Artist Art
Alpha 18 adds the ability to search for artwork for artist and album artists. I added in 3 internet based artist artwork sources and also added 2 more album artwork sources. Selecting 'Artist Art' from the context menu will now bring up the artist art selector UI.
Items in the art selector now have a 3 dot menu with 2 options. Select and Preview. Select will choose that image for the artist/album/album artist. Preview will pop up the image in a bigger display. This helps with picking the best quality image. Right now only one of the art apis actually returns the resolution of the image, so the preview is the best way to make sure you are picking the right image.
The artist and album artist detail views now will also show the artwork if present.
New Library Item Layouts
Since artists have imagery now, it made sense to add a grid view. In the process of adding that I ended up adding a few more options and redid the view mode menu to make it less cumbersome. Library views with imagery now have 4 main options: List, List: No Art, Grid, Grid: Compact. Additionally there are 2 other options to modify those views: Cards and Context Menu. Cards will toggle between using the card ui, and context menu will let you turn on/off the 3 dot menu.
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| View Mode Menu |
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| Grid with no context menu |
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| Grid: Compact with no context menu |
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| List with no context menu |
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| List: No Art with no context menu |
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| List: No Art |
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| List |
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| Grid |
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| Grid Compact |
If the context menu is turned off, a long press of the item will bring up a dialog with all the options / actions that the 3 dot menu contained. If you would like to start multi-select, choose the 'select' option at the end and that will enable multi-select mode. Also note that the ugly default "no album art" image is used when there is no artwork. Now a letter based image is generated using the first 2 letters of the item with a background that uses the primary and primary dark theme color.
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| Multi select |
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| Grid size of 3 |
Tablet UI / Split Mode
Fans of the 2.x holo theme will be happy to see the split mode is back. Right now its only available for large displays / tablets (it uses 600 density independent pixels for the shortest dimension as the cutoff currently), but a future update will allow smaller devices to toggle it on in the options (it will be always on for tablets).
Split mode basically takes the screen and splits it in half. One half will always show now playing, and the other half will show the view you navigate to.
I have only tested on a nexus 7 and a galaxy tab e 8in so far, so I am not exactly sure how this layout works on the 10 in tablets or chrome books.
Split view will certainly be improved over the beta, but this is it for tablets for now. Both tablet and phone UI will get improvements with the album art as well. The goal is to show art with the correct aspect ratio without clipping part of the image.
Smart Crossfade
The addition of auto dj caused me to rewrite some of the logic for crossfade. Previously there were some crossfade options that weren't exactly straight forward, so I simplified things. Under the crossfade mode there is now just a "Auto Crossfade Mode" with 3 options:
- Smart Crossfade: Only crossfade if the 2 connecting songs are not consecutive tracks on an album.
- On Shuffle Only: Only crossfade when playback mode is set to shuffle.
- Always: Always crossfade.
Smart Crossfade does require correct album tags and track number tags, otherwise it will just always shuffle. Smart Crossfade now allows auto dj to not crossfade when playing an album straight and then start crossfading again when auto dj starts adding new songs to the end of the queue.
3.0 Alpha 18 (2019-12-08):
New:
-Added additional album art sources
-Added loading progress indicator to album art selector when search for art
-Added setting to determine when to auto crossfade 'Auto Crossfade Mode": Smart Crossfade, On Shuffle Only, and Always
-Added artist art search/downloader
-Artist/album artist details will now show art if present
-Added grid view to artist and album artist list
-Added view modes with no art to the album list
-Added new letter placeholder for items with no art
-Added Grid: Compact view mode to artist/albumartist/album views
-Added view mode checkbox to turn on/off the 3 dot context menu. If off, a long press will bring up the context menu options
-Added initial tablet ui (split mode)
-Effects/EQ standalone UI now has a mini player
Improvements:
-Condensed card view mode options into a single card check box in the view mode menu
-Minor scrolling behavior improvements
Fixes:
-Sorting album list by 'Artist' will now sort by artist first and then album name
-Fixed issue where widget would be invisible until gmmp is launched
-Fixed crash with the filter menus
-Ignore case when using 'Ignore Prefixes" sort modifier
-Fixed seek bar preferences not showing selected value
-Fixed preloading of art in lists
-Fixed album details text color when using light theme with a light primary color
-.nomedia is now created in cache folders to keep imagary out of the android media scanner
-Fixed issue where audiobook and podcast tab would show every album/song when selecting an artist
-Fixed now playing when no song is loaded (now treated like no album art)
-Fixed issue where some of the effects UI was cut off
Downloads: