A new name also?

Too many people found "Teen Spirit" name to be inappropriate (at least) for the program. I consider changing the name to "Conium". I have recently bought "theConium.com". It ll help also to help people remember it better.

P.S.
I tried to have the "conium.com" but the owner (a "I buy all the Domains that have some meaning to sell it later" company) asked 2500$ for it. This kind of jobs should have been illegal

Integration

I ve integrated the brand new player, Tagger and visualization Engines in the main project. Did a test in my 20k mp3/ogg collection .. most things seems good.
Some more work is needed in other changes that i ve made back in September.

Lyrics

There is a problem in the automatic downloading of lyrics in the current release of Teen Spirit. Google changed a "p" tag to "div" in the way it serves results (the change happened in mid-November) and TS Parser fails. Another way to track google changes i guess
Anyway it is solved in the "yet to be released" next version of teen spirit

Behind schedule

What is software programming. 'Something that is always behind schedule' you could say.
Maybe i should have gone step by step for the next version of Teen Spirit. Anyway the "one brought the other" and now most of the internal engines have been changed and new patterns were applied.
Anyway let me tell what we have now in the player/tagger/visualization front.
Player:

(Unit test application Player/tagger/visualization featuring interated Geiss vis)
A multi engine which automatically switches between Bass/DirectShow player engines
Currently supports:

• mp3/mp4/mp2/mp1
• ogg
• flac
• mpc
• wma/wmv(video)
• xm/s3m/mod/mtm/umx/mo3
• aiff/wav
• cd audio
• mid/midi
• ac3
• aac
• ape
• avi(video)
• asf(audio/video)
• mpg/mpeg(video)
• more if you have dshow filters installed

Tagging through a modded taglib + completely renew filename parser (supported usual stuff plus lyrics/rating)

• mp3 (id3v2.4)
• wma
• flac
• mpc
• aac
• ogg
• plus anything else through filename/directory parsing
  

It supports the usual stuff plus lyrics/rating

Visualization using winamp plugins. Currently

• Geiss
• oscilloscope etc
• ...work in progress

(visualization / video in separate moveable-resizable window)

regards

Players Players Players

I m thinking about letting the user choose which Media Player Engine to use...
Currently the options are:
Bass Engine (fastest but audio only)
WindowsMediaPlayer Engine (slowest, audio-video with visualizations integrated)
DShow (faster then WMP, audio-video, no visulizations)
Winamp Wrapper Engine (audio-video, visualizations but not in the integrated window)

Possibly by default i ll use a compination of Bass for the audio and DShow for the window

Bass Rocks

Saturday, Raining.. time for some programming.

Now the default player is Bass and i can't really describe how really good it is..
Less resources, less time to initiate. wonderful
So many thanks to the people of un4seen

October awaits

There has been some time since the previous release.( end of august)
What is keeping me busy for the next version (around end of october)

• Many small bugs has been solved (like the not redrawing window after restoring from tray in some computers). I did a whole new splitter class
• A total new (purely hand made) language module. Now you can load the language dynamically (no restart needed). You may create and immediately test yours .. its only a unicode text file (extension .lng) that you need to modify. The information of the author etc.. can be easily added and can be viewed in the about box.
• It was fast to startup. Now it is even faster thanks to some on-demand constructions and code tweaks.
• Now you may choose the columns you want to see in the list controls.

now the BIG ONES

• The windows media player engine will be replaced with the BassLib (http://www.un4seen.com) (at least for the audio part - video will use the wmp engine). This means that more formats will be supported like mp3, wma, ogg, mpc, flac, aac and more.
• Id3lib will be dropped in favor of the excellent TagLib. Tagging will be available for mp3, ogg, wma and more
• A new plug-in like interface (and the associated API) for information downloading and more. (i don't know if this will be available in the 0.91 ver though
  

My main concern in this project is to test some coding practices and to self train. So there will be some major architectural changes not visible by the user of course.

Blog Transfer

Just thought that it would be better to move to the full featured blogspot.

Old Articles (not many) are copied here...

August 17, 2006

Last beta till next version (534)

Most things seem to work but there has been done some structural changes inside so i m a little worry.
If everything goes well it ll be out in the following days

August 14, 2006

German Translation

Returning from holidays a nice surpise was waiting.
Ralf Martin made the long expected German Translation

August 4, 2006

Holidays

Sometimes i start something and before i finish , i m starting something else and never go back.
This happened at least 10 times during the development of the next version of TS. First it was the new DShow Player Engine. Well I said it need lots of debugging on different systems - leave it. Then it was the AudioCD Support (CDDB). I was at about 70% until i accidentally found a serious bug in collections Auto-Update. I start fixing it and then i said why don' t i support USB Flash memory, iPod mp3 players etc. While doing this i realized that i could have a much better notification system for the user. So i re-engineer some code and then i ve found that i could optimize it a lot .. if i make some more changes... and so on...
Now i m with a non working version with lots of new features under development (not the ones of course that i had in mind)
Anyway i m leaving this mess. I wont touch a keyboard for the next 10 days...its holidays time
Have fun

July 30, 2006

Stop The War

Stop the massacre in Lebanon. Get Involved

July 27, 2006

Jobs to be done untill the next release

1. Get Tags From Filename (under construction) 50%
2. Import AudioCD (CDDB support) (under construction) 70%
3. Handle or play AudioCDs (0%) (maybe not in the next release)
4. Copy Selected Files To Folder (80%)
Any feedback... till then

Copy Files To Folder (new feature)

After a propose from Gabrielle i ve added (its not in the 407 beta) a new submenu with Copy To Folder / Copy To Clipboard function. Still needs some menu items of the latest folders that you ve moved files (like bookmarks)

New Beta (507)

Finalizing the new version of TS a new beta (507) released. Feedback is needed. Specially from the people who has paintinf problems when restoring the application. Also you may check the new features.

July 24, 2006

CD Audio - CDDB - FreeDB Support

For the people who want to organize their AudioCD collection in Teen Spirit i have to say that this feature is on the way. I found some sample code elsewhere for this (MFCCDDB) but this code was so inefficient that i had to rewrite the whole thing

Multimedia HotKeys

While i was buying something in media markt i saw a "multimedia keyboard" called "PLEOMAX". I remember a guy once told me to support such a thing so i said "what the hek? Lets take it".
So in the next TS version Play/Pause - Stop - Next - Prev multimedia keys will be working (optionally) with TS

July 22, 2006

Latest features for the new version which is coming up (in a few days)

+ Export main track list, and all history lists to HTML file (you can make your own css style)
+ Dynamically link files on CD/DVD media. (now you can play files from CD/DVD media)
+ Renamer Upgrade (preview of the renaming process and new modes)

Also
+ Get Tags From Filename added (under construction)

and the new languages.
Brasilian portuguese - French