Sneak peek at itunes based subsonic web UI

[JesterEE]

Just tried the subtunes server from a CentOS/3.6-2.el5 system running FF 3.6.13. Most of the issues I was seeing fom my Windows 7 computer are gone! The list and coverflow both work. The searching is still slow (and there is no feedback to let me know its working and not to keep pushing Enter), but it works. As for the HTML5 audio, I noticed that on both platforms it won't start playing until I toggle the "Use HTML5 Audio" radio button once. Until I do, I have a small (~200px x 200px) white box in the upper left corner of the screen. I was also having an issue playing the first song in an album. The interface didn't recognize my selection. Any other track would work correctly.

On an interesting note, I did get subtunes to start playing about 5 songs simultaneously! I don't think it registered the song switch completely, and kept playing the previous song after starting the new one.

Nice little mod! Thanks for sharing it with the community. There are some rough edges that could use some buffing out to make it my default subsonic frontend, but the design is certainly appealing.

-JesterEE

[mattgoldspink]

Hey JesterEE,

Thanks for the feedback. At the moment the HTML5 audio is pretty flaky because of limitations in the library I used on top of it (soundmanager2) and also bugs in various browsers. Since the current version of subtunes there's been a new release of soudnamanger2 so I'll try incorporate that into the next subtunes. As for the searching I'll take a look, I'd not had any issues with it but I'll give it a go on the same setup as you. Also Firefox 3 performance is not on par with Chrome (yet!) I plan to do a bit more around performance to make it work better in other browsers too.

Matt

[mattgoldspink]

For all the people having problems installing on Windows I put together a screencast of how to do it on a new subsonic install: http://www.screenr.com/v7j

Apologies for the quality of the sound and the pauses, my windows box is a bit old and sluggish.

In the process of doing test recordings I hit the issue with:
Unexpected token <":
It looks like this happens when the browser has cached an incorrect install path. To fix this click the cog icon in the bottom left hand corner (it's next to "about") and choose "Subsonic instance url". Just delete everything it displays, click save and then refresh your browser. Hopefully that will fix it for most people. I'll try get it fixed properly in the next release.

Matt

[kvcrawford]

It'd be cool if you were hosting this on github so I could clone the repo, mess around with the code, and even possibly contribute. Just sayin'

Question--does this interface allow easy creation of playlists? Because it's a real PITA to create a playlist with the default interface.

Thanks for the work!

[eptesicus]

Joined just to comment! Great work on this mod. It's brilliant. I'm running Windows 7 and haven't had any issues as of yet... except for the search in the top right corner. Any word or phrase I try and seach, I either get a 500 error, or no error at all and nothing happens, but sometimes it works.


Some ideas:

A different colored loading bar over the progress bar so that one, like grooveshark's player.
Have an option to display every song in the library.
Possibly a back button to go back to your previous screen

Thanks again!

[mattgoldspink]

@kvcrawford

It others a bit of a simpler way to create playlists. You can drag and drop tracks from the grid to playlists on the left bar. As for github I'll see, I don't really want to have it available in 2 different repo's unless it's easy for me to keep them all in sync. Can you use the SVN one for now and submit patches?

@eptesicus

Yeah I've found the search a bit flaky myself. I've not quite narrowed it down yet. As for the other ideas:

A different colored loading bar over the progress bar so that one, like grooveshark's player. --- Can you expand upon which part you mean. I'm not familar with it.

Have an option to display every song in the library. --- I've asked Sindre to support this on the server side, the issue is that in order to do I'd have to make a hell of a lot of calls from the client to the server to get the contents of each directory. It's certainly do-able but for large libraries this would take a long time and use a lot of resources and bandwidth

Possibly a back button to go back to your previous screen --- This sounds reasonable. I''ll likely just use the browser back button (the ipad version already does this)

[steve1977]

@kvcrawford
It others a bit of a simpler way to create playlists. You can drag and drop tracks from the grid to playlists on the left bar.

Thanks! I did not succeed to delete playlists or songs with playlists. Is this not possible or am I missing anything?

Separate question - any plans to support videos (even with transcoding) given Subsonic now fully supports it. This would make the MOD complete!

Last question - would it be possible if I use albumview when in the first folder hierarchy level (i.e., displaying albums), but change to list-view in the second foder hierarchy level (i.e., displaying songs)?

Thanks again for your fantastic work. Looking great!!!!

[mattgoldspink]

@steve1977
At the moment I've not added delete support for playlists. It's definitely something I can do though. For video, I'll look to see what can be added now that Sindre has added support into subsonic. As for the albumview I think that would be a nice feature, basically I'll just split the view into 2 if there are songs then show them in the grid, and any folders I can show with their album art.

[steve1977]

@steve1977
At the moment I've not added delete support for playlists. It's definitely something I can do though.

Thanks for your answer and clarifying that it is not possible now. For me personally, this is not a priority. I was just curious.

For video, I'll look to see what can be added now that Sindre has added support into subsonic.

It is not only added, but in my experience works completely flawless for both AVI and MKV (including transcoding). Nicely implemented, but unfortunately not implemented in any skin yet. Would be terrific if you could give it a crack as your sking is so much simpler/better compared to the original one (I really dislike that the original has all these frames with chats and other stuff I couldn't care less about).

As for the albumview I think that would be a nice feature, basically I'll just split the view into 2 if there are songs then show them in the grid, and any folders I can show with their album art.

Yes, this would be perfect!!! Thanks! Out of curiosity - where do you pull coverart for the artists and albums from? From embedded tags, folder.jpg files or from somewhere on the Internet? How is artist coverart treated?

[yarbo]

I hope this is not a question that has already been answered, but I couldn't find the answer. How does one uninstall this theme, and go back to the default subsonic theme? Do I just re-install subsonic or something (I hope not...)