Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

I haad to change this back as my new ogg files put on my N810 were not getting indexed by Canola anymore. The existing ones played fine but I could not add new files.

Switching back to oms solved the issue.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hi Talimage :

Well, we really wished gapless playback was just a matter of tweaks here and there, but it's quite complicated to get to work with the platform components. But this is by far one top priority, the problem is that is not a simple job (so I need a very experienced developer to do so) and I am here in a new city to see if I can get that person in :))

YoDude: We do not initiate, this is true. We indeed try to keep Canola not too tied to the platform, and also do not go against the rules too much in this " system important" matters. So, we do not mess with the connection manager. as we do not have an way of connect inside canola, to show the connection on top of canola makes the same sense but I think your point is really valid and now is possible that we implement it.

Scrobbling ? It's there dude : scrobbling is the act of sending the musics you have listened to. You can turn on and off.

About the " style " this is due to last.fm large database of other kind of data... tags that we don't have, and making users do it manually is impossible (that's why last.fm is nice because it's great on get users feedback on some musics and gather this data together. This can be studied as a plugin!

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Firstly I would like to thank the Canola team for bringing such a brilliant application to the tablet. Canola makes frequent appearances on my N800 and I often wonder how clunkie life was before I installed it.

Now my question, an easy one, but one which I cannot find the answer to in any forums.

Bookmarking videos within the YouTube add-in - how can this be done?

I see no interface to allow a playing video to be selected and added to the 'Bookmarks" menu.

Your advice please.

Thanks,
Alan

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

For some reason I had totally skipped this message.

It would be really nice if you have time to do that. Thank you in advance!

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hi Marcello and Canola Team,

a Big thanks to you guys for the excellent application. And certainly my daughter is a most happy camper with Canola :)

Thanks for the tips, I will try guiding her away from the You-tube to the My Videos icon. In fact she know YouTube so well, that she actually when clicking on the C2 Icon in simple Launcher (she know which icon to start canola too) calls it as "YouToo". Canola is synonymous with YouTube to her.

And, no she can't read, but I do hope she will build her own Canola when she is 10 years - thanks for your good wishes - may you live long :D )

Will try getting a video of her using Canola (every evening she has to have her quota of a bit of "YouToo" on her mom's N800).

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Alan : in the playing screen (not fullscreen) you have a button on the lower right. This button is a contextual "Options" button, that brings all other commands related to that item in focus (in this case the video you are playing) so if you click there you will find:

- save this video
- bookmark this video

Then after this you are able to go to your bookmarks on the youtube plugin main menu and see your videos that were bookmarked and play them from there.

BR

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Thanks for sharing this information Marcelo, I had seen this context sensitive feature displayed on an on-line demo but for an earlier version. My version, beta 9, does not have the bookmark icon present, indeed I notice it doesn't have the 'return' icon in the bottom left corner also!

Perhaps a broken install?

Your thoughts and guidance please.

Regards,
Alan

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Yes, it can be that something is not loading correctly. Because you need to have at least the button back (or return) always there : /

If you restart.. it always come without the icons on the bottom? and nothing changes if you change themes?

Also try the following : can you go to the youtube playback window of any video.. and press the right bottom corner?

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Thanks for sticking with me Marcelo. No buttons in eithher bottom corner. Also pointing in either corner changes nothing. I navigate between screens using the 'return' button on the n800 pad.

Do you want me to try anythhing else for your diagnostic needs or shall I remove and re-install?

Cheers,
Alan

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Suggestions from a user who prefers audiobooks to music:

1. Support for Audible's proprietary .aa files (they may demand that you purchase a license.)

2. The ability to stop play of a file in the middle and pick it up at a later time.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hmm I still don't understand why canola can't read my id3 tags sometimes (what does it use?). It also seems to duplicate the album in the album arts and album sometimes. For example right now..

