SharpSonic - A windows front-end for Subsonic[Beta11 Jan3]

[HighCast]

By the way, the software works at Win7 also without administrative permissions with the newer db
It's just that loading the "select server" window takes about 10 seconds until it draws the fields to the box. This is most likely just a matter of optimization at the later development sprints..if I guess right.

Let's see what we will get our hands on next

Nice work indeed so far!

[eldanno]

Beta 4 just uploaded.
I have tried to make the server selector as responsive as possible.
On my testsystems when you select a server it takes under 1 second to fill in the textboxes. If you notice conciderable lag please let me know.

[HighCast]

Seven seconds from click to the appearance of the texts at the frame.
The package installed now nicely without any issues. However, I did not remove the .net framework components - just th eold release of the Beta3 before installing this one.

By the way, the software crashes, if the subsonic server is not up when you click 'connect'. It tries to connect some time, and then crashes.
You should add some error hadling for this, as well as to other possible error situations so that the software would not crash and make a memory dump of the crash. I believe it can be avoided with quite a smalish fixes. If I happen to find something not working, I'll report them here.

[eldanno]

Handling of server down will be in the next release. I have just been to lazy to add error handling around that
It is a bit weird that it takes seven seconds to get the data but I will look into it some more.

[HighCast]

Seems to work - at least most of it. Adding more than one album seems to slow the app down a bit.

As a feature request, the tree view to the left side would be handy too to show the content of the folder level as directories.

For some reason, the app seems to take a lot of memory (IMO) for just playing it. The first amount is the common Windows memory, second is commit size in kb.



The UI is easy to use, but starting up the thing with the downloads of the content etc actually, by my startstopwatch, takes almost 20 seconds.
Please also note that my Subsonic server remains on another PC at the same network. They are connected through 1Gbps Lan cables through the DSL modem/switch.

Here's the link to the UI, which I use along my 120DPI screen settings..:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22452323/sharpsonicui.jpg

Waiting to see what's coming up

[eldanno]

The UI is easy to use, but starting up the thing with the downloads of the content etc actually, by my startstopwatch, takes almost 20 seconds.

I think I have misunderstood you before, the initial load of the gui is slow as you say. It is the generation of the cover art that takes a while.
The same with the memory usage, a lot of images taking up memory while rendering.
I will try to optimize performance once I get the features I have in mind in and after the 1.0.0 release.
Regarding the treeview I will implement it at some point(at least as I think you mean )
A note about the gui: I have designed it with my setup in mind so it will look best at 1920x1200 resolution and will work best with a subsonic library with this structure:
Music Directory
Artist Directory
Album Directory
Tracks

Hoping to do a release in the next few days with some new features.

[sergiocos]

Hi, eldanno!
Thanks for this great app.
I want to ask you smth regarding caching.
On a server with over 1,500 albums, my cache database is somewhere over 4GB (is it normal?). What exactly is cached? Images only? Or also the music library (songs)? (the second one seems useless, since I cannot cache on my C partition several subsonic servers )

[eldanno]

Hi, eldanno!
Thanks for this great app.
I want to ask you smth regarding caching.
On a server with over 1,500 albums, my cache database is somewhere over 4GB (is it normal?). What exactly is cached? Images only? Or also the music library (songs)? (the second one seems useless, since I cannot cache on my C partition several subsonic servers )

Hi!
The stuff I am caching is names and id´s of the artist/tracks and albums and also cover art. What is taking up space is the Cover art the rest is only textdata used for fast access when searching/displaying artists and such.
My library is around 5500 albums and my database is 2,2Gb in size. It will grow considerably if you have covers with high resolution though(and if you do not limit cover art size on your server).
All music is streamed from the server.
Looking into it I just realised that I cache the album art for each individual track even if the parent folder has a cover...
I will re-write this so that it only caches cover for tracks with no cover on parent in a future version(probably not beta 5 though as I have a lot of other stuff in that and want to get it out before I go away next week)

The database is saved when you re-install the app so if you want to have a new database you need to delete it manually when re-installing.

Thanks for the feedback!

