Hello,

I have downloaded the latest version and am trying it out to see if I want to purchase the product. While there are many things I like about the product, I have a few observations and requests before I would buy the product, and would like to share them here for discussion.

1. First of all, I have spent a lot of time meticulously ripping my CD collection into WMA's placing them into folders per artist, and then subfolders per album. Windows Media Player has automatically downloaded the appropriate album covers and saved them into the album directory as a hidden file called "Folder.jpg". This is useful when browsing in explorer since the tumbnail image represents the album. When the wrong image, or no image was downloaded, I created my own by manually downloading the correct one from the web, or scanning in the image myself. What I would like in eJukebox, would be a place to use the "Folder.jpg" image that resides where the file is by default rather than having it re-download the image automatically, which could result in the wrong one.

2. Can you please add an Uninstall to the installation. I have deleted the necessary files (I think) from one of my computers, but it would be easier if there was an Uninstall option included.

3. Some Artist names are hyphenated, so they show up incorrectly in the artist list. For example: "A-Ha" shows up as "A" and the song has the "Ha" part added to the front of the song title. Is this just a tag problem? They show up correctly in WinAmp and other apps.

4. I'd like to be able to right click an album cover in the Albums list and change the image right there on the spot.

If some of these have been mentioned before, I apologize. I am very interested in this product, but some things are a bit quirky right now.

Thanks for reading!

Hi! Hmm a lot of interesting things in your observations ... And a long post, often features a long reply

1. You got a big Wma collection? Are they displayed as expected in ej? My experience is that ej doesn't support Wma tags very well so I have converted all my wma's to mp3's.

A poor sollution, I know, but the best one I could come up with waiting for a real sollution in the software. I'm not a big fan of the format myself, but since the cdripper in windows mediaplayer uses it I think it will increase in usage in the future. Ej should take the consequence of this and have proper support for this format?

It could make life easier if ej first looked in the directories for coverimages. Then, if noone found, looked them up at the internet as usual! It could also make ej easier in use for users without a regular connection to the Internet. Maybe resulting in more registered users in the long run?

And it would of course increase the possibilities for ej to find the correct coverimage at the end of the day. I think this is a good idea which I support 100% as long as it's implemented as an user defineable option.

2. Ej supports unistall. Look after uninstall.exe in your ejukebox directory.

3. A-ha is a cool norwegian group from the 80's and they are displayed correctly in my albumlist and artistlist. This sounds like it's related to tags. Are those files in Wma format? Or does this happen with Mp3's as well?

4. Great Idea again. A rightclick option in the albumlist seems logical. You can, however, rightclick the albumimage in the "now playing" panel, then choose "edit" and "use image from".

This requires that the album is played in the very moment, which obviously isn't the case always. Since most of us got more than one album in our database

Again, nice suggestions. I would like to see them all implemented

Hey Fishy,

Thanks for the response! I used to have my entire collection as MP3's, but due to HD space a while back (My entire collection is 6897 songs from 1670 Albums [All from my own CD Collection]) I re-encoded all of my tracks to WMA at the same quality, but half the size. This is when I discovered the Automatic Album cover download by Windows Media Player.

I agree on the "user definability" of the album cover download.

Also, thanks for pointing out the uninstall file. I forgot to look there. :-)

I know this is beside the point, and it is not to be a annoyance, but i do believe the WMA format is quite lacking when it comes to quality...

I found an interesting (though a bit old) guide about the formats) at: http://ekei.com/audio/

"(...) Microsoft's second claim that WMA provides CD quality at 64kbps is entirely wrong. Not only does the 64kbps WMA lack in violin detail, but even at 128kbps (which Microsoft touts as "audiophile" suffers from overbrightness." (...)

From that, i would not advise anyone to repeat your mp3>wma manouver. Allthough it might be space-saving now, big HD's are growing cheaper each day, and you might end up regretting it in the end; wishing you had the same files in better quality, even if it took three or four times the size.

