Is there any ETA on the release date of a new version?

In one of the threads from last week they mentioned to have a new version out by the end of this week...

Hmm.. any updates on this? Not trying to be a nag, just looking for an official word.

offical word! official word? haha I wouldnt count on that I have put a posting, then 3 ICU messages to Audiosoft about updates for e2web - as the company I work at was going to buy multiple licences - after 3 months - as I could give them no word on an update - I gave up - and so did the company going instead elsewhere. A real shame...

ochristmas....we replied to your email on Wednesday. We are having major problems with mydoom virus clogging our email server...we have been busy trying to get this resolved and thus v3.7's release has been delayed to 2/9/04.

Here is our response to your email:

Sorry for the late response. We have been having serious problems with the mydoom virus spam causing delays and saturation of our email server. Your registration code is: 80798460

RE: In the very near future I intend to bundle your software properly licensed. We intend to sell 3 units per week initially. What are the conditions as a distributor of your software?

You may ship your systems with the 30 day trial or licensed. The only time you would need to email us for a replacement code is after formatting the HD or re-installing windows. However, we are currently working on a new registration system that would work with the old system and allow you to obtain a single (non-changing) internet enabled registration code...so that emailing us after formatting will no longer necessary.

hmmm curious! Thanks for that Audiosoft but that wasnt my email!! My question was about e2web development....

Thanks for the update audiosoft, good luck with the viral spam - I'm still feeling it weeks after the virus peaked.

That virus was a nasty one. It was estimated that for a while 1 out of every 12 E-Mails traveling through the Internet was that virus. Luckily, all my customers got updates anti-virus software signatures and no one got infected. Good Luck, Audiosoft. (And anyone else fighting it.)

Nice new version! Still playing but looking good so far!!!!

But....from reading the description, I guess still no ratings displayed in 800x600, right? I can only try out the new version tomorrow...booohoooo

Yes Demnos, i think you will be disappointed tomorrow! There is nothing very spectacular in this new version booohoo too... Perhaps you could buy a new touch screen that support 1024x768 resolution instead...

Maybe Audiosoft wait the 4.0 version to amaze us again... I hope, but how long we must dream of that new home page so expected??? and for the playlist .dis file?? the songs preview?

I did not know what to expect from this version, but a new Home Page view sounds like 4.0 material, so I didn't expect that at all... same about the Songs Preview suggestion, which i also think came too recently to be picked up by this version. The playlist .dis file would be a great thing, though. Allthough, if Audiosoft are planning a major redesign of eJ in version 4.0 they might wait until that release.

But one thing i did notice abou the 3.7 version was a speed increase when navigating in the album list / opening and closing the artist list.

The artist list has also gotten a background image, which certainly made things seem a whole lot smoother.

The thing i was hoping for, (along with all the other small suggestions of improvement ) was the speed increase when you type a letter with the Album List open, it is still too slow from A to Z, so to speak. A to B is fine. But if you try to write "Coltrane" for instance, you are in for a long wait. (A friend of mine tried eJ for the first time yesterday, and tried this intuively).

I just made a new suggestion on this issue, you can read it here:
http://www.audiosoft.net/forums/viewthread.php?tid=653&page=1#pid3016

I think it's important that we realize that it's important that these smaller bugs get ironed out in current updates before we go making the big jump to 4.0...

v3.7 was a maintenance release. Tons of bug fixes (way too many to mention on our homepage) including a urgent one to get 2WEB1's image web server's auto IP detection working again....plus a new progress indicator when eJukebox is starting up and an optional one when eJukebox is shutting down...and the database update now shows the song file name when it is being added to the database.

Goals:

1.) We are going to add the 5 star rating view in non-edv by the end of this month for sure. It is really just a matter of determining where to put an option to toggle this on and off.

2.) We are struggling to come up with a new look for eJukebox. This is consuming too much of our time...so this month we will be working to implement a skinning system. This system will allow you to drop new .dis files and images in the ejukebox/images/ folder then the skin will be accessible from the right click songlist or artistlist menu - or we may create a separate skin selector window. With the help of interested skin developers who post their own skins - we hope to get inspiration for v4.0's default skin.