Danity Kane
Dark Light
Dark Passion Play
Dark Passion Play
Dark Passion Play
Dark Passion Play
Dark Passion Play
(so on for how many times there are a song in this album)
then it goes onto the next album (some are fine)

then it does it again for another album with how many listings being how many songs it has

It's really really annoying. >.<

Edit:

So I'm messing around with the afflicted files with my mp3 tagging tools and noticing they have different tags sometimes (like id3v1 id3v2). So I cleaned them up and standardized them and it seems the problem is going away.

Now to figure out why the music programs aren't recognizing my folder.jpg or folder.jpeg in each music folder >.<. Could it be because they're to big? 500x500?

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Launghing, Canola tries (have been improving since beta 1) to support most of id3Tags, but it's quite hard to support all formats (there are differentes, in genres, etc) and we think we are at least a lot better than beta7 and backwards. So , if you still have the files.. it would be of great use to detect the problems in them. BUT the album art duplication is a choice of us for somethings and to avoid the extra cases with placed the settings : combine multiple art options, that merge duplicated albums like your case.

BR

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

It's not that they're various artists on a single album (say a movie soundtrack). It's the same artist from the same album they produced. (like Weezer and Weezer (The Green Album..which they have three albums named Weezer which gets real annoying). I understand what you mean since I do have movie albums that I have combined using what you described.

Unfortuantely I fixed the problematic songs already, but the next time I load songs onto my tablet that I find does this, I'll be sure to send a sample to you to see what's the issue. :D

I'm certain it's a tag issue since the problem gone away after I updated the tags in the programs I use (the program also auto deletes existing tags) to make sure it's clean. When I tried looking for the differences among the affected albums I couldn't see anything significant so maybe you can find something I missed. :)

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

I've noticed that my Canola performance has significantly dropped after installing a few applications and some times videos lock up (when I use MPlayer directly it doesn't have these problems), I'm not sure which application did it, but it may be related to python. I notice though that after running Canola also, that performance of my entire system is bogged down, and that python is running the background.

When I get a chance I'll have to uninstall a bunch of applications and see which one degraded Canolas performance.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Lee : The mplayer outside canola (pure mplayer) is indeed faster than any other mplayer playback "inside" application (and I mean really inside : embedded mode). So the playback will be worse in canola because we use that mode. We are trying to get another ffmpeg based back end, but it's not as simple as it may sound to get something with the same performance as mplayer.

About the bogus, yes indeed it may be something you installed that is also eating CPU and competing with canola for that. So, can you run canola over SSH? try doing a top (It won't show too much, but at least you will be able to see the other application eating the cpu at the same time. We sometimes believe it can be the crawler as it is really processor intensive and when things go wrong (some corrupted file etc) it can hook the cpu and affect the system performance.

Canola is a python application, so you will always find python on the background, but another python application can be effecting, or also not killing the possibility you've just found a scenario where canola is bringing itself down also.

See if you can send us more info on how to reproduce and we will hunt this bug down!

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

I've just started playing with cover art so please forgive me if this has been dealt with before. According to this past post, I should be able to put a cover.jpg file in each album's folder & Canola should pick it up, but it doesn't. Here's a listing of my currently loaded music folders & the cover files:

Canola plays the music fine but doesn't display the covers. I installed Canola Tuning, but Canola then just downloads & saves cover.jpg files in it's own ~/.canola/covers directory. I just want Canola to display the cover if I've supplied it. is this not the way it's supposed to work or do I misunderstand something? TX

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hi, its supposed to work that way. Try seeing if you covers are inside the cover file (for selection) go to the 3-screen (big cover) view, and click on the cover. you will be presented. If you have cover in all your folders, go to settings and set the covers sources to only local covers.

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

If I understand correctly, I have to have cover art in every folder for any one of them to be used? And do I have to manually tell Canola to rescan for covers each time I start it up? I was hoping that if I had cover.jpg files in only half of my albums, for example, then they at least would be automatically be detected & displayed. I've tried setting Canola to only scan for local covers, but it still takes a looonnnggg time to scan & still doesn't seem to use the ones I already have. tx

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

I use the newest version of canola on my n800. I try to use canola to play the flac files on my 8G transcend sdhc card. Most of the files can be found and played. But the files in two folder cannot be found by canola while the folder shown. Is it a bug of canola?

