Oh right, I see now .. Well, it's better than nothing perhaps. I never browse all artists in my artist filter, so for me it's not much of a problem at least.

Although I realize it's not the desired solution, perhaps this is the time to advertise playlist tree? With a little configging, it should be easy to make it look basically like a filter.

Resurrecting this thread with a persistent issue that google is failing me on:

For whatever reason, about a month ago, periodically when I would start foobar, some of my album art would have this ugly gray/white border on the top/bottom. I.e.:

http://img408.imageshack.us/img408/3738/badal.th.jpg

It used to be that I could close/reload foobar and it would revert back to normal. Now, however, I can't get it to go away at all. Even though only a few albums are affected, it's still kind of annoying (I'm pretty OCD about my music collection, especially album art:p: ). Any ideas on what could be causing this?

EDIT: Playing around with it and I'm realizing that this new skin I'm using is set up to read album art as a separate folder.jpeg file instead of embedded album art. Found the thread on the hydrogenaudio forums where he describes how to change the script, but I'm super confused on where exactly to find what he's talking about.

no idea there, i'm afraid. that skin dives far into foobar's scripting territories, where i have not dared to venture.

Tore messes with that stuff though, hopefully he can help :)

Hopefully. Going to be a shame if I can't figure this out because I really like the skin. The old one I posted was really slow and would freeze at points, this one has the same functionality, looks just as good if not better, and is 10x faster to boot.

can't you solve the issue on the other end? by fixing the album art with the albums that are problematic?

the issue is with the aspect ratio of the art. so if it's embedded art that's giving you trouble, use MP3tag to export it, fix the aspect ratio, then embed it again. that way you don't have to mess with the skin at all.

it's definitely a nice-looking setup!

That's not really the issue, the issue is that the skin is scripted to search for album art by a separate .jpg in the folder. I'm not sure how or why it's displaying the embedded art in my existing albums, but I added a new Don Caballero album today and it wouldn't display the embedded artwork at all, I had to temporary stick the separate .jpg in to get it to show.

there is usually a hierarchy of sources where foobar looks, and if it doesn't find art in the first source, it moves on to the second. since most of your artwork is displaying fine, i assume this is the case.

look into the tracks that are giving you problems. remember that mp3s can have more than one image embedded in them.

without understanding how the skin was built, it's going to be difficult to change the way it functions, so you should consider just fixing the cover art for the problematic albums.

anyway, there are advantages to using external album art. embedded art will dramatically increase the size of your music collection since you have as many copies of the image as there are tracks in an album. plus, external art is much easier to change/manage...

Like noise, I definetly prefer external files for cover display. My own foobar downloads cover art for me which is very useful, but I don't know how I'd go about getting that to work with embedded art.

Anyways, looking at the problem, the first thing that strikes me is that it looks like a problem with aspect ratio and background colour in the panel that shows album art. Can you right click and get properties up? See if you can change the background colour to the dark grey which is used in the rest of your skin.

As noise said, there's a hierarchy and so have you checked if this is a problem that happens when an album doesn't have embedded art? If so, it could move on to the next thing, external art.


Anyways, fixing the script according to the hydrogenaudio forum shouldn't be too hard, but it's tough to do from here where I can't see it. The person refers to two panels. PSS is the Panel Stack Splitter, a panel which holds other panels inside it - such as the album art display panel. The other is the ELPlaylist which is highly scriptable. If you can get into the config areas for these two, you should be able to find the bits of script they suggest changing.


Still, I would think that the white/grey colour is either a background color issue in the panel or that the white and grey is part of the folder.jpg. The easiest fix then is to download new folder.jpgs or set the background colour in the art display panel right!

how do you guys display track artist for compilations?

right now i add it to the track column, using something like this:

[%artist% - ]%track%

it's not ideal but it's better than having a full column dedicated to %artist% that normally sits empty.

anyway i'm curious to know what others have worked out :)

The album header shows Various artists, probably, then the tracks show up like this :

01. Track title - Artist

Specifically, this is what goes on :

This bit here is in the elplaylist scripting :
It looks a bit tricky. Basically, it checks whether album artist is different from artist and if yes, there's also a check for the presence of a VACHECK variable. If it's not present, the album is treated as a mixed artists compilation album.

So, when the album is a confirmed various artists album, this happens after the track number and title :

Might look a bit tricky, but it just fetches the first value in the artist field. If it's a WMA or some other format that doesn't support multiple values, it'll separate the artists with a / .. although of course such files shouldn't really have multiple values so that bit is not too important. Unless perhaps if I decide to change meta(artist,0) for %artist%, but I think the semi-colons become commas then.

edit :

Note that I don't have any columns (atm) by the way :p: Mixed artist albums also have both artist and album artist on all tracks.

I should perhaps elaborate why I have the VACHECK variable there as well. Some of my albums are collaborations between different artists where they essentially act like a band. F.ex Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin and Paco De Lucia's album "Friday Night in San Fransisco".