[eldanno]

- The app no longer crashes when server is not available
- The playlist has been redone with more "windowslike" interface, double-click to play right-click for options
- Volume control has been added to the player and it is controlled by keyboard media keys (if no other app has control when launched)
- Local tracks can now be added to playlist. One or more tracks, the ability to add entire folders will be in a future version
- Last.fm scrobbling of local tracks added(Last.fm username must be saved locally)
- It is now possible to love tracks on last.fm(Last.fm username and password must be saved locally)
- Last.fm loved tracks can now be played if they exist in the subsonic library(it will only fetch the first 50 in this version full support in next)(Last.fm username must be saved locally)
- Some bugfixes

It still takes a bit of time for the UI to load when opening if you don´t use local cache, I will try and optimize loadtimes as I go.

[HighCast]

Thanks.

I'll check new feats later on, At this point I'm somewhere that I cannot access my computer..
I'll report if I find something out.

[HighCast]

Here's some notes about Beta5:

+ Initial load time is faster
+ Won't crash that easily (congratulations!!)
+ Now playing showing at the active screen (on three-monitor setup) is really cool!!

- Album load time is horribly slow. After double-clicking the artist name, it takes about 2 minutes to update the content of 20 albums.
- Starting to play the music is also really slow. Selecting an album with 3 CD content (every CD in separate subfolder), the system loads the content of total of 50 songs for about - five minutes while the jog keeps scrolling to show that something should be happening. This is something you really need to fix. Or should it get faster after the DB is in use properly?

Please note that I'm now testing this from my work with really fast network connection, and when I compare the performance of this application to Subsonic's own web ui, this is like a fly walking at the tar spot

Feature requests:
** Ability to scale the content better when resizing the window. At this moment I'm using Sharpsonic at second monitor (1920x1080) and it looks OK in full screen - the album art is rather big, so those (sh)could be scalable from the menu (small/medium/large cover art).

** Ability to use the software in frameless mode so that no scroll bars else than at artist list is shown
** Ability to change to full screen mode on one display, like in internet
browsers by pressing F11
** Ability to show only taskbar notification area icon instead of also at the task bar

[eldanno]

- Album load time is horribly slow. After double-clicking the artist name, it takes about 2 minutes to update the content of 20 albums.
- Starting to play the music is also really slow. Selecting an album with 3 CD content (every CD in separate subfolder), the system loads the content of total of 50 songs for about - five minutes while the jog keeps scrolling to show that something should be happening. This is something you really need to fix. Or should it get faster after the DB is in use properly?

Please note that I'm now testing this from my work with really fast network connection, and when I compare the performance of this application to Subsonic's own web ui, this is like a fly walking at the tar spot

Thanks for taking the time to write this stuff down!
My database when updated took about 5 seconds to show an artist view with 60+ albums so db is definately faster, however I will try my hardest to get the non-db version as fast as the web-ui. I have some ideas but I have not had the time to work on them. Will start using SharpSonic from work tomorrow again (have had a vacation) so then I will see the performance issues first-hand again.
Starting to play music is something I will fix as well, will start playing 1 track as soon as it is available and then add others as it is playing should speed it up.

Will add your requests to my todo-list for future releases.
Could you elaborate some on the frameless mode? Not really sure what you mean with no scrollbars, playlist and albumview would be compressed?

[eldanno]

@HighCast:
Forgot, about the scaling, if you resize the window the cover-art should resize as well? Is that not working?

[eldanno]

Beta 6 Changelog
- All Last.fm loved tracks that exists on the server are now added to playlist
- Fixed some bugs where loved tracks where not found
- Fixed a bug where default server was lost when saving other serverdata
- The app should now perform better when using it without local cache
- Fixed a bug where Last.FM password was lost on save

[Braelvenae]

Thanks so much for this. I absolutely love it. I hope you keep working on it.

Some things to report:

-It still crashes sometimes randomly on me, especially if I am adding multiple songs to the current playlist.

-This crash also happens once I exit out of one album back to another (If size may be related my library is somewhere around ~1900 albums and 500 artists)

(This is all on Windows 7 Home 64 with all updates installed)

Some things to suggest:

A better playlist option; perhaps a way to save them for future loadings.
Continue working on the load time of the GUI and library (though this version is better than previous)


Again, thank you for all your hard work on this project. I look forward to its continued progress.