In addition to user requested features, v3.0 Beta 2 and Beta 3 includes a new feature we have been working on for some time now... Automatic CD Ripping to MP3!

Please let us know what you think and report any bugs by replying to this post.


v3.0 Final is now available for download:
http://www.audiosoft.net/download.htm

List of changes over v3.0 Beta 2:

-Fixed CD Ripper bugs
-added button to set an Artist Name for all tracks in CD Ripper
-added "Compilation Album" checkbox to CD Ripper.

List of Beta 2 changes over v3.0 Beta 1:

-added Fast Direct CD to MP3 Ripping with automatic CDDB lookup, ID3 tagging, user selectable bitrate/quality, album cover download, and eJukebox database insertion. Plus support for using your own Album Image if you want the image saved to the ID3 tag for all the tracks. You can open the CD Ripper window from the database manager or the Special menu.

Other changes:

-added Bookmark menu to Now Playing menu

-added option to disable songlist title animation

-added support for Playlist files without full mp3 file paths

-eJukebox now displays the current song title in taskbar and traybar

-album options button has returned

-added option to disable album image tiling in songlist background

-fixed "New Mp3. Adding to Database..." getting stuck - eJukebox now adds songs played in winamp immediately

- eJukebox will now add any file (no matter what extension) played in Winamp to the eJukebox's database automatically

-added option to "Show All Genres" or "Show Only My Genres" on Editor's Genre List

Hé bien! It seems you have done a lot of work!
I'm impatient to try the new CD ripping feature...
Thanks.

Pirk

Beta 2 Bugs:

- If you click on the button "Go" without put any address in the field "http://" you have a message box "Run-time error 53: File not found: C:/Program files/eJukebox/Temp.bmp" + a GENERAL CRASH of eJ!

- During the "looking up album image" procedure, if none image found OR none internet active connection you have the message box "Error #5 Invalid procedure call or argument".

In spite of everything I have been able to rip a CD with an automatic CDDB look up (Does it use the free cddb database or allmusic.com datas?) and an image automatically downloaded, not the right one but I have kept it to continue the test of the ripper.

But after the extraction complete, (all seems to be OK concerning the ripping stage!) the album image is NOT visible in the eJ lists even though it was visible in the ripper window. Tag&rename report none image in these files.
I have not yet tested the solution with a local image.


Requested features:

- A way to apply the same artist name (typing it only once like for the album field) for all the CD titles when you fill fields manually. You can keep multi-artists only in case of compilation albums.

- A way to choose more freely the construction of file names and folder including the ability to add some user defined text print like . - or anything else.
For example: C:/Mp3/<Artist> - <Year> - <Album>/<Track number>. <Title>
(< > = ID3 values)
(/ = back slash, because it is not visible in this forum...)

- Addition of the .jpeg as default images extension type in addition to .gif .jpg .bmp when you doing a local image search. This simply to be able to see the .jpeg images which may exist in the folders.

- Perhaps also the memory of CDDB datas for already inserted CD, but I think it's not the most important thing.


This is all that I noticed during my first test!

Also, what kind of encoder do you use in this tool? I think LAME 2.93.1 is the best one.

Otherwise, I believe you are the first ones who had made a CD ripping tool with at the same time an album image support AND potential of good CD ripping quality, thank you very much!

Pirk

Thank you very much for the bug report.
We have released v3.0 Beta 3 (download above) to fix these bugs.

It uses FreeDB.org for the CDDB CD info lookup and the latest version of LAME for the encoding.

Thank you again to be so responsive, all the corrections are OK!

- The menu "MP3 Encoder Settings" always return to its default values. Changes are valid only once, obligate you to reset them each time you open the CD ripper.
Can you memorise the user settings?

Some features I have mentioned before that I would love to see in v3.0

The possibility to have tags with more than one capitalized letter. DJ, Notorious B.I.G., XXX Soundtrack are all examples when eJ changes the capitalization in the tags

The scrolling of the title in the title bar and traybar. The title is included in b2, but the eJ info takes up too much space and I can only see the first few letter of the song playing. Why not shorten it to
eJ: artist - track name

I don't like the titles under Album view to be scrolled, but would still like the artist to be shown. Could an option for this be possible?

