Minirok news
I’ve released Minirok 0.9.1, to fix a bug whose symptoms Boyán described to me on the phone, and which I could diagnose after a quick debugging session on his laptop.
BUGFIXES
- Don’t die when setting the tooltip for tracks with no artist tag. This manifested in the slider not moving for those tracks, and the player not jumping to the next track when reaching the end.
This year I’ve participated with Minirok in a free software contest for college students. This past weekend the winners were disclosed, and Minirok won the first prize in its category. Yay!
Posted Mon, 12 May 2008 12:28:38 +0100I’ve released Minirok 0.9, possibly the last release for KDE 3. The changelog is small this one time, I just needed to get this out the door:
NEW FEATURES
- The slider in the statusbar can now be used to seek within a track.
BUGFIXES
- Unbreak saving the list of paths from the tree view combo box.
NEW FEATURES
The tree view can now quickly scan for changes in the filesystem (via a new Refresh button), instead of having to re-read all directory contents.
New action “Open directory” in the File menu to select with a dialog the directory to load in the tree view, instead of having to type it.
Dropping tracks while holding down the Control key will always append them at the end of the playlist, independently of the position they were dropped at.
IMPROVEMENTS
Key shortcuts for toggling random mode (Ctrl+R by default) and cycling through possible repeat modes (Ctrl+T).
The labels in the statusbar that tell the position in the track will now blink while the player is paused.
Completion of directory names works in the path combo. (The code was there, but wasn’t working due to a small PyKDE oddity.)
Make the creation of the tree view faster by avoding lots of useless calls to slot_populate_one() when iterator.current() is a FileItem and not a DirectoryItem.
Read ID3 tags in a separate thread, to improve UI responsiveness when the audio files live in a network filesystem over a slow network link, eg. sshfs over wireless.
(The same is planned for reading directory contents for the tree view, probably once ported to Qt4, because I’m having trouble with the main thread blocking when reading directory contents in a separate thread, that seem solved in PyQt4.)
BUGFIXES
- Does not discard length information for MP3 files without any ID3 tags; formerly, the length for such files would always be reported as 0:00.
OTHER CHANGES
- Improve the handling of non existing directories in the tree view combo box.
NEW FEATURES
Calculate the length of tracks when loading them into the playlist, instead of just when starting to play them, unless reading of tags is disabled.
The systray icon will show the currently playing track as a tooltip.
New function in the context menu to crop selected tracks, that is, to remove from the playlist all tracks except those selected.
The context menu can handle enqueueing several tracks at once.
Compatible with lastfmsubmitd 0.36, which introduced a new API; compatibility with older versions (0.35) is maintained.
BUGFIXES
When adding tracks to the queue while playing the last track in the playlist, the Next button would not get enabled.
Then length of tracks is calculated with Mutagen instead of GStreamer, which fixes several cases where GStreamer would get the length wrong.
Ctrl+LeftButtonClick works to select several items in the playlist.
Exit the engine thread cleanly, so that there are no unhandled exceptions when quitting.
NEW FEATURES
Repeat mode: repeat track or repeat playlist.
Random mode.
Handle the return key in the playlist search line, starting to play the first item that matched the search; and in the tree view search line, appending matching items to the playlist and starting playback if the player was stopped.
Minirok accepts files to load into the playlist as arguments.
New command line option -a/—append and accompanying DCOP function appendToPlaylist to append given files to an existing Minirok instance. For —append, if no instance is running, a new one will be started.
BUGFIXES
Searching in the tree view handles non-ASCII characters case insensitivity. Formerly case insensitiveness only coped with ASCII.
“Stop after current” works even if the currently played item is not present in the playlist (i.e., has been removed).
The Next button is enabled when at the last item in the playlist, but with items still left in the queue.
Items don’t get added more than once to the playlist even if they’re present multiple times in the drag object (eg. when doing Ctrl-A).
Minirok does not cancel logging out when the main window is visible.
OTHER CHANGES
When reaching the end of the track marked as “stop after this track”, playing stops but the current track jumps to the next track. Formerly it would stay at the just played track.
The playlist scrolls automatically to ensure the currently playing item is always visible. This is particularly handy for random mode.
If the list gets cleared while playing a certain track, and then that track gets added to the playlist while still being played, the playlist will mark it the current track.
If Minirok is docked in the systray when logging out of KDE, it will be there as well when restoring the session. Formerly the main window would always be shown.
Empty directories are not shown in the tree view. This includes directories that contain no playable files. Directories which only contain empty subdirectories are not shown as well, recursively.
BUGFIXES
- Handle lastfmsubmitd being installed but not configured.