In my library tree, I would like this album to show up under all three artists :

As well as :


So the solution is to use multiple artists in the artist field, like so :

Paco De Lucia, Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin; Al di Meola; John McLaughlin; Paco de Lucia

And then use only "Paco De Lucia, Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin" as album artist which is what appears in the albums header. The check in my previous post would now treat this as a mixed artists album if I didn't tag it with VACHECK .. so that's why it's there. ;)

wow that's insanely complicated!
do you populate %album artist% even when it is the same as %artist%?

if not, then why not just use this:

- $replace($if2(%album artist%,%artist%),;, /)

it will push %album artist% if it exists, otherwise it will just push %artist%

I only want the script to show information in the artist field next to the tracks :) Album artist is only used in the albums header, never in the list of files!

ok i'm confused. i read the edits you made to your previous post so now i understand why you use something more complex than a simple conditional, but i'm not sure what the result would be

maybe you could post a screenshot of the three-artist album you mention as an example?

Sure!

I should mention that the bits of script I posted are not exactly polished. Rather they were made to do one thing, then modified to do something else, but it's easy to see how they could be neater so I'll get on that.

Anyways, here are a couple of albums!

First, there's the Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin and Paco De Lucia album (files have a total of 4 different artists in the artist field, each of them respectively and one for the "band") :

http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/4040/ex1a.png


Then here's a Various Artists album. You can see artist ($meta(artist,0)) shows up after the title of each track.

http://img175.imageshack.us/img175/174/ex2t.png

In both of these albums, the artist shown in the header is simply [%album artist%], though if missing, foobar fetches %artist% instead.

thanks! i follow you now.

i really need to look into elplaylist, i like the group headings much better. but i have so many 'columns' set up right now, it would be a nightmare to try to code them all..

That skin looks awfully familiar tore;)

EDIT: Did you get rid of the little white crescent shadow thing on the album art? I've been wondering how to do that, it's slightly annoying...

Possibly, my elplaylist script has been robbed and modified from some theme .. Never used the theme, but stole the playlist as it were. :)

Don't understand what you mean by crescent shadow, though. Screenshot?

http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/2632/crescentp.th.jpg

You can see it on both the menu and the display art.

Ahh, now I get what you mean! It took me a minute of just staring at the picture before I got it :p:

I don't have that problem, but clearly there's a picture somewhere that came with that theme which is overlapping the album art. Either you find the script and change it or you can find the file and rename it. The latter method is sloppier of course, but on the other hand it's simple and easily reversible if you know little about scripting.

Just look for picture files inside your foobar folder until you find the culprit.

working on a new playlist layout. it cleverly splits track titles and sends anything in square brackets over to the right. pretty cool if you ask me :)

http://i41.tinypic.com/2s80etu.jpg

^Agreed, that looks good :)

the latest iteration:
http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/769...image64.th.png

You're awesome tore, sure enough it was a picture file that was the culprit. Muchas gracias, senor.

And noise, that does look awesome.

^You're welcome gotjuice :)

Also, looking good, noise! :) Only change I'd do is put the quicksearch next to the menu toolbar, probably aligned to the right, but that might not look as good (looks like you have it hidden in a tab). I might experiment with a light theme using the old columns/NG playlists in an effort to bring down cpu requirement for a theme for the laptop.

A couple of questions to you, noise. What's that scroll bar? It looks neat .. I guess this is controlled by a windows theme? And how often does your foobar crash? Mine does on occasion and supposedly, mod track info panel is supposed to cause crashed and I suspect the last.fm biography/artist pictures component I have also causes these. A solution might be to script some of this (what you have in the mod track panel) in a wsh panel, but that sounds like it might be quite an undertaking.

hey tore,

i actually changed this a lot since i posted it. well, just the colours. the gray was too much, i went back to plain white. i do like the brighter themes, even though they're a bit tougher on the eyes.

the scrollbar is indeed part of my windows visual style. it's called Nude for Windows 7, and you can find it at deviantart.

as for your other question - i can't recall foobar ever crashing, and i use it several hours every day. track info mod is supposedly problematic, but i've never had problems with it. i also use the biography panel frequently, and it never causes problems either.

i would prefer to use wsh panel, it is so much more flexible. but it's really touch to script, especially for an average guy like me :)

Thanks for the answer! :)

I have something which causes my foobar to crash, but I'm not sure what it is. Your post has helped me narrow down the list of possible culprits.

I agree that WSH panel looks quite intimidating :p:

hey tore!

i came here looking for inspiration, but you've taken down all your screenshots :(

can you post a screenie of your latest config? specifically, i'm interested in seeing your Library Tree. i'm getting fed up with the limitations of Filters. it's nice having the ability to make pretty colors, but Library Tree offers so many more possibilities...

cheers :D

by the way, there's a new Playlist Organizer out that lets you sort playlists into a tree. check it out if you have not seen it yet - it's very cool!

Sorry for the late reply of the year :)

I bought a new drive and since, I've been trying out different foobar themes, some I downloaded. The basic idea is that I've now got my whole music library on my new drive and also a range of portable foobar installs with different themes and components. Some of the themes are quite demanding, some of them are very lightweight. If I have my new drive connected to my main computer, I may use the more demanding theme(s) and if I have it connected to my few years old laptop, I run the portable foobar installs with the less demanding themes and fewer components.

