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New trial user: my feedback
Padieu - 10-27-2003 at 02:52 PM

Hello to all

I'm a mp3 freak, and pretty pround of my small 3500+ MP3 collection.
I 'm between foobar and winamp5 to play them,connected to a big Lyrics server to display lyrics, and was searching for a good mp3 Jukebox, standalone or winamp plugin.
I've tried them all :
MusicMatch: piece of crap, no customizable at all, nothing to play your music your way.
Media Jukebox: far behind, highly customizable, with saved dynamic playlist, but a bit dirty, the skining engine is badly coded, ....
and then I found this one: eJukebox
I immediatly thought I had at last found the piece of software I was missing:
Lot of ideas/concepts/functionalities are really matching my needs, and are well thought:
- the navigation by cover
- the 'next 'lookup
- the coverart download
- the Navigation Concept
- the 'Popular' features
- ..
But what the ** is this *** GUI ??!
On a TV , it might be cool , but on a PC with a 1280*1024 screen, it's awfull !
Or do I understand nothing, and does this program is intended to be used only on a TV via a HTPC ?????

If this program is really intended to be used on a 'regular' pc, thereis work to do !!!!
Men, I wouldn't even release in 0.1 prebeta by myself something with so much bugs/mistakes/abusrd behaviours !!!!!
And you're on version 3.53!!!!!!!!!

Some examples (in windowed mode):
- the Artist List 'window' is such a pain !!
you only see half of the name because the window width is too small, AND NO WAY TO RESIZE IT ??
- The Names are WAY TO BIG ! And now way to customize the font !
- The 'quick-index list': How ridiculous it is to see a sub-item list "W-X-Y-Z-#" on a 1280*1024 screen when you have plenty of space under it !!!!!
- why not any horizontal resizing ??
what the hell is that 'Toggle Extended Data View ' button ?????????
- Why there isn't any 'text only' view mode for album list ?

- please let me disable all these unusefull rollover effects, blinking borderbars,'gadget' sounds ! (minimize...) , 'insert cd' animation, !! btw , the stupid 'blinking blue' highlight ? it doesn't mean anything, since it shows only the 'last item on which my cursor has rolled over" !!!!!!!!! What's the use of this ?
-the only rollover which could be usefull : the rollover over star rating, a la WMP9, hasn't been made !

- Listing all tracks when clicking on an Artist is stupid ! if the artist produced 10 albums of 14 tracks, you've got to scroll 140 tracks to find the last one ! Why not an album (titles and covers) only view, and display the tracks of the selected album ?

- MassTager is awfull:
no way, for example, to set a year for a whole album !?!
- Suggestion: why not reading the freedb ?? could be so usefull... (automatic renaming of all tags of album tracks)

- much too slooooow: nearly 1s to enter the edit mode ! (>1Ghz, 1/2 Go Ram..), and slow everywhere... (even with all effects disabled!)
-73 Mo RAM eaten !!! Man, what do you load in memory ??? the whole cover art DB ??

- no mass-renamer, to rename files based on the tags...

-Buggy !
- "Error 5 No Program Name Found" error when clicking on Back Button?
- the vertical resizing produce some awfull flickering !

-wow.. this a lot of drawbacks...
Guess, I will goes on searching for my perfect Jukebox..
That's a pitty since this software has great qualities aside that.

regards,

- Padieu,

Rich - 10-27-2003 at 03:46 PM

Appears this guy spent more time on his post than he did using eJukebox.

-Rich

Padieu - 10-27-2003 at 04:41 PM

Yes, I took some time to write this post, 'coz I think it's important to have sometime an external point of view.
I took some time to report all the annoying ,disturbing or weird things, because of the quality of eJukebox.
His qualities are undeniable, but completely spoiled by these things, FOR MY USE (just my old PC and my ordinary 1280*1024 screen)
The more I use it , the more I appreciate the qualities ( the popularity Mode with HYBRID ON is fantastic !) and the more I'm become upset with the defaults (The artist list is even not updated when I do some tag change ! Even when I do a Refresh List! And what about this split bar which can be dragged outside the screen ?? Did Audiosoft guys know the word 'testing'..)

