Squeeze Control for Android (support thread)

[brausebirne]

Thanks for all your replies!

Yes, you are right - the playlists also don't show up in the browser interface. I wrote a mail to the developer. He knows the problem and maybe he will try to fix it.

A few suggestions: It would be nice to have the running time for a playlist like in the web interface (LMS 7.9). Some icons for the artist, song, album and runnig time in the play now screen would also be nice or maybe you could make the play now screen a little bit more like the one in Squeeze Commander.
What about cover flow when switching between the songs like in the Android app "Poweramp"? Also the background effect for the covers in "Poweramp" looks very nice. Below the cover you could add the next track (also like in "Poweramp").
I don't know if it makes sense but I would like to have a way to show only the artist in the play now screen and not the album artist. If there is a track which contains also another artist e. g. abc feat. xyz then appears abc and abc feat. xyz.
After the end of an album or after the countdown of the sleep timer squeeze ctrl should also quit after a fews minutes.

 

[wayne@angrygoat]

It would be nice to have the running time for a playlist like in the web interface (LMS 7.9).

I looked into this and somewhat surprisingly there's no way for a remote control app request the total running time of the current playlist from the server. This means that the only way to get a total running time is to add up the durations of all the songs in the playlist. Unfortunately, since Squeeze Ctrl loads the playlist incrementally as you scroll, there's no way to do this since it doesn't have the entire playlist until you've scrolled to the end.

Some icons for the artist, song, album and runnig time in the play now screen would also be nice or maybe you could make the play now screen a little bit more like the one in Squeeze Commander.

Having icons for the artist, song, etc. just makes the screen look too cluttered and really serves no purpose. I don't really like Squeeze Commander's Now Playing screen.

What about cover flow when switching between the songs like in the Android app "Poweramp"?

That animation is very pretty, and I would love to have something like that, but animation is not a strong part of my skill set. The time it will take me to research and experiment with making an animation like that would probably be better used for fixing problems. Eventually I might look into it, but it's definitely not a priority.

Also the background effect for the covers in "Poweramp" looks very nice. Below the cover you could add the next track (also like in "Poweramp").

The backgrounds in Squeeze Ctrl has a purpose, they can be used to distinguish between different players, so having a constantly changing background doesn't really work. If you hold the device in landscape orientation when you looking at the Now Playing screen, there's a box that shows you the next song.

I don't know if it makes sense but I would like to have a way to show only the artist in the play now screen and not the album artist. If there is a track which contains also another artist e. g. abc feat. xyz then appears abc and abc feat. xyz.

Squeeze Ctrl should already show the track artist, if there is one, instead of the album artist. Does LMS to recognize a separate separate track artist and album artist for your songs? If it does you should be able to see both an album artist and a track artist field in the browser interface.

After the end of an album or after the countdown of the sleep timer squeeze ctrl should also quit after a fews minutes.

I'll look into this, but it will most likely be a more generalize solution where the app will auto exit if the music playback has paused for a certain amount of time.

 

[brausebirne]

In the browser interface I see them both as well as on the display of the touch and the radio. It shows artist, artist feat. another artist. I would prefer if only artist feat. another artist appears. But maybe it's more a LMS "problem"? I don't know. Perhaps I should ask the developer if there is a way to change this.

 

[wayne@angrygoat]

In the browser interface I see them both as well as on the display of the touch and the radio. It shows artist, artist feat. another artist. I would prefer if only artist feat. another artist appears. But maybe it's more a LMS "problem"? I don't know. Perhaps I should ask the developer if there is a way to change this.

I think your song may actually be tagged that way. You should inspect the tags with something like mp3tag http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

 

[brausebirne]

The latest version of LMS (7.9.0-1432742970) fixed the problem with the playlists in the library view.

 

[CypherMK]

Hi,

I have the following issue. When I download songs with squeezectrl to my phone (transcode from flac), I will lose most of my tags. I do have these tags: album, artist, title. But I miss for example: year, track, replaygain, etc...

Can this be fixed? Or is this a Lms issue?

I used 7.8 and 7.9 to test.

 

[wayne@angrygoat]

Hi,

I have the following issue. When I download songs with squeezectrl to my phone (transcode from flac), I will lose most of my tags. I do have these tags: album, artist, title. But I miss for example: year, track, replaygain, etc...

Can this be fixed? Or is this a Lms issue?