A simple cd player (not a ripper) that should be accesible through kiosk mode. Quite common that someone brings a cd and wants to play it.

The more options for kiosk mode, but I think that wish is on its way in the final version.

Maybe a bit more complicated, but wrote to you about the tag problem. The possibility to turn of the album lookup function for my single tracks. Seems to be that the program looks up track info from the net when my single tracks are playing and adds the album info to the track. (it doesn't write it directly to the tag, but its still stored in eJukebox.
Might not be a big deal, but it creates a mess. In an artist I want the album to be named only if I have the whole album. As it is now there can be a few different albums under the artist view, while I might only have one of the albums and a few single tracks.
I have removed all album info from the id3 tags.

Thanks a lot,

Jacob
jlo@yacobo.com

New Bugs found in Beta 3:

- Preview file play in eJukebox doesn't work any more for *ALL* my Mp3s even though I could preview most of my songs in the last non-beta version. I don't know if that have something to do with a new feature of the latests Beta versions?

- The images added by the CD ripper are now visibles in eJ panels, but they are still invisibles in Tag&Rename, even if T&R report there are images in these files.

Pirk

Pirk,

We did not change anything related to the preview play. For some reason Windows Media Player, which is what eJukebox uses for the preview play, sometimes does not work correctly. Usually restarting eJukebox will fix this, sometimes a computer restart may be needed.

We are not sure why this is happening but we think it is only occurring for users who have the latest version of Media Player - v9 installed.


Now in regards to the CD Ripper images not showing up in tag & rename - the eJukebox ripper does not save the image to the ID3 tag unless you set a local or internet image file. Otherwise the eJukebox looked up image is only used and is not saved to the tag.

We originally tried to have the eJukebox looked up images saved to the image tag from the ripper but unfortunately we could not get the images to come out looking good. This is because the eJukebox images are GIFs and have transparent borders and saving them to JPG for the ID3 image tag turns the transparent pixels to white pixels. Which really degrades the quality to an unacceptable level when the images are sized.

We cannot save GIFs to the ID3 image tag because we can only have one image format for saving ID3 images - which must be JPG because it allows your user added images to have more than 256 colors.

Also, we have updated the Ripper to save the encoder settings. And we plan on adding the other features/fixes mentioned in this and the other posts. However, since the last official eJukebox release is now over a month old...we feel that we should release v3.0 this weekend/early next week so that users who do not frequent the forums can use the new features. Allot of new features/fixes will be coming in the weeks after v3.0 is released.

Actually, even if I restart eJukebox or even my computer, preview play does not work AT ALL for none of my files. That is what I want to report to you.
But you are right, I have Media Player v9 installed. Furthermore, recently a program I have installed required an new update of Media Player v9, without which it refuse to start. Maybe the new update maked worse the problem...
So I see that actually the only way is to uninstall Media Player v9 (Is it possible as I can't see any uninstallation program?), my new program (not a very good program) and put back an old version of media player or else to not use the preview play in eJ. It's a bit pity that programs interfere.

Hi Pirk,

We are going to try and find a solution to the Windows Media problem and check into the ID3 tag images.

It was not our intention to make it sound like user posts were holding the v3.0 release back...this is not the case at all, we really appreciate everyones posts....We just want everyone to know that v3.0 will be out soon and that some unresolved issues discussed in the forums will be addressed in new releases following soon after v3.0.

Hi eJ Team,

Sorry,
Sometimes, I have the impression I'm asking too much of you, you are so receptive that I'm a bit afraid to bother you (and the others users) with all my features requests and my suspicions about bugs. But if you tell me that is not the case, I am happy you appreciate my (and the others!) reports. It's a real pleasure to participate at the evolution of your great program. For once that someboby make a program looking really in the opinion of all the users...

Thank you very much.