3.) New homepage view is being developed this month.

Hurry! We can't wait.....

1) Demnos, this is for you! , lucky

2) Haa... skins are again in the hot seat! junk, prepare your graphics...

3) So, February will be a great month!

Thanks for your explanations Audiosoft.

And also, do you still plan to add - soon? - a second column when there are more than 20 genres in the genre list?

Quote:

Originally posted by Pirk 1) Demnos, this is for you! , lucky

Quote:

Originally posted by Demnos Quote: Originally posted by Pirk 1) Demnos, this is for you! , lucky Yes Yes Yes!!!!! Once this feature is in, I will shut up and never request anything again, then eJukebox is simpy *perfect* for me. Thank you, Audiosoft!

Skinning = Much Happiness, bring it on!

I hope that when a final "look" is selected, the feature to change skins will always be available, with users being able to upload / download skins from the audiosoft.net website.

Thanks Pirk, but as a reaction to my message, Audiosoft pulled out my (old) original thread about this, and we are now discussing this again over in the "run-time errors" section. Audiosoft, if you read this: Thanks, I really appreciated that! So maybe there is a chance that they will find something.

But now I am suprised: You say "I don't experience this one so often than you". This means: You *have*, at least once, experienced this as well??? This would be important, as in the other thread it seemed like I was the only one having this problem.

Demnos, YES sometimes i experience something a bit similar, but it's less serious than you. I have tested that once again with one song that cause the problem (please examine my screenshoot):
- First eJ play normally the song "Comme un papillon"
- When this song is finished winamp start to play the next song "L'île de Ré" BUT eJukebox doesn't bring up to date its "Now playing" panel, it stay on the previous song! The song "L'ïle de Ré" normally play in winamp but as eJukebox doesn't send the next song to winamp, it simply stop to play at the end of the song!
- If i click on the next button on eJ, it play again the same song "L'île de Ré"... I need to suppress this song of the eJ playlist in order to unfreeze eJukebox. Then even if eJ jump the normal next song, it resynchronize with winamp!

I think the problem with this song is because of the foreign character î (i + circumflex accent).

Pirk,

The problem you are experiencing happens when the previous song has the same track length as the current song. Because of this eJukebox does not recognize that a new song is being played. eJukebox recognizes a new song is being played after the current winamp track length changes.


The reason eJukebox uses the change of the track length to determine song changes is because it is a MUCH faster (and less processor and hard drive intensive) to check winamp's song length every 1 sec than to parse winamp's playlist for the songpath that often.

eJukebox can not get any song title or song tag info directly from Winamp...It first checks track length then, if it is different from the last song, it grabs the songpath and then matches that path to the matching song in eJukebox's database.

The odds of 2 songs being played back to back having the exact same song length are small but it has been known to happen (your screenshot shows it). We are trying to find another way to determine if the song has changed without relying on track length alone...I am not sure if we will be able to do this but I will keep you posted.

Ah! so, it's because of the songs length... YES Audiosoft, the 2 songs have exactly the same length: 2.48 mn. Moreover (as you say now) you can see that on my screenshoot, in the winamp playlist!
So in my case that has nothing to do with foreign characters! Sorry Demnos, you stay alone with your problem... But as now you are helped by Audiosoft, i'm sure they will solve that soon.
Otherwize Audiosoft, i am very surprised by the way you use to determine that the song as changed in winamp!! I would think there was something handy already planned to interact easily with winamp... But it seems that is not the case!
Thank you to take an interest in this problem. I hope you will find a solution.

The problem is: The Winamp API (interaction interface) is very limited and only allows outside programs to do real-time (low CPU) checks on: play, pause, stop status - current song position in the winamp playlist - Track progress time - and Track length.

The only way to determine what the current song is by instructing Winamp to output its current playlist to a file...then eJukebox parses the small playlist file to get the current song's file path. From that point, eJukebox uses that path in conjunction with the eJukebox database to show the song info in eJukebox.

