Song time, playback buttons, seeking, user-level access

[cartwright.d]

A couple of requests por favor senor Sindre!

-Song length display (passed & remaining) - in browser or push to media client with .pls/.m3u

-Playback buttons somewhere - stop, next, previous, pause

-Seeking within a song - REALLY HELPS for media encoded as one long track

-User-level folder access - deny users permission to defined folders

Things that have already been mentioned:

-VBR display/identification

-Option for playlist playback to be client-side or server-side. Client-side would resolve: seeking, playback buttons, song length display

Thanks! Your program kicks ass!

[sindre_mehus]

Dave,

Thanks for your suggestions

Having a client-side playlist would probably make it possible to show elapsed time in the player (since you can put the song length in the
M3U), but there is no way to seek within the stream. (There is no separate control channel as in some proprietary protocols).

Displaying elapsed time in the browser is feasible (but would be a bit inaccurate due to buffering).

Playback buttons should be fairly straight-forward to implement.

As for user-level folder access: what granularity did you have in mind? Separate directories, or whole "music folders" as configured in the Subsonic settings?

VBR identification and display of average bitrate will be part of Subsonic 2.8 (at least for MP3 files with a Xing header). LAME resampling of VBR will also be supported, most likely.

In summary, things to look for in future versions are: elapsed time in browser, playback buttons, VBR support.

Regards,
Sindre

[cartwright.d]

Hey Sindre,

I'm not a programmer and cannot pretend. On the other hand, I am technical, and run company networks and computer systems for a profession. Day in and out I utilitize MANY programs, mostly personal and some business. I consider myself a software tester/improver (in my eyes, which isn't always the general concensus). I observe programs intuitivity, function, control, interaction, and over-all appearance. All of which for Subsonic have been par, if not birdie

It's obvious you know your sh*t It shows.

I look forward to many great releases of Subsonic. Now that I have it I don't know what I would do without it. I would be very upset if I was forced to switch up to Apache+SQL+PHP+JSP+BLEHHH program to do the same thing yours and perform just as well.

As far as my suggestions go; never say never.

Seeking would be the ultimate for long one-track songs. But hey maybe one day it will happen; just like WinAMP support for SSL.

Having the remaining song time show up in the client or browser would be nice. It already shows how much time has passed, is there a function to take that number and subtract it from the song length? OR show the length of the song in the browser to get a good idea of how much is left? OR add an extra parameter to the search index function to scan the length of the media file?? (Again, I'm not a programmer). OR with CBR files, players can perform simple division of file size by bitrate and possibly determine the length of the song for display.

User-level folder access: I was thinking something simple like listing the available music folders in the user-setup tab and having 'Accept/Deny/Hidden' boxes next to the folder list. Or possibly integrating the users and music folders tabs.

VBR ID/display: awesome! LAME resampling, even more awesome!

THANKS!

Dave