Notices

You can browse the folders in the folder viewer and press the [+] button for any folder you want to add to your library.

I've got ~1500 mp3s in my collection. They're organized into many directories and subdirectories. They're in (a directory on) the removable memory card of my n810, symlinked into ~/MyDocs/.sounds/

If I try to browse the library by Artist, I get the "Updating Index" screen, which hangs at 31% complete.

Running "MediaBox 2> err.txt" when I do that produces the attached file. It complains about a UTF error, but it doesn't seem to tell me which file/directory it's having trouble with.

I do have a few direcories/files with extended characters in their names. If I remove them, I can browse the library. Trying to add this directory to the playlist (so I can shuffle it all) however adds only 442 items. It's still failing somewhere, but I can't see anything in the log.

Does MediaBox just not handle these?

This looks like there's a invalidly encoded tag in a file.
Running MediaBox -vvv >err.txt might reveal more information.

But it's bad that this error causes MediaBox to hang. I'll investigate this.
Thanks for reporting.

Wow I love the new version of Media Box, the new thumb scrolling is great for rapidly going down a list and the thumb sized volume is great too. I've changed over to MediaBox because I have a large collection of mp3s on a 8gig card, and MediaBox handles a large collection great.

I do actually miss the ff and rewind arrows in full screen "Car" mode, ive noticed there is a hidden button to fast forward but sometimes i overskip and want to go backward in the car. Is there a way to rewind in car mode? It would be cool if you could just swipe left and right to change to the next track. It also would be nice to have larger scroll bar and larger ff and rewind buttons in regular screen mode, especially considering you have blank space at the bar right next to it. Also if you don't want lyrics, it would be nice to turn those off in settings or at least not show the "no lyrics found" message.

I know MediaBox can create playlists and that works fine.

It can also use playlists created using other programs, but importing playlists is currently non-user friendly. Currently to import a playlist I have to:

1) Make sure MediaBox is not running
2) Make sure the .m3u file's contents reference media files using a full path on the tablet e.g. /media/mmc1/music/whatever.mp3
3) Use x-term to copy the .m3u file to the .mediabox directory. Since this is a hidden directory (because of the dot) one cannot use the default Maemo filebrowser as it does not contain a way to see hidden directories. One could also use the file browser of a host computer (e.g. a desktop running windows or ubuntu) but users will still have to know the directory exists and have checked "show hidden files".
4) Start MediaBox.

I suggest adding in an "import playlist" button which will present some kind of filebrowser interface to choose the .m3u file. This should at least copy the file to .mediabox.

Ideally, there should also be some way of asking if the file references inside matches the directory structure of the mp3 files on the tablet. So if on my home machine running Ubuntu, I'm running Rhythmbox and export a playlist, the file references inside contain full paths to files on my desktop maybe something like /home/mydesktoplogin/music/mysong.mp3

I'd want Mediabox to figure out that /home/mydesktoplogin/music doesn't exist on my tablet and ask me what I'd want to substitute it with (e.g. /media/mmc1/music) or maybe even "best guess" it:

Maybe it could look for a file with the same filename in its index, and if some of the directory structure looks the same go for it. So if I have something like /media/mmc1/music/Beatles/Yellow Submarine/All You Need Is Love.mp3 and the playlist from my ubuntu machine has /home/mymachinename/music/Beatles/Yellow Submarine/All You Need Is Love.mp3 it'll match the two and rewrite it's copy of the playlist to match the location on the tablet. But if that's too complicated, the first step (let the user select the playlist file and copy the file as is to .mediabox) would be sufficient.

Let me know if I haven't described my suggestion well.

Adding some thoughts to jcharpak post.
Playlists could become a new Library Item type, playlist files could be put in some folder (not hidden one) and easily managed.
And what's about adding some more info about items? E.g. not only file type, but length, bitrate (for audio), length, resolution, streamrate (for video), length, width and height (for pictures). Or even make it configurable (e.g. I want length and file type to be shown for audio)...
As far as I tested animated GIFs are not supported... Am I wrong?
And I'm thinking of FTP plugin for MediaBox... I've got an FTP server running at home and sometimes I'm downloading music and videos from it instead of finding USB cable or using my external card in card reader. But MPlayer specs (and other backends') are to be read to be sure ftp is supported for playing media.
And for HTTP it would be nice... So it even could be a Network plugin...
Furthermore, what's about making UPnP a separate plugin? It is for me a union of not using it and addiction to not having something I don't use

P.S. All the lines written above are IMO and result of finally having free time

Thanks for all your suggestions.

I like the ideas regarding playlists. It's true that MediaBox uses m3u format internally, but currently doesn't recognize m3u as a media format in the file browser. Maybe playlists could be treated like albums in the music browser. Or the playlist viewer lists the playlists that were found while scanning for files.

Adding more information, such as bitrate, to the items would require to retrieve that information, which at least slows down scanning time. Tags are read during scanning, but bitrate or other properties are not always present in the tags.

Animated GIFs are not supported right now.

Having a FTP plugin in MediaBox should be no big deal. Even if mplayer or the other media backends wouldn't support FTP, we could always have the data stream piped through a local proxy HTTP server, like the YouTube plugin does (for being able to save to disk).

UPnP could be made a separate plugin, but I considered it an important part of MediaBox, so I put it into the main package.

What's the chance of lyrics being read from the mp3 file directly in the future? Getting all those lyrics for my songs is kinda time consuming lol. It'd be easier if I just used a software that embed the lyrics into the tags.

The chances are good. Are you already using a software to embed lyrics?
If yes, how does the embedding look like?

It looks as if you're saying that getting the lyrics and embedding them is easier than just getting the lyrics, which sounds odd.

Does some music come with the lyrics embedded in the tags? That's pretty neat.