Folks,

Here is what's currently on the drawing board for tRio v0.1.3:

1. Random support for the current "queue 'n play" approach

2. A new "Jukebox" style playback approach being developed by Chris Campbell.

3. Enhancements to synchronised playback to:
3.1 Automatically synchonise all players listening to the same internet radio station
3.2 Give "slave players" more control over what is being played.

4. Web-based interface (possibly via jreceiver's direct control)

5. Native playlist support (for arm users)

6. Windows installer

Not all of these will end up in the release though. I'll take a look at how things have progressed in a month's time and make a decision on what to include. And hopefully release it a few weeks after that.

If you all respond to this post with the 3 items from this list that you'd like to see most, it'll help me prioritize them.

Cheers
Paul

can you elaborate on #2?

does #4 mean we need jreceiver installed?

On #2, I'll try and get a fuller description from Chris and then let you know.

On #4, implementing the jreceiver solution shouldn't be too much work. But given that there are only are only 2 of us working on this project, I'm not sure that implementing an entirely new web front-end is achievable for this next release. We'll have to see how it goes.

I wasn't too clear in a previous request about volume control which you put in 0.1.2. What i meant was the volume control of the line-output as all my rios go to seperate amps.

Ivé not used trio lately because i'm stuck on jreciever 0.2.3 and couldn't get it play, (http 500 error).

so my two priorities would be:

1. line out fix
2. web interface

sorry i can't write code or i'd help out myself.

bill

Paul,

Hello! And thanks for looking into suggestions for 1.3 - I'll go ahead and put my rating in just for grins.

1. Native Playlist Support
2. Random Support (including native Playlist Support)
3. Web-based interface
4. Giving slave players ability to change master (forwards / backwards in the play list)

I know that's 4...

While I'm not using Jreceiver (was never able to fully get all the pieces working on Windows) - I could help out with any sort of Web GUI Design or mockups.

Thanks Paul!

-Dave

My requests would be:

1. Multi-level selection menus, eg. Genre->Artist->Album->Track.

2. Change play order for Artist->All to Album/Track instead of alphabetical!

3. Line-out volume control.

But to answer your question, my preferences in order would be 2 (whatever it is), 4, 3, 1 and I don't care at all about 5 and 6.

Paul,

I actually took the time to figure out how to install JReceiver and it's working pretty well... No wonder why you didn't put in playlists for ARM - as it works pretty well with JReciever. However, I've come across enough bugs with JReceiver that I'd like to keep my request in for native playlist support.

I'm not sure if anybody else is having the same problems, but scanning in files that have special characters in the file name don't work very well with JReceiver at this time... Such as:

Télépopmusik - Breathe (Charles Hart Mix).mp3

Would cuase it to error out and stop the import process. I know that's an issue that you would be dealing with, but I guess I listed my preferences above based on using the ARM out of the box instead of a complete third-party server component.

Can't wait to see what comes up!

Enjoy!
Dave

I have the same problem with non-ASCII characters. It's in his bug list, and I haven't seen any updates in a while.

I just tried trio among others, and it's a fantastic idea and is far better than the rest.
I would like album ordered albums like everyone else.
I do java, and if I understand your idea, the receiver is acting like an api and screen client, and java classes control the rest.
That said, it's a lot less daunting for me than doing the embedded c, so who knows, maybe I'll try hacking around.

Folks,

An update on how things are progressing with 0.1.3:

1. Random support for the current "queue 'n play" approach
- done

2. Chris' Jukebox mode (more below) - looking good, BUT NOTE THAT THIS WILL ONLY WORK WITH JRECEIVER

3.1. Automatically synchonise all players listening to the same internet radio station - done

3.2 Give "slave players" more control over what is being played - in progress

4. Web-based interface - sorry, but deferred to 0.1.4

5. Playlist support for ARM users - done

6. Windows installer - deferred to 0.1.4

7. Line out fix - deferred to 0.1.4

8. Change play order for Artist->All to Album/Track instead of alphabetical - not started, but I'll try my best for 0.1.3.

At our current rate of progress I think we're about 2 or 3 weeks off have something ready for testing.

On Chris' Jukebox mode, instead of queueing up music to be played (as in the current "Queue 'n Play" mode), you instead position yourself in your music collection and it plays from there.

You browse your collection as an expandable and collapsable tree. The highest level of the tree lists all the artists, each of which can be expanded to show all their albums. Expanding an album then shows all its tunes. And so the structure is artist->album->track. Chris might also build in an alternate genre->artist->album->track structure.

Currently it supports a random playback "across the entire collection", but Chris will also be adding "within the current artist", "within the current album" and possibly, "within current genre" - time permitting.