This all works very well and good as eJukebox only needs to grab the current song path once - after finding a track length change during its second by second real-time check of track length.

What we are probably going to do is add a once every 10 second backup check to see if the filepath changed when the track length has not. That way it will update the song display even when the last song had the same track length without needing to use allot of cpu and hd to parse out the file path every second but rather every 10 seconds. This way eJukebox corrects the display within 10 sec after the same track length problem occurs and does not effect performance.

It outputs the current winamp playlist to: "winampfolder/winamp.m3u". Then eJukebox grabs the filepath line, for the current song, from inside that file.

OK, I will play with this. I just had a new theory: As I am getting all my MP3 files over a WLAN Network, which is really just a SHARE on my Win 2000 main PC, ...maybe the path names with foreign characters are not resolved in the way they are supposed to be? That could explain why not everyone with foreign songs here in this forum has this problem! Let's see if I find something in these files...

I think you're on to something here. Perhaps the file transfer drivers aren't properly tested for handling files with special characters. I guess the same would happen to my system with some files i have, that have too long filenames to be copied (or deleted, for that sake!).

I know some cases where this has happened after using Tag&Rename's "rename file" function. It renames the file after the id3 tag, and in some cases the filenames becomes extremely long. I can play the file, but cannot re-rename, copy, move or delete it (i use Windows XP, standard filesystem).

Audiosoft,

I have an idea concerning the problem of 2 consecutive songs having a identical length:

When the problem occur, i notice the position of the current playing song in the winamp playlist stay freezed to 2, even though normally after each "successful" synchronization the current playing song always stays in position 1, until it has finish to play. Then, before eJ synchronize, the current playing song in winamp is the next one in the list which, at this moment is precisely in POSITION 2!

So, rather than check the song length you could check (every second in real time) the "current song position in the winamp playlist". When position = 2, it's the current playing song has changed!

I think if you use this method to determine the song change, that should work in all the cases... This make sense?

Well, getting back to my problem, I

- examined the Winamp playlist file & compared it with the entries in the db.m3u file. Everything checks out perfectly.

- rebuilt the database one more time. No difference.

- replaced ejuke.asn with a fresh one and erased db.m3u, then rebuilt. No difference.

- I then copied some MP3 files to the local HD to bypass the network, again deleted ejuke.asn, db.m3u and rebuilt with only the local files. No difference. So now I know that the network has nothing to do with it.

- Finally, I upgraded to Winamp 5.02 lite, as I noticed the "lite" version is really almost the same as Winamp 2.91. No difference.

- I then took the files to a friend's PC, installed an evaluation copy of eJukebox, there everything plays fine without a problem.

So, Audiosoft, what do you think? Should I just format the HD and reinstall Windows etc.? This might take care of the problem, as it seems to be somehow related to this particular PC. I mean, noone else has this problem, right?

Then again, by doing so we may lose the opportunity to find out what is going on. The thing that still puzzles me is that eJukebox 3.4 works without any problems, only 3.5 and beyond show this behavior. And why only files with special characters??? I want to find out!!!!

So...do you still want me to try something or should I start formatting? If the latter, then be prepared to be asked for a new serial soon...I have no problem using 3.4 for some time, but if you have run out of ideas then I might as well get it over with now...

I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!! I FOUND IT!!!

Unbelievable. Normally, when the system was hanging, I always killed eJukebox from TASKMAN. Just now, for the first time, I did something else: I selected SHUTDOWN from the START Menu, while ejukebox was in its endless loop.

Gosh, I wish I would have done that earlier. Shutdown first hangs 30 seconds, then it kills eJukebox. Then it hangs another 30 seconds and kills Winamp (which is now also hanging). And then, after another 30 seconds, it kills one more program. And this is called "Microsoft Text To Speech Synthesizer" Arghh!!!! So yes, all I had to do was go into eJukebox and deselect "Song Announce" and now...NOW MORE HANGING.