CU

Audiosoft - 10-27-2003 at 05:42 PM

Hello Padieu,

Quote:

- why not any horizontal resizing ??
what the hell is that 'Toggle Extended Data View ' button ?????????

The 'Toggle Extended Data View ' is what you use to make eJukebox 1024 pixels wide. A 1280 mode is coming fairly soon.
Quote:

- Listing all tracks when clicking on an Artist is stupid ! if the artist produced 10 albums of 14 tracks, you've got to scroll 140 tracks to find the last one ! Why not an album (titles and covers) only view, and display the tracks of the selected album ?

That is precisely what the album list does.
Quote:

- "Error 5 No Program Name Found" error when clicking on Back Button?

This is an error FROM allmusic.com. We have recently discovered a way to get around this, which is why this has already been fixed for v3.6.
Quote:

- much too slooooow: nearly 1s to enter the edit mode ! (>1Ghz, 1/2 Go Ram..), and slow everywhere... (even with all effects disabled!)

We could make the editor popup immediately - but it will still take a sec to load all the data (ID3 and eJukebox database data as well do a real song length calculation) for the song. Also eJukebox becomes faster after your album cover images have been downloaded.

Quote:

- MassTager is awfull:
no way, for example, to set a year for a whole album !?!
- Suggestion: why not reading the freedb ?? could be so usefull... (automatic renaming of all tags of album tracks)

You can set a year for the entire album by clicking the "Set4all" button that appears next to the year after you change it. However, there does seem to be a problem with this button not appearing under v3.53...we will have this fixed for the next version. Thank you for identifying this bug.

We are working to see if we can interface eJukebox with "freedb.org" to automatically fill tag information for songs. However, so far we have only been able to interface the CDRipper's lookup to use this data source.

eJukebox's album lookup will grab the year for the album but currently does not support automaticlly figuring out track # and genre. If you need to you can use the INFO link on the editor to get this information yourself from allmusic.com.

Quote:

73 Mo RAM eaten !!! Man, what do you load in memory ??? the whole cover art DB ??

The Album list takes up allot of RAM because of its highly graphical nature. Close the Album List and you will reclaim allot of Ram if you need it for other purposes on your PC.


Quote:

And what about this split bar which can be dragged outside the screen ??


Not sure what is so horrible about this, as this list will automatically be resized when you click an album. But you are right that it should not do this, so we will be limiting the album lists top position in the next version.

Quote:

(The artist list is even not updated when I do some tag change ! Even when I do a Refresh List! And what about this split bar which can be dragged outside the screen ?? Did Audiosoft guys know the word 'testing'..)


The 'Refresh List' button is for the album list. Totally closing the artist list then clicking the Artists button will refresh the artist list. We are not a huge company like musicmatch so give us a break. We do 'test' for a few days before releasing a new version but put emphasis on getting requested features implemented faster. If we spent all our time with our limited staff 'testing' nothing new would ever get in. We rely on posts from users like you to these forums to identify unknown bugs and Do fix them as fast as possible. All in all, I think eJukebox has come a very long way in the 1 1/2 years since its first release, thanks to the hard work of our small staff in collaboration with users in these forums.

Finally, we are working on a better GUI skin and more customization for v4.0. If any one has any ideas for this please feel free to post some images that overlay a new look ontop of the current eJukebox window.

P.S.
I use eJukebox at 1280x1024 on a 21" screen quite well. Maybe you just need to enable the Extended Data View if you haven't already done so. I realize eJukebox's GUI needs a bit of streamlining, but that fact that it does not look like a regular windows program is kind of the point. It is a Graphical Jukebox and is not supposed to be a generic Windows List/Grid control style 'jukebox'.

flummi - 11-2-2003 at 12:27 PM

I have bought the Ejukebox today. I tested it long and intensiv and I also searched in the net for alternatives, but I didn't find any software, that is as good as Ejukebox.
And now, I use Ejukebox so often, that I don't want to miss it and today I decided to buy it.
So my suggestion for all new users: Try Ejukebox not only for one Hour or so, you have 30 days and than make your opinion.

By the way, I think it will be usefull for new users to have a small instruction manual (in diffent languages). That I really missed in the first days.