So, I'm operating with a few different foobars these days. However, when I uninstalled my old foobar, I lost my library tree scripts which is why I haven't replied to you earlier. I've yet to rewrite them all to be honest because I've basically stopped using the tree altogether although I still like the functionality it gives. Instead, I use quicksearch and autoplaylists with certain search queries to find the music I wanna listen to.

The foobar themes I use the most now are these :

My own super-lite theme :

http://img580.imageshack.us/img580/9952/minimal.png

This foobar is the regular install on my home computer and handles the file associations. It plays files whenever I double click files. I don't use it for much else, f.ex I don't browse the library with it. Basically, if I download some music and wanna sample it quickly, that's when this is used and so it's not the "main player". As you can see, it's pretty basic and took about two minutes to create.


DarkOne v2.0 screenshot - this is not my theme, but I like it quite a lot and have used it for a little while :) I've tweaked it to fit my needs somewhat, like replacing filters with library tree and modifying some of the information it shows and order scripts, etc. It's basically the most demanding theme I make use of and has all the typical bells and whistles like lyrics, visualizations, biography stuff and so on.


This is a lite theme which is my own. It's just a 5 minutes strip down of my old theme and honestly, it doesn't look too nice and possibly, I'll just make a lite theme from scratch instead. I haven't used this much yet, but basically the idea was to have a foobar theme which lets me listen to the library without demanding much resources, so .. as few components as possible! It has a columns playlist and a quicksearch bar and a library tree.


I've got a lot more actually, some I've created and some of others and I still haven't tried out everything or gotten it exactly the way I want it, but I'm pretty happy with this way of doing stuff. :)

hey no worries about the late reply. sorry to hear you lost all your scripts!

i actually gave up on the tree and went back to filters, it just works better for me. plus, since i started using the new playlist tree component, i have been making lots of autoplaylists which fulfills the same function.

i've been thinking of making a mini config too, but one that i can switch to after i decide what to listen to and set up a playlist.

for quick previews from my file manager i use Billy which is absolutely brilliant. it can be set to queue up all audio files in the directory it starts from, so opening a single song can pull up a whole album. it's great for listening to stuff before i have added it to my foobar library.
Billy - Sheep Friends

Hey, Billy seems like just the thing, especially for the laptop :) Gonna try it out!

Itunes is pissing me off.
Downloading this now.

How do I extract my albums in iTunes into Foobar?

Hm? I've never used iTunes, but I assume it or you have placed your music somewhere on your computer. In foobar, press CTRL + P to bring up preferences, go to media library and browse for the directory containing your music.

The word extract confuses me slightly though. :confused:

Just installed foobar and the colomns plugin.
At first glance, I liked the original looks better.
My album list is gone, I can get it back as a seperate window, but I don't want that.
Help?

If you go into the menu and go File -> Preferences -> Display -> Columns UI -> Main you should see a Quick Setup button. Just play around with that for a bit until you get a layout that you're happy with. Getting a layout that you're really happy with takes a lot of figuring out but you'll get the hang of it eventually.

I guess I'm not the quick setup kind of guy ;).
I'm usually the one who really wants an extra choice in multiple choice question lists :D.
I'll go and have a Look.

Hmmm... Had to reset everything. Installed some skin (fth file) that sucked. Have a lot of different file extensions that are supposed to be skins (pui, fcl, fcs) but can't seem to find out how to install them. Did a lot of googling but there doesn't seem to be a clear answer to that...
Feel like a n00b now...
And I can't seem to get the album list window docked in columns either.
I guess I'll stick to the default interface for now. I don't really see the point of columns so far, but I'm sure someone will explain that to me ;).

On the same preferences page as the Quick Setup button there is an area that says FCL importing and exporting, there is an import button to import a .fcl skin. The only thing about some fcl skins is that you're required to download and install some other components. Yeah it can get complicated sometimes :)

But what does it do for me other than look pretty?
Because if that's all, I'm fine with the original looks.
I'm messing around with the scratchbox now. Just discovered that when you make a divider, you can't seem to delete it. Starting all over :P.

There's certainly a lot to learn!

Columns UI with additional plugins is likely the way you wanna go. Your foobar could look marvellous, but you can also choose and pick what kind of functionality you want. Some typical ones might be a panel where you get additional information about the artist you are listening to, a panel displaying the lyrics and/or various vizualisations.

When I started with foobar, I created my own skin from scratch. Sometimes I borrowed code from others, but I always learned what it did and changed it in some way and I had a great time doing all that. It took a lot of time before I had a player I was starting to get happy with though. Now I mostly just tweak other people's skins to my needs. ;)

the main benefit for me is the new playlist capabilities it offers. the Columns playlist panel is quite a lot more powerful in terms if customization than the Default one.

Columns also provides new ways to access your music via Filters, it has a better art viewer, more flexible usage of the status bar, tighter control over panel placement, and lots of other little benefits. i don't think i could ever go back to Default UI after using Columns :)

here's a hint: View - Layout - Live Editing