Rompr / Blog: Recent posts

Some updates and new features. This may well be the last release for the time being.

• There are now options to hide individual members of the sources panel - eg the files list or the albums list. This can save a lot of browser memory, which will be useful on mobile devices.
• Saved radio stations can be re-ordered by dragging
• Pressing enter in inputs will now work
• New play control - stop after current track
• Fix bug where album and track playcounts were not displayed in Last.FM Info
• The crossfade duration can be configured
• Full artist bio can be scraped from Last.FM. It always used to be, but then Last.FM changed their API so they only return the first 300 characters of an artist's biography, which is crap. So There is a new bit of code in RompR that goes and grabs the complete bio from the website and displays it. There's a new option to switch this off (it's enabled by default) just in case Last.FM change their website structure and it breaks.

Some incremental changes from the previous release.

• GUI operation - you can choose the way you add items to the playlist:
  • The default is to double-click to add, click to select
  • There is now an option for single-click to add, which disables selecting. This is for users on mobile devices where double-click zooms the page
• A big speedup in playlist generation, which will be noticeable for people who have very large playlists.
• MPD audio outputs can be enabled and disabled on the fly using the GUI
• Some GUI settings are now stored locally in the browser. Different layouts work better on different devices, and you want the layout to be fixed to the browser. So, the following settings will now be set on a per-browser basis:
  • Hiding of the info panel, playlist, and chooser panel
  • Info panel information source (last.fm/wikipedia/slideshow)
  • Width of the chooser panel and playlist
  • Music click/double-click mode
• There is now an option to select your country - this is used only (currently) when you click on the 'Buy This Album' or 'Buy This Track' links. You will receive prices in your local currency.... read more

You test and you test and you test and then you find a bug the day after your release :)

In 0.20, RompR will crash if you enable 'Don't Scrobble Radio Tracks' and then play... some radio tracks :) 0.20.1 fixes this. There are no other changes.

Phew, what a lot of work.
What started as a little bug hunt turned into a host of major changes - some necessary, some just because...
This version has some major changes to the way the pages are laid out. You won't notice any difference but it is now a lot more efficient. However this comes at a price - you will require a modern browser (i.e. a recent version of Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Opera, or Safari). Internet Explorer definitely won't work now, but I don't think it ever did :)
What else is new?... read more

My pseudo-random version number system continues!
There isn't much new in this release. I've made a few minor tweaks and bugfixes and a couple of speedup improvements.
But the biggest change is that the music Collection is now cached, which massively speeds up loading the albums list and the files list.
There is a new option in the Configuration to make RompR update the Collection every time you load the page - enabling this option basically reverts RompR to the old behaviour. Additionally there are new buttons to force a Collection update and to force a complete Rescan of the entire collection.
People running mpd/apache on slow machines (eg Intel Atom/Raspberry Pi/hacked NAS devices) might find this update to their liking.
Enjoy the music :)

Version 0.16 has been released.
Yes I know the previous version was 0.12 - I had some problems with Ubuntu's Launchpad service which entailed bumping the version number every time it went wrong.
Anyway, good stuff in this release:
Drag and drop from the sources list to the playlist is now supported. This entailed a change - you must now double-click to add things to the playlist. A single click will select things, You can make multiple selections with Ctrl-click (Cmd-click on Mac OS).
The playlist panel and sources panel can be resized.
Last.FM radio has had another overhaul and should now work even more reliably than before.
Any radio stream can now be added to the 'Your Radio Stations' panel
Probably lost of other things I've forgotten about :)

I've created an Ubuntu PPA to give Ubuntu users an easier way to install RompR.
The deb file from there will probably work on other deb based distributions too.
http://launchpad.net/~fatgerman-m/+archive/rompr

This has bumped the version number up to 0.16, simply because Launchpad is a bit rubbish and it took me several goes to make it work. 0.16 will be uploaded to SourceForge as soon as I've calmed down :)

Well, it seems SF.net have changed the layout again and all the useful links have vanished. I'm looking for a host with a more reliable and better laid out user interface. If anybody knows of one I'd be interested.

