Test My New Program and Website - Contributors needed

toon_mad

toon_mad

toon_mad

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Joined
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This is my first ever website and forum, which can be found here: www.nismo-soft.com

As you may or may not know, I develop Applications (mostly as a spare time self taught hobby). I have created many different programs over the last couple of years (I am by no means a professional programmer), most of them not really worthy of posting about, but I have my newest program which I think is definitely worth a mention.

It is called Media Renamer, which you can see on the main page of my website. It basically renames your media folders to the correct filenames. The website will go more into detail, there are more screenshots on there which will make it more clearer. It has taken me about 6 months to get it to where it is today, with all the features and fixes it has etc.

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But this is where I need your help and contributions. The program works for me, but that is expected I guess seeing as I am running it on the same enviornment it was developed on. I have fixed as many bugs as I possibly can, but there is a chance I have overlooked something somewhere. The program will be freeware, so contributions should not be looked at as a financial gain, but more like a community effort - I will be in need of trustworthy forum moderators ;)

So how can you help?

- Download, Install the program. Report any installation problems.
- Once installed, visit the forum and download some of the Media Profiles. Test them out, report any problems there.
- Report any other errors or problems with the software.
- Create and upload your own Media Profiles.
- Become a forum moderator, I need trustworthy people here no random joe bloggs :D As a moderator you won't be expected to be on all the time, but more information can be provided later.

It is really important that the program is in a tested stable working condition, before the world starts posting, contributing and uploading profiles etc.

As a contributor, your name can be placed in the About dialog of the program (if you wish), you can also become a moderator (ie, part of the team). If you are interested in these opportunites, feel free to post below.

I have been working on other applications too, in the future more will be added to the website. But the focus now is to work with the Media Renamer program.

Go ahead try it out, tell me what you think thanks :)
 
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The website coding is poor. If you want it to be a good program and go far, you need a decent website, one that someone has hand crafted not a WYSIYGE has made.
 
So will the people have to go on your forum in order to download the media list and then apply it to their songs?

Imo it would be good to have an online interface built into the software by which people can search for a specific artist in the database, then by album name if known, or even by a song name which will list out the albums the track appears on, and then allows them to download the needed file from the interface to then apply it to their media.
 
Aedus said:
So will the people have to go on your forum in order to download the media list and then apply it to their songs?

Imo it would be good to have an online interface built into the software by which people can search for a specific artist in the database, then by album name if known, or even by a song name which will list out the albums the track appears on, and then allows them to download the needed file from the interface to then apply it to their media.
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Yes, it's simple enough to do from the forum. Once the program is installed, you can find the profile, click the attachment and select open (not save), it will instantly load into the program ;)

There is room for such future enhancements - it's early days yet ;)
 
toon_mad said:
I am more a software developer, not HTML Web designer :o
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:eek: Send me over that design and I'll code it free of charge. I haven't coded since I signed up to this forum. So I'm rusty. But its like a language if you don't use french for a few months you forget it all.
 
Hyburnate said:
:eek: Send me over that design and I'll code it free of charge. I haven't coded since I signed up to this forum. So I'm rusty. But its like a language if you don't use french for a few months you forget it all.
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I copied the design from the forum :p What do you need me to send, the graphics?
 
toon_mad said:
Yes, it's simple enough to do from the forum. Once the program is installed, you can find the profile, click the attachment and select open (not save), it will instantly load into the program ;)

There is room for such future enhancements - it's early days yet ;)
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I can understand that, but once it gets to more than a handful of artists /albums it'll be a lot more of a pain to sift through them all, compared to doing a simple database search within the program to find what's needed.

Just an idea anyway.
 
Aedus said:
I can understand that, but once it gets to more than a handful of artists /albums it'll be a lot more of a pain to sift through them all, compared to doing a simple database search within the program to find what's needed.

Just an idea anyway.
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It is a good idea, one I will consider. It would make it easier to find what you need I guess, but for now I wont be doing that. I need to know the program works ok before adding more to it.

Edit: I forgot to mention, the forums for profiles are sorted by A-Z so that makes it a bit easier anyway, but I understand what you mean.