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hi again!

Well, the plugin is integrated but not automatically called yet. We want to do this, but this is scheduled for the "wizard" that we always planned to have but we needed to make sure everything is working. When the wizard is working, after installing, you choose the folders, it asks if you want to download / search covers, generate thumbnails etc... But for now, you need to install canola-tuning (plugin is the better option than the standalone version) and then run it from the settings.

You just need to run it once, and if you add / modify too much your library then it would be needed to run it again (it's not automaticaly, also to avoid problems for now) but should be in the future.

About the cover art : Canola uses the regular approach ; if you have a folder (album) that has mp3's on it, canola tuning will look for the cover.jpg IN that folder and do what is needed to use it as cover (resize, do the 2size of covers etc)

If you added just one music.. you can go straight to that album and pickup a cover or downoad covers just for that song on the 3-album art screen.

If it's not seeing the covers, something is breaking the script. If you can try lowering the number of folders (try "watching" one folder at time) and see if canola can see it... it's highly probable that you found a bug on the tuning, then we need to find out what inside some of your folder is breaking the script :)

But looking at your data: 2 8giga bytes card it's a lot of space / possible a lot of music...

can you provide us than the details after you scan just one or 2 folders? then send one or 2 mp3s + the jpg? then we can add to our test suite and fortunately find and fix the bug with this help from you!

@superleon

Hi Leon, maybe it's a bug, but also there's a possibility that some of this files are in a FLAC version that we don't support : / can you provide the files that are not found for us? you can send to my email : handful AT gmail.com then I wll gladly place them in our testing library, and if the bug shows up we can fix it!

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

I would just like to say that I really like Canola 2. The youtube plugin, album art, skins, and everything else are great. Thanks for making it!

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hey Handful :)

Thanks again for an amazing app, I'm really appreciating Canola more than ever after spending over 30 hours in the car the past week!

A quick search didn't turn anything up on this, so I've got a feature/hack request,

Would it be possible for you to add

/media/usb/

to the list of folders you can ask canola to watch for media?
or if this is too user-specific (I might be the only one out here who plays movies/media off a usb stick) could you point me to a config file where I can add this?

Thank you!!
Josiah

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hi Guys,

in behalf of the team, thanks for the nice words. I think indeed usb is really high on our priority, so I will push it as much as I can to add this in the next beta!

:)

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hi
I really tried to stay off the N8x0 versions, as I thought I was strong enough to wait for the next major release (and be able to live with my underpowered N770).
Well - Canola (and the UPNP plugin) made me realize that I "needed" a N8x0 - so I bought one 2 weeks ago on ebay, and what a thrill.

First thing I installed was Canola2 - and since I was about to go on a trip, I loaded an 8gb sd card with movies and music. In that process I found a few bugs:
Setup:
I put 35 albums (3,2 gb) and 10 short movies in xvid+mp3 format (240 mb) onto the sd card. Every mp3 has embedded cover art + folder.jpg image in each album folder.

1: [bug] Running the "cover arts and thumbnails" import imported about 80% of the covers - but for some odd reason some of the albums didn't get any cover art. I tried to unload all music on the sd card, and only put back the folders/albums that didn't work in the first run - and the second time, these covers were imported without a problem. It seems the cover art importer chokes when the "list is too long" (on a side note I am puzzled that canola2 wants to re import album art...)

2: [bug] Tried to play videos - but only got a blank screen. Tried to read documentation + website, but I could find no direct info about mplayer being bundled or not. Tried to install mplayer and restart canola - still nothing. Read some more, and learned that canola automatically switches to mplayer if it is installed. Rebooted the N800 - and voila - canola played the xvid videos fine.
It seems that canola doesn't look for mplayer installation on the fly - but only after reboot.

