3.0 Work in Progress 13: Cuesheet improvements

Most of the work I've done since the last post has been behind the scenes so there is not too much to show.  I rewrote the audioengine management piece (what handles the interaction with gonemads audioengine, android media player, and chromecast), rewrote the crossfade code, and cuesheet handling.

Cuesheets are something that the majority of gmmp's user base probably does not use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_sheet_(computing), but they are a nice feature.  For those who do not know, a cue sheet allows you to listen to a single large audio file as if it was split up into tracks for each song.  GMMP has always had decent support for CUE files (they would appear as individual tracks in the library views), however in the folder browser they would just appear as a .cue file and the single mp3 / audio file. 

In 3.0, the folder browser will actually extract and list the individual tracks in a CUE instead of the single file.

Below is what the actual folder on disk looks like.  This example is a single cuesheet with 5 separate hour long mp3 files (its a electronic/trance mix i believe).

Folder view from solid explorer

This is how it will now appear in GMMP 3.0

Cuesheets can also be embedded into the tags of files.  GMMP supports that as well

Next up will be the new equalizer / effects UI.  I will most likely also rewrite a lot of the underlying DSP/EQ code as well. 

3.0 Work in Progress 12: File Browser UI

Next up on the new UI list is the file/folder browser.  I also rewrote the file/playlist handling on the backend to be much more streamlined.  A lot used to go on when playing folders and i've greatly simplified that.  As always, the file browser will show anything on the file system and does not care if its in the database or not.  This is great for navigating, but caused a lot of issues when a user went to play a file or folder.  I am sure some were familiar with the issue where songs would "disappear" from the queue after reloading GMMP.  This was because the user played a file that was not scanned into the database.  GMMP would play the file fine in the queue, but when the queue was persisted to the database those files were lost.  In 2.x GMMP would try its best to get everything scanned in by running silent scans of folders as you navigate into them.  While being pretty inefficient, it worked for the most part.  The big issue happened when a user would select a folder to be played and that folders contents were not scanned it.  GMMP did a bunch of stuff to account for this, but in the end it was very hacky/ugly and really bloated the codebase.

This time around for 3.0 I came up with a much better approach.  The new UI / data backend has some nice capabilities like auto updating when its backing data in the database changes.  Now when a file is played, GMMP will look to see if its in the db, if not it creates a placeholder on the spot.  The placeholder just contains the filename and a track id which is all that is needed for putting a song in the queue.  If any placeholders were created, gmmp will then run a scan to populate all the placeholders with the information from the tags.  Any UI that was displaying the placeholder will auto refresh and show the tag metadata.  So now there should never be a case where files are lost from the queue on restart.

New UI (I switched up the theme colors just to add some variety to the screenshots)

At the top is the QuickNav which is scrollable horizontally and each folder is clickable to instantly jump back up a few folders (the video below will show this).  Like every other list item, the metadata shown is customizable.  In this screenshot below the first item is a playlist which is just displaying its filename and the items below that are showing the song name and duration.

I plan on adding the ability to highlight the currently playing track (i also think i can add that ability to the library views. I know this is requested often).