KIA said:
Nothing wrong with the website. It's simple & clean.
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That's what I thought, but I don't know much about web design so I bet there is something wrong with it :o
 
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That's what I thought, but I don't know much about web design so I bet there is something wrong with it
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The code behind what you see is not very well written. But as you say people who are just visiting wouldn't know about it.
 
toon_mad said:
Yes, it's simple enough to do from the forum. Once the program is installed, you can find the profile, click the attachment and select open (not save), it will instantly load into the program ;)

There is room for such future enhancements - it's early days yet ;)
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Sorry, but I honestly think this whole concept is a non-starter, simply because it's extremely unlikely that you'll ever get enough user submissions to be any practical use. And then if you did, it would then be a major PITA to manually find, download, and apply a profile for each individual album.

The MusicBrainz database for example has entries for over 800,000 releases and nine million tracks, with very stringent requirements for accuracy and consistency, and there are very effective tools available (eg Picard) to query the database and automatically tag/rename files accordingly... could you realistically ever hope to get anywhere near that? There's also Discogs, freedb, and a decent availability of other tagging/renaming tools... mp3tag, Tag & Rename, foobar2000 and many more, which have all benefited from an extensive period of development and refinement.

The same applies for video files, there are plenty of metadata scrapers and renaming utilities already out there.

I don't like to pour cold water over someone else's hard work and creativity, but with the best will in the world, I don't see how this project brings anything new and useful to the table, and it might be better if you concentrate on your other ideas rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. :)
 
i've got one word for you: musicbrainz.

i cannot believe you've started a project of this nature without knowing about it. if you did know, why aren't using their public API? what's the point of trying to build a database from scratch when this already exists? :confused:

and i'm sorry to say it but your implementation is ridiculous. you seriously expect people to load one album at a time and then check your forum for a profile? have you considered re-releases/special editions/bonus tracks?

the ONLY way to make an application like this is to use TOC lookups online (which means scanning tracks for their length, how many tracks in an album) which takes zero effort on the part of the user. as i mentioned, MB have an API which you could use but i should also say they already have their own excellent application (musicbrainz picard) which will scan an entire collection for you with just a few clicks.

and i just don't think it will work for tv series either. some people will acquire them online and others will rips from DVD and these are usually in a different order. i just don't see how you can automate such a thing. :o

edit: damn you CaptainCrash. :D
 
Hang on...

Who said I was trying to make a public music database??? And I have never heard of musicbrainz.

The screenshots show what my program does. It renames your folders that contain your music with the click of a button.

You must have ripped a music cd before, and the filenames ended up being track1 or whatever, this helps you name them correctly.

It is not meant as a public database to find names and things.

It turns Track1.mp3 into SomeSongname.mp3 as an example.

So much for my time and effort on this then! :o

EDIT: and as for reinventing the wheel, I have genuinely never seen any program like this. Maybe I never looked hard enough, oh well.
 
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toon_mad said:
You must have ripped a music cd before, and the filenames ended up being track1 or whatever, this helps you name them correctly.

It is not meant as a public database to find names and things.

It turns Track1.mp3 into SomeSongname.mp3 as an example.
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errmm... sorry if I'm being thick, but if you're not creating a database, where is your program going to find the information it needs to turn Track1.mp3 into SomeSongname.mp3? How long would it take before you have enough profiles to cover even a tiny fraction of the total releases out there, and what's the point anyway, given that such databases already exist and are freely and publicly available?

toon_mad said:
So much for my time and effort on this then! :o

EDIT: and as for reinventing the wheel, I have genuinely never seen any program like this. Maybe I never looked hard enough, oh well.
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As I said, I don't like to **** on your chips... perhaps your effort wouldn't be wasted if you do as marc suggested, take a look at MusicBrainz and use the skills you've acquired to come up with an alternative to Picard, or something that would query Discogs or freedb? The trouble is, though, the existing apps already do the job effectively, hence my comment about reinventing the wheel...
 
Sorry but there is nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel. Some of the biggest name entrepreneurs have made their name and money by improving or in some cases not someone else's ideas and products.

This is what creates competition, keeps prices down and improvements in pretty much everything we use and do.
 
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Staffy said:
Sorry but there is nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel. Some of the biggest name entrepreneurs have made their name and money by improving or in some cases not someone else's ideas and products.

This is what creates competition, keeps prices down and improvements in pretty much everything we use and do.
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Improving on a pre-existing concept or product is not what is normally meant by the metaphor "reinventing the wheel" (perhaps I didn't use it in the right context) and yes, if he can come up with a better implementation then more power to his elbow.
 
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