Conclusions:

a) Text to speech doesn't work with foreign characters. I just called my friend where we installed eJukebox earlier today. And yes: Even on his PC, as soon as you start "Song Announce" and play a song with foreign characters, the system hangs. So you can all try this at home now!

b) I never ever ever ever used text to speech anyway, what a useless feature. This means, I also never enabled it. But until 3.4 the default after installation of eJukebox was OFF, and after that it was ON. Correct?

c) it also explains why nobody else had this problem: I don't think anybody in their right mind uses the song announce feature.

d) there is still something weird about this: Even when I used to play a song with non-foreign characters, I never heard the song announce. That is the reason why it never occured to me to switch it off. I simply didn't realize it was on! On my friend's PC, when you do enable Song Announce, you also hear it working (with non-foreign characters).

Anyway, this explains everything!!! Why my 3.4 worked and later versions didnn't and why it only happened on foreign characters and why only on my system.

Phew!!!!! Now I am so happy I don't have top reinstall anything. Time to open a nice big bottle of beer!!! Cheers!!!

Demnos: Which just goes to show relentlessness end to pay... Bravo!

You can be proud! You manage to hang my computer :mad: Now i understand why you only ran v3.4... :
I've tried to enabled the song announce and play a song with foreign characters (french songs with some accents), and you know what happen...
But, knowing that was because of the song announce, i succeed in killing a program called vcmd.exe which used 97% of the cpu time!

Otherwise the song announce works good for me when there isn't any foreign character in the song or artist name, and even i haved try to use it there is a long time, and i don't remember it had ever hang my computer. Curious...
But i never use it because the voice is not polyglot!! I have songs in English, in French, in Spanish, in German... Or else it would be neccessary to change the speech engine according to the song language...

Cheers! Demnos

Thanks Pirk, for trying it out! And for the empathy! Now you really know what I have been going through...

At the same time you can imagine that I am happy for another reason: while you and the others have "only" upgraded from 3.6 to 3.7 this week, I now went from 3.4 straight to 3.7 and so I now have many more changes and new things to play around with today. Ha!

So, today you are:

a) Relieved

b) Happy

c) Eager to try a lot of new eJukebox features.

d) And a bit... drunk!

PS: Don't take your car this evening...

Demnos,

So glad you figured this one out!!! Nice work!!

We are going to see if we can auto disable to song announce when it encounters a song with a foreign character. Also after 3.4, we enabled the song announce feature by default...I think we will be making it disabled by default again for the next version.

Thanks

Audiosoft,

As regularly (at least once every day! Agrr...) eJukebox stop playing when 2 songs have the same lenght; or worse, when the "Prevent Playback Stoppage" option is enabled, it play the same song again, it play the same song again... and again(!), a real nightmare!
I wonder if one day you plan to fix this issue or not... Especially as i think i have a SOLUTION !!! (as suggested in my previous post):

>>> i.e. to watch the now playing SONG POSITION in the Winamp playlist, rather than its lenght... :
When the song position in the Winamp playlist change, then you can be sure the now playing song has changed !!!
It's so simple... and at least that would FIX this nasty bug for good!

Unless something else prevent you to use this method ???
The only case where that may not work is when eJ simply monitor Winamp and if someone change the tracks order... A mode i never use, but... Although i'm not sure if that really cause a problem: just a supplementary unnecessary synchronization? and then, it's not a problem since at this moment eJ is in a passive mode!

So maybe you could keep the current "song lenght" method specially for the monitoring mode, if you care about it, but above all watch the "playlist position" in all other cases.

Or else, tell me if i'm completely wrong on this!

Thanks.

Pirk,

Funny you bring this post up now...we just fixed this 2 days ago for v3.83.

In v3.83, we have fixed the problem where eJukebox was not updating the now playing display (and inturn the playlist) when the song playing before the current song had the same track length. So eJukebox should now always show the correct song and continue playing no matter what.

Your idea for song position check was good but there was an even simpler way to accomplish this (which we should have thought of much sooner)...we just added a double check in eJukebox for the current winamp song when the playtime is between 0:00-0:01 just in case the song changed and the track length did not.

Ahah... very good! I'm happy if you have finally fixed this bug! No matter the way you use, since that works...

Thanks a lot!