Pirk

I also lost the ability to preveiw any of my mp3s after loading b3. I am also using Media Player 9 on XP. I re-upgraded my version BACK to b1 and the preview is back! There must be a change in how previews are handled between b1 and b3. Thought you would like to know.
----Update----
Soon it stopped working in b1 as well. Restarting ejubox fixes it...for a while. I can preview 8 or ten songs and then poof, unable to preveiw. In b3 it never worked.

Thanks for a fine product overall. About to buy a second copy for the living room!
Don

You are right Dyno Don,
I have replaced b3 by b2 and the preview is back for my too!
So it's only from the LATEST BETA 3 that the preview doesn't work AT ALL.
But as you say, there is still the other problem between Media Player 9 and eJ.

Thanks for your report.

Pirk

Pirk or Dyno Don,

Can either of you please try reinstalling beta3 over beta2 and see if the preview still works and then let us know. We do not see how Beta 3 could effect the preview play any differently than Beta2. The preview play in Beta 3 is currently working on our 2 test systems with Windows Media 9. Maybe a reinstall of Beta3 is what was actually needed?

Thank you for your help.

No no, if I reinstall beta3 over beta2 the preview doesn't works at all again. The difference is evident on my computer.

Pirk

Pirk,

Could you try upgrading to a new version of beta 3 that we have just put up: http://audiosoft.net/ej2upgrade.exe

This beta 3 also has:
-added option on editor to delete all files found in the same folder from the database
-corrected editors genre button's tooltip
-Cd Ripper now saves encoder settings

Most importantly please let us know if it also fixes the Preview Problem. Thank you.

OK I will test the new beta (as sooner as possible because at the moment I must to see my family!)


Otherwise, I haved made my own tests:

Media Player 9 seems to doesn't like big ID3 images:

I have checked the songs for which the preview doesn't works in Beta2 (not a lot since I have replaced my mp3s by clean backup copys in which I have put locals ID3 images) and I noticed these songs (2 albums) have some too big ID3 images: 360 Ko for an album and 489 Ko for the other!
I have put back a resized image (17Ko) in these files but still doesn't works. I think too big images corrupt the file ID3 infos. What is the maximum size for an ID3 image?

I believe that if I use the eJukebox editor then ID3 images are automatically resized, but am not sure? Most of my local images take up more or less 25 Ko.


Dyno Don,

I don't know if this is the only problem concerning Media Player 9 but maybe also you put your own images in some of your mp3s?


Pirk

I don't know what you have changed in this new version of Beta3, but now the preview WORKS as well as the Beta2. I can preview all my mp3s excepted those I have corrupted with a too big image (only 2 albums).

Thanks.

Pirk

In fact I have 10 albums corrupted by some ID3 images too larges in the tags. I don't know precisely the limit, but according to my observations:
images < 125Ko = OK
images > 270Ko = too large --> file corruption

These too larges images come from my scanner! When I can't find any image on internet, I scan directly the cover of the CD...

There is no problem in Winamp but in Media Player (only v9?) these files can't be played.

Pirk

It works for me also. Tried to preview one file after fresh boot. No go. Tried new upgrade. Presto! Thanks.

T answer anther question. Yes I did insert my own images...back in 2.99r5. Corrupted most of them. Overwrote the first 8 seconds of every song. I tried it once on one album with beta1, still corrupted the songs, so I decided to wait until 3 final. Is it fixed? I'll try again if you like.

Don

Hello Audiosoft,

Have you fixed the problem of file corruption (unable to preview in media player) when a too large ID3 image is inserted?

Pirk

Pirk,

We have fixed it for the most part but are still working on it. As you know, the images are saved to the tag in JPEG format so they are automatically compressed. No modification to the original image is made except for the compression. So when you scan your Album images in...use 300dpi or lower and you should be fine. When you use higher scan rates it makes the image unnecessarily huge in dimension and in turn file size, which causes it to be unreadable by Windows Media Player and the preview. The images you use should be no larger than 800x600.

Thanks for the advices about scanned images.
In fact I haved these huge images since a long time, but before I used it only in a Winamp plug-in which simply display the image file present in the same directory as the mp3s...whitout any problem.
Later, when I started to use eJukebox, I have put these images in the ID3 tags whitout to take care of their size...damned!

Pirk