ShaunsMediaSystem - Released

[thirdprize]

ShaunsMediaSystem

Anyone want to try out my new file manager software for me? Its small and fast and has a nice GUI.

This is a little app I wrote that addresses some of the problems I see with the existing file manager software. These were
1 - You have more files than fit on your player at any one time. How do you make it easy to just get the stuff you want on there and how do you make it easy to update with new stuff?
2 - Sorting by names. The Orb should be next to Orbital and Bob Mould should be next to Morrissey, not Bob Dylan. Plain sorting by name is not quite good enough.

To run it
You need to have Microsoft’s .Net framework 1.1 installed. Then just double click the executable.

To set it up
The first time you run it, it will ask you for the directory where you keep all your music. Once you have done that, it will go through and list all your music folders. Its really designed for use with music ripped with WMP and by that I mean it looks for music in a \artist\album\*forma t. All these will be listed in a tree.

Next click on the Options button to bring up the options dialog box. Here you can set the drive where your player appears. The option “Group Alphabetically” will create directories on your player called A,B,C etc and put the artist in the relevant folder based on their name.

G:\A\Art Brut

G:\B\Beastie Boys

The Categories panel allows for clever Artist renaming. In the right hand list you should have all the names which are peoples names. Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, etc. The left hand side is everyone else. “Move Prefix” will move the word “The” to the end of an artists name, so “The Orb” becomes “Orb, The”. “Surname First“ will move make “Tim Buckley” into “Buckley, Tim”. If you don’t use either of these options then you do not have to bother with the two lists.

There are a few other options but they are not implemented yet.

Generally if you have copied any files over and then changed any of these options it is probably best to delete everything on your player and copy it all over again.

To use it
You can select music either by checking the artist (which selects all their albums) or by just selecting a particular album. De-selecting an album you have previously copied will delete it from your player. The state of the tree is saved when you close the program, so when you restart it should be as you left it.

The first two buttons in the toolbar select and de-select everything.

The next button goes through your media folder and adds/removes anything that has changed.

The next button will set the check boxes in the tree to match the contents of your player. This is handy if you happen to de select everything by mistake.

The following two buttons start and stop the copying of files onto the player. When it start copying it, it first deleted anything that has been deselected since the last copy and then copies anything new over.

Settings and About bring up their relevant dialogue boxes.

Finally, down the bottom are a status bar and a progress bar. The former provides a few stats like how much you have selected and how much free space there is on the player. The latter just shows the progress of the copy procedure.

Saved settings
Everything in SMS is saved in two files. These are SMS_SETTINGS.XML and SMS_FOLDERS.XML and are found in the same folder as the application. While they are text files, they should not be edited.

Any comments
Then let me know what you think of it. Any suggestions can be posted here.

Shaun

[thirdprize]

Thanks to everyone that has given me feedback on this. Just to say that version 1.2 is now available if you want it. As well as a smarter interface and handling more file types, it now does automatic (per artist) playlists as well. You can get it Here

Enjoy.

[thirdprize]

thanks to everyone who has downloaded it.

Having added play-lists i now find them really useful. Especially the one in my "Various Artists" folder which ends up sounding like my own personal John Peel show. what with the 52 character limit, there are some albums that just won't get played though. so I'm thinking about adding an option to truncate the names of the albums/tracks to make sure they all fit the limit.

What would people prefer? losing a word or two at the end of the file name (not the extension) or a word or two in the middle. same goes for album titles. it would probably be the middle to cater for a "Dicks Picks 59" and "Dicks Picks 60" type situation. this would allow up to 23 characters for the album name and 23 for the track name. the logic is that the playlist entry has to be 52 characters long and if its saved in a sub folder then you dont need to include that folder name in the entry.

would you rather the whole file name (artist\album\track. mp3) was reduced to 52 characters instead? so you could make your own playlists saved wherever you want and still be able to access any file?
they might be giants\dial a song - 20 years of they might be giants\07 dr worm.wma
would become
they might be\dial a song giants\07 dr worm.wma

any thoughts?

[MattyJ]

Hey Shaun, I really like your program and use it all the time for my iRiver. I don't use playlists and I use rockbox so the 52 char limit doesn't really bother me. I was thinking, now we've got albumart on rockbox, can we have the option to copy bmp files over with the rest of the album, as SMS only currently allows for jpgs?

I for one would really appreciate this! Otherwise great work.