I used 7.8 and 7.9 to test.

You must be transcoding the songs when you download them. It's an LMS issue. When LMS transcodes a song, it strips ALL metadata from the song. It has to do with how transcoding is implemented in LMS and probably can't be fixed without rewriting that part of LMS.

The reason you still get some of the metadata is because Squeeze Ctrl requests some metadata for a song when it queues the song for download and after the download is complete Squeeze Ctrl writes that metadata back into the song. LMS limits the number of metadata fields returned per song to 8 items whenever you request the metadata for a list of songs.

Here's the 8 things that Squeeze Ctrl requests:

Title
Album
Artist
Duration
Compilation - no artist is returned for compiliations, so this tells the app to set the artist name to "Various Artists"
Genre
Type - mp3, flac, etc.
Coverid - so Squeeze Ctrl can retrieve the cover art for the song.

 

[CypherMK]

Thank you for the clarification. I've been posting on a thread in the Lms forum in an already existing thread, but no response yet.

Do you now of a developer who can fix this?

 

[wayne@angrygoat]

Thank you for the clarification. I've been posting on a thread in the Lms forum in an already existing thread, but no response yet.

Do you now of a developer who can fix this?

No I don't and I doubt that it will be fixed. LMS uses open source programs to do the transcoding and the way it has to link the programs together makes it very hard to pass metadata thru to the result. Also the transcoding system is really just meant to create streams for players that do not support certain formats so there isn't much of an incentive to change it.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

 

[dipsqueezectrl]

Yesterday I bought Squeeze Ctrl and I find it way the best current Squeezebox Control app. Many years ago I used SqueezeCommander and during the last years Orange Squeeze but Squeeze Ctrl seems to beat both of them.

I have only the following problem:
For browsing my music I have defined CustomBrowse menus for Artists, Albums and Classical Music. The CustomBrowse menu for artists is identical to the regular artist browse menu except that it does not contain artists of classical music (genre=classical). Similar, the CustomBrowse menu for albums does not contain any albums with classical music. The Classical CustomBrowse menu on the other hand comprises several sub menus (Composer, Work, Album, Artist) for classical music only. With this menu structure browsing of classical music is much better (since you usual browse classical music by composer) and at the same time the browse lists for my non-classical music are not cluttered up with items of classical music.

The problem I have with Squeeze Ctrl is that in those CustomBrowse menus neither the Fast-Scroll letters are shown nor the Jump List is available. While I had the same problem with Orange Squeeze (which has also Fast-Scroll letters in the standard artist and album menus but not in the CustomBrowse menus) this feature works in SqueezeCommander. So it seems that it is in principle possible to have Fast-Scroll letters and/or a Jump List even in CustomBrowse menus.

Since I have a lot of music (about 16000 tracks) I would appreciate it very much if you could make the Fast-Scroll letters and the Jump List in CustomBrowse menus since this simplifies browsing of long lists very much. Is this possible?

 

[wayne@angrygoat]

Yesterday I bought Squeeze Ctrl and I find it way the best current Squeezebox Control app. Many years ago I used SqueezeCommander and during the last years Orange Squeeze but Squeeze Ctrl seems to beat both of them.

I have only the following problem:
For browsing my music I have defined CustomBrowse menus for Artists, Albums and Classical Music. The CustomBrowse menu for artists is identical to the regular artist browse menu except that it does not contain artists of classical music (genre=classical). Similar, the CustomBrowse menu for albums does not contain any albums with classical music. The Classical CustomBrowse menu on the other hand comprises several sub menus (Composer, Work, Album, Artist) for classical music only. With this menu structure browsing of classical music is much better (since you usual browse classical music by composer) and at the same time the browse lists for my non-classical music are not cluttered up with items of classical music.

The problem I have with Squeeze Ctrl is that in those CustomBrowse menus neither the Fast-Scroll letters are shown nor the Jump List is available. While I had the same problem with Orange Squeeze (which has also Fast-Scroll letters in the standard artist and album menus but not in the CustomBrowse menus) this feature works in SqueezeCommander. So it seems that it is in principle possible to have Fast-Scroll letters and/or a Jump List even in CustomBrowse menus.

Since I have a lot of music (about 16000 tracks) I would appreciate it very much if you could make the Fast-Scroll letters and the Jump List in CustomBrowse menus since this simplifies browsing of long lists very much. Is this possible?