Anyway, RompR version 0.12 is here. This version has a load of improvements. Many of them are behind the scenes but the major changes are:

1) Rewrite of the information panel so that it now has a full history menu and back/forward buttons. The panel will not update automatically if you've gone 'back' to read something.
2) Much improved internet radio stream handling. All of the icons for internet radio stations have been moved to one panel and I've added a new feature where you can enter the URL of any internet radio stream or playlist and have mpd play it (providing your copy of mpd supports the stream type). Stations you've added in this way will be remembered by RompR.
3) Albums or radio stations in the playlist can be 'rolled up' by clicking on the album icon.
4) Last.FM radio support has been further improved to get rid of some annoying bugs that have been in there for a while.
5) Many minor UI look and feel improvements
6) Last.FM login process has been improved so that the popup window no longer gets blocked by your browser (because it gets opened as the result of a mouse click)
7) The information panel can be hidden
8) The drop-down menus for saved playlists, etc, have a fixed maximum height which means they now get scrollbars when they go over that height
9) Many internal bugfixes and performance improvements.... read more

A couple of minor bugfixes from 0.10
Now sorts albums in alphabetical order in the albums list
An attempt to prevent last.fm tracks being shown as 'Unknown Stream' in the playlist
Album art uploads should now work on Linux and MacOS

Is it correct to go from 0.09 to 0.10? :D 10 is bigger than 9, that's how I work it out :D

OK, so two releases in a week. Yes, I've been bored, sorry - busy.

This version fixes a couple of small bugs in the hotkeys stuff that was introduced last time
It also adds a new file browser mode - so you can browse your music according to the directory structure on your hard disc. This has been the most requested feature. I can't see then point in it myself but I aim to please :D

Well, significantly earlier than expected, I've made a new version.
Version 0.09 adds a couple of features that users had requested, so:
1) Fixes the play controls to the left hand side, which stops them jumping around as track titles change.
2) Adds user-configurable keyboard shortcuts for next, previous, play/pause, stop, and volume.
Any suggestions for other functions you want as a shortcut gratefully accepted.
I think that's it. I haven't been able to test it much so if it all goes horribly wrong please go back to version 0.08.

This version fixes a bug that could have (probably did) prevent anyone outside the UK from listening to last.fm radio. There was a bug where this could happen in the UK too so this probably fixes that as well... :)

One bugfix and one new feature.

Bugfix: If you had an album with multiple discs not all tracks would be displayed in the case where either (a) the tracks weren't tagged with disc numbers or (b) you are using mpd <=0.16 and the files are m4a files. This fix makes rompr always display all tracks in this case, although it may not get the disc order correct.

New Feature: In the album art manager you can now choose to display only albums without covers

This is a bugfix release:

Album Art not displayed when Artist != Album Artist (introduced when Album Artist support was added in version 0.05)
Tracks with " in the filename could not be added to playlist
Strip leading zeroes from track numbers read from mpd
Use Disc number when sorting tracks for albums - mutliple disc albums will now be sorted correctly using disc number and track number from the tags.

Some new features and a few bugfixes. Got my first Reccomendation! Yay! The post under reccomendations also notified me of a few bug, most of which I've endeavoured to fix. So:

Bugfixes

Volume control, scrobble % bar, and seek bar now work in Firefox. (What happened to Firefox, it used to be the one that did things right?)
There is now a favicon :)
Buttons now have tooltips (for browsers which support that, which is all ones I've tried)

New Features

Can now use the 'Album Artist' ID3 tag to help RompR sort your music collection more neatly. I've added a bit to the Wiki about this.
soma fm support. If you haven't seen soma fm, it's pretty cool - a bunch of free radio stations run out of a guy's garage (basically). It's free but if you like it please donate to keep it going :)

Well there seems to have been some interest in RompR. This makes me happy, so I've uploaded a new release.
So, version 0.04 adds a feature to allow the interface theme to be changed. After I spent ages making the brushed aluminium look I decide I now prefer the dark interface... You can theme it by mucking around with css. As this is the first time I've used css, the css is a real mess. Sorry. Just copy one of the existing css files, give it a new name, and mess about with it. A refresh of the browser will make RompR pick up your new theme.
Also fixed a nasty playlist bug which means Last.FM radio stations would not update properly if there was something in the playlist after them.
Added a couple of minor tweaks and a feature to allow you to choose when the song gets scrobbled - as in how much of the track should be played before scrobbling. 50% is the minimum - Last.FM specify this. It's the rules.
Enjoy. Let me know if you like it, it makes me want to keep going.