks can differ. This would also apply to Various Artists of the form that are not released yearly (i.e. moreso a "Greatest Pub Hits" or "One-Hit Wonders" album... yes, the album was released in 2012 but each individual track might be 1976, 1982, 1973 etc. and the genres differ).... what variable can or can't I use on each screen (or can more be made available)

10) Not a problem but a request. Please, please, please whoever is responsible for the SxxLxxS_gif skin can we please have a widescreen version (prefeably 1920 x 1080 but I'll take anything). I'd like to have widescreen versions of all of the skins but this is the main and desireable one at the moment and there are a fair few of us out here that run E-Touch on widescreen, high-resolution monitors.

At the moment I'm sticking with the 1024 x 768 version with the FULL SCREEN MODE option on but it looks... well... stretched and I wouldn't mind the extra resolution to possibly cram more covers on.

Apologies if the post overwhelms you...

[wwwombat]

3 months on and I decided to download and retest all of the above conditions with the latest beta available (8005-beta17) so we've been through some mine versioning and a lot of betas since the initial post.

With the exception of item 2 from the first set (and, to be fair, I didn't retest item 4 from the second set) all of the remaining "errors" still seem to exist.

How can I ensure that these still remain (if they ever made it) on some universal bug list to be acknowledged (surely I can't be the only one experiencing them) and hopefully looked at and corrected?

I'm hopeful that anything potentially involving a delimiter/punctuation can be corrected with relevant ease at least and make a future forthcoming beta soon. I'm certainly surprised that no one else appears to have brought up the missing playlist items if a comma is involved in the name (or more probably just didn't notice its omission)... I'd rather tie up all of the existing bugs before rushing into new features.

[Barcrest]

7. Stops you moving songs around the queue. Without that set then you can click on songs and move them up and down the queue or play them straight away.

8. Songfacts can be disabled by removing the dat file.

9. Year by track isn't currently supported.

10. You need to ask Hitbig about the SxxLxxS skin, he created it.

[Hitbig]

10) Not a problem but a request. Please, please, please whoever is responsible for the SxxLxxS_gif skin can we please have a widescreen version (prefeably 1920 x 1080 but I'll take anything). I'd like to have widescreen versions of all of the skins but this is the main and desireable one at the moment and there are a fair few of us out here that run E-Touch on widescreen, high-resolution monitors.

At the moment I'm sticking with the 1024 x 768 version with the FULL SCREEN MODE option on but it looks... well... stretched and I wouldn't mind the extra resolution to possibly cram more covers on.

If I only had a widescreen...... until I buy a big screen I can't make the conversion.....I'd love to....running out of resources $$$$$...
Let you know...one of these years... You never know....I could win the lottery....

Seriouly, I just have a 1280x1024 resolution that's why I can't at the moment....
Sorry.

[Barcrest]

10) Not a problem but a request. Please, please, please whoever is responsible for the SxxLxxS_gif skin can we please have a widescreen version (prefeably 1920 x 1080 but I'll take anything). I'd like to have widescreen versions of all of the skins but this is the main and desireable one at the moment and there are a fair few of us out here that run E-Touch on widescreen, high-resolution monitors.

At the moment I'm sticking with the 1024 x 768 version with the FULL SCREEN MODE option on but it looks... well... stretched and I wouldn't mind the extra resolution to possibly cram more covers on.

If I only had a widescreen...... until I buy a big screen I can't make the conversion.....I'd love to....running out of resources $$$$$...
Let you know...one of these years... You never know....I could win the lottery....

Seriouly, I just have a 1280x1024 resolution that's why I can't at the moment....
Sorry.

Maybe he can throw enough $$'s your way to get you a new screen to make it LOL