The list of letters in the Jump List (which is the same set of letters used for the fast scroll) is retrieved from the server, but the server doesn't support it for all types of menus. So Squeeze Ctrl looks at the command used for retrieving a menu to determine if the resulting menu will support that jump letters.

Since Custom Browse is a plugin I guess it doesn't use a standard commands to retrieve the menus so it is not recognized as a menu that will support jump letters. I'm guessing that Orange Squeeze is doing the same thing.

Squeeze Commander accesses the server in a somewhat different way so, it's support of the Jump letters does not necessarily mean that Squeeze Ctrl can support them too. I'll have to do some testing to see if it is feasible.

 

[dipsqueezectrl]

Thanks for the quick response. It would be great if you could make it feasible

 

[wayne@angrygoat]

Thanks for the quick response. It would be great if you could make it feasible

I tried out CustomBrowse and it's not possible for Squeeze Ctrl to have a Jump List (hence no Fast Scroll letters either) for the custom menus. As far as I can tell the CustomBrowse plugin does not support generation of a list of letters for use in a jump list. I don't know how Squeeze Commander does it, but my best guess is that it downloads the entire list and internally generates the letters (unless it's using some undocumented commands for CustomBrowse).

Squeeze Ctrl cannot do that since it incremental loads every menu on demand; ie. it doesn't load the later parts of the menu until just before you've scrolled to them. This is to increase the speed of loading menus and is not something that I will change.

One possible solution is that LMS 7.9 has a built-in feature called "Additional Browse Modes" that can create simple filtered lists of the library. I took a quick look and it seems that this feature works in such a way that I should be able to retrieve what I need to create a Jump List. However, since 7.9 is a developmental version and new features like this would most likely change a lot before the development is done, I will not support a Jump List for menus created using this feature until the next stable version of LMS.

 

[dipsqueezectrl]

That's too bad. I will try to contact Erland (the author of the CustomBrowse plugin) if he can add support for generation of a list of letters for use in a jump list.

But I have one further issue. In the CustomBrowse menus the context menus are not working. There is only the normal + symbol instead of the extended + symbol with the three horizontal lines shown on the right of each menu item. So you cannot acces the context menu for those items. This definitely works in Squeeze Commander and also in Orange Squeeze so I guess it should also be possible in Squeeze Ctrl. Can you please have a look into this?

Thanks

 

[wayne@angrygoat]

But I have one further issue. In the CustomBrowse menus the context menus are not working. There is only the normal + symbol instead of the extended + symbol with the three horizontal lines shown on the right of each menu item. So you cannot acces the context menu for those items. This definitely works in Squeeze Commander and also in Orange Squeeze so I guess it should also be possible in Squeeze Ctrl. Can you please have a look into this?

Ok, that actually is a bug. The code for fetching the menu is there, but the logic to decide if a menu is available is faulty. I'll fix it for the next update.

 

[jared_fr]

Thanks for your great app !

Do you think you will develop the app for windows 8/10 desktop?
The windows store tells me it's only for mobile version...
This OS teribly lacks an app for controling squeezebox server...

Maybe with the new universal app designed for both mobile and desktop version?

thanks

 

[wayne@angrygoat]

Thanks for your great app !

Do you think you will develop the app for windows 8/10 desktop?
The windows store tells me it's only for mobile version...
This OS teribly lacks an app for controling squeezebox server...

Maybe with the new universal app designed for both mobile and desktop version?

thanks

I was in the process of porting the phone version to an universal app a few months ago, but work on the Android app got really busy. I'll get back to it soon.

 

[jared_fr]

Great!
Thank you for your work ;-)

 

[mannekijn]

Great app but I'm wondering if you could add more control to the transcode settings in the download feature. Looks like lame is doing a -v (= -V4) which doesn't sound very good to me. Being able to control VBR or CBR would be nice. Any plans to add that level of control to that feature?

 

[wayne@angrygoat]

Great app but I'm wondering if you could add more control to the transcode settings in the download feature. Looks like lame is doing a -v (= -V4) which doesn't sound very good to me. Being able to control VBR or CBR would be nice. Any plans to add that level of control to that feature?

There's no way to change those settings remotely, you need to adjust the transcode settings on your server. If I remember correctly, you can't even do that within the browser controls, you have to edit a config file somewhere.