Despondo: The pleasure is all mine

Junk: This might be true. But it doesn't change the fact that it's popularity will increase along with the popularity of the media player and the bundled Cd-ripper.

A lot of users, maybe even the average, doesn't care to look around for (better) alternatives and ends up with taking what's served to them on a plate. I am afraid Wma has come to stay and should be supported properly in media playback applications like ej and winamp.

I think I have seen Wma tags displayed correctly in winamp, so I don't understand why ej doesn't support them properly. Unfortunately I have converted all my wma's to mp3's now. So I don't have the possibility to verify this statement.

would be nice if Audiosoft could give us some insight on this.

I agree with you, Fishy. WMA is here to stay, no matter what one might think of the format and what it promises in terms of quality. I also think it's a pity for eJ that it does not currently support WMA tags, and only use their filenames when adding them to the database, as it might scare off many potential users.

In terms of coding, i don't know how much work adding WMA tag read/write support (even just read support would make a lot of difference) would mean. Perhaps more than i think. But it would surely be a smart move, nevertheless.

I agree with Junk, the WMA format was a little lacking in quality when heard with a great pair of headphones on a great sound card. Hard drives are getting cheaper and cheaper and if you do not have the space inside your box, a USB or Firewire external drive can help out and they do not take much room. I have encoded all my MP3s at 192K and the 1500 songs I have take up about 30GB on my 120GB USB drive. I have an additional old 30GB drive that I keep a copy of my current library on in case of "___". If you need more than one drive, there is nothing wrong with using multiple drives or stacking them (RocketPODs let you stack the drives saving on cabling).

The real reason for the HD storage problem is I was on a laptop originally. The harddrive I had was 30GB. I now have an 80GB in there. I also have tons of samples for my audio composing app, so my space is still limited. To my older ears, the WMA sounds acceptable to me. I did several listening tests comparing MP3 to WMA before I made the jump to WMA, and they sound close enough for my use. Thanks for all of the replies!

Ah, i see. A laptop makes things a bit different.... What kind of music do you make, by the way? You have any files online?

WMA really is lousy. What I'd like to see eJ support better (be more tag friendly I mean) is .OGG, which is a heck of a lot better than WMA.

"What I'd like to see eJ support better (be more tag friendly I mean) is .OGG, which is a heck of a lot better than WMA."

Yes! And it is even better than MP3, at least on low bitrates.

The best high-end format for critical listening environments (good headphones) remains MPC / Musepack, at least according to my listening tests and tons of websites who came to same conclusion.

But since I won't have the time to reencode some 12.000 tracks from CD to MPC, I guess I remain stuck in the MP3 world...

So, each one wants it's own format mpc, ogg, wma... Audiosoft will have a lot of work to add all them! Or so which one to choose??

I would give the formats these priorities:

1. WMA - full priority
2. OGG - medium prority
3. MPC - low priority

For these reasons:

1. WMA - Too widespread and too important for fresh users to ignore. For many, this format appears essential for them to even consider using eJukebox.

2. OGG - An important format for a lot of people, it seems. eJ should definately support this format, but WMA support comes first.

3. MPC - This format is allready partially supported. Even though considered have the best algorithm, it is not very widespread, though, and besides, it allready supports full tag reading (including images etc). I have a theory that this is because MPC's uses the exact same tags as mp3's, so eJukebox just doesn't have to think twice about them. Why it doesn't write to them, i do not know.

Fine analysis, junk!
I agree, WMA in first because it's a format used by windows media player users... so there are many files in wma which spread everywhere!
OGG, i don't see many files in this format, but if it is the best...
MPC, so you say eJukebox can already read the tags? That's great, but as i don't have any file in mpc... never tried that!

Audiosoft,
Do you plan to improve WMA support in eJukebox (tags reading at least...), or perhaps others formats?

Quote:

Originally posted by junk Ah, i see. A laptop makes things a bit different.... What kind of music do you make, by the way? You have any files online?