Cheers
Paul

Have you had any reports (other than the one I'm about to give) about stability problems? I've had a lot of issues with tRio, where (for example) the receivers will stop working and I have to restart the server. Or a receiver, when starting listening to another, won't respond to further controls (it plays fine, but no volume, menu, or anything else, will work). I think I've also had problems when I do a cold restart of a receiver (via the power cord), causing me to need to restart the server.

Also, I keep meaning to check it out, but does the remote work with tRio?

Finally, a feature request -- break up menu lists into sublists, if the number of items exceeds, say, a hundred. I've got something like 350 CDs, with probably over a thousand artists represented (via compilation albums), and it takes FOREVER to find anyone in the middle of the alphabet. Maybe break into A-Z for the top level of an Artist, Track, or Album menu, then (perhaps) AA-AJ, AK-AZ (for example) if the "A" list is too long, etc.

I realize this is probably too late to be asking this (and I apologize for not speaking up earlier), and also that it's really just a hack and not the "right" solution to a better interface, but it'd really help a lot.


david.

David,

Yes, I'm aware that tRio isn't entirely stable yet - it's something I'm quietly chipping away at in the background. Hopefully it'll improve with each new version. There are definately one or 2 fixes in v0.1.3.

The remote does work in 0.1.2 and it'll help you out with your large collection. If you, for example, press the '5' key from the select artist screen, it'll take you to the 1st one starting with 'j', 'k' and then 'l' as press it again. But yes, implementing a search function is a good suggestion for 0.1.4.

Cheers
Paul

Good to hear about some of the stability fixes, and that the remote works (I've been afraid to try it for fear of having to restart the receiver/server again. )

> But yes, implementing a search function is a good suggestion

Not quite a search function, but further intermediate levels within the album / artist / title / genre menus. I can elaborate in great detail later (I've even got a long document I started working on a while ago for hacking Rio Riot like functionalities into the main receiver software -- it might be time to revisit that).

I've been trying to check out progress on the sourceforge page, but you don't seem to be making much use of the bugs or feature request databases. Any chance you'll start using those? Seems a good place to discuss features, etc.

And one of these days I'll probably start looking at the source, but generally these "dozens of java classes" apps just make my eyes glaze over.


thanks again!

d.

I was hoping to get a quick feature request for the 0.1.3 release. My server (jreceiver) is running on a linux box along side many other apps that require the system time to be on GMT. Is it possible to have a local time offset setting in the trio.xml config file for the clock display?

On a separate note I am really excited by all the work that is going into tRio. The only issues I've come across have been mentioned by others in this forum. Please let me know if you need any additional feedback / testing. I'll be more than happy to help where I can.

dan

Folks,

I've just about got #8 (Change play order for Artist->All to Album/Track instead of alphabetical) working now. And so if you press PLAY on an artist, it'll queue all the tracks in album name and then track number order.

A few questions though:

1. Currently the Tunes for Artist screen lists the tunes in alphabetical order. Should this now list them in Albun Name, Track Number order?

2. Getting this working for the original ARM software slows things down GREATLY because it's got to retrieve the album name and track number for each tune. It takes about 1/3 second per tune, so it could take some time if you have 100 tunes for an artist. This is only the 1st time you do it for that artist though - once retrieved the details are cached until the tRio is restarted. Is this okay?

Cheers
Paul

Paul,

What receivers is this new release being tested on? I have a fairly new Dell branded receiver and the 0.1.2 does not work on it. It just sits there at the "tRio" splash screen. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. The installation appears simple enough.

I've never heard reports either way about tRio and the Dell branded players. Has anyone else tried?

If you like I'll have a quick glance at your trio.xml if you PM me with it together with a brief description of your network config.

Cheers
Paul

> 1. Currently the Tunes for Artist screen lists the tunes in alphabetical order. Should this now list them in Albun Name, Track Number order?

Each list should show alphabetical order. If I pick "Artist", I now get a list of all albums (bracketed) + all tunes in alpha order + a "select all". What would be nice is if I could click on an album and get a list of tracks (I think I'd prefer track order at this level since the list is short) along with a "select all".

As for item 2, you can speed this up quite a bit with some code. Get the list of albums for an artist, then get the tracks for the first album, then get the track number for only one album's worth. That should keep the delay in the <5 second range. You can even start playing as soon as you get track 1 and continue grabbing the rest in the background. For a typical 10 track album, the delay would be under 2 seconds average, 4 seconds worst case.

... or just keep playing alphabetically for ARM and blame it on the lame server software ;-)