3: [bug] After canola had imported the mp3 info, there was a typing error in one of the names, resulting in two entries. I could not recreate this on the original files, as the "Artist" tag was the same. After some poking, I found out that the "Band" tag was wrong in some of the mp3 files - and it seems that canola2 uses the band tag for artist. This might be what you want - but would be nice to write this somewhere, so users are aware...

4: [bug] After the initial load of files, I wanted to reorganize the folder structure on the sd card. I did this, and went into settings in canola to change the media folders. Every time I tried to change the watch folder, canola set it back to the old folder. After a reboot canola had switched to the correct folder.

5: [suggestion] The thumbnail creator for videos uses a fixed ms for doing a screenshot. The videos I brought was the Pixar short movies - so I mostly ended up with either a black screen or the Pixar "logo". I think the option to create thumbnails is cool - but would be nice if the thumbnail creator either had a variable (longer) ms count before it took a screenshot - or that it presented the user with fx. 4 different images for each movie that you could choose from.

6: [suggestion] Playlist support would be nice - could be done with a button that switches between play and add mode. That of course brings up the whole backend needed to support playlists....

That's it for now - an amazing piece of software !

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

nikolajhendel

Hi! thanks for the very long feedback, and great detail on some actions.
indeed we received most of this bugs, and some of them are quite complicated because they deal with fully reload. Those may take a little more to " refresh " platform stuff. Mplayer embedded mode also has it's flaws, but this is a good tip and we will investigate more. A wizard is also need to improve the first usage experience.

The album covers, as you reloads, probably if you already have covers it will pass forward to the others, but as you said it's probably choking.. but in some file, because we do have 8 giga byte based media library for tests (with all kinds of files, from all countries etc) and it's going "ok". So we need to find out problematic files that triggers the bugs so we can fix it.

the number 4 is indeed true, we are working on this, trying to make a "hard" refresh, but it's also not as simple as we tought it would be. Nothing that cannot be fixed :) just needs time.

5: the thumbnail is actually (or it should) using a random number, but up to a maximum second indeed. You can go to the video, and from the options (not on fullscreen playback screen) you can choose set thumbnail in the desired frame. (it seems that some formats are returning black screens, but in our tests with most of supported formats it sets correctly.

6: playlist is already there. go to " on the move" or just click and hold a item, to add it to the playlist. After adding the files, you can go to playlist list and save the dynamic list with a name and start a new one. in the current version there's no recursive add, so you can add just music items (not albums, or artists) as this can generate some really have recursive adds, and we need to do it more carefully.

Anyways, thanks for the nice words, we are indeed running to improve it more and solve some of the issues you said, do better others, and so on , and feedback like yours are the best thing to guide us!

BR from brazil,

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

First, great work with Canola, it stoped me from replacing my Nokia with an iTouch.

I run Canola 2 beta 9 on my Nokia n770 with OS2007HE, and it works fine and fast most of the time. My only problem with it is that sometimes, when it should start a new song (first song or after it just played some), it just showes me the info for the next song and the small circle at the bottom is circling, but the song dosn't play. I can go to the next song, or go around in the menu without problems, just the next song refuses to play.

Otherwise, its just awesome.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Geek : on OS2006 and 2007 there is a non-fixed bug for DBUS that prevents some songs from being played, also Dbus is really old, thus you can fall into problems like these more often than in newer versions : /

If you can take a look and see if the file what is not playing sometimes has spaces, or strange characters, then it's the reason.

a thing you can do it's to make sure there's no unusual characters on your files name. :/

If not that.. and it's one song..etc send that to us so we can debug and kill if the bug is on canola...

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Marcelo:
Thanks for the Info, will test some songs for lockups.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Marcelo: I'm finding that after deleting a couple albums, they still appear in the Artist and Album lists. Obviously if I go into the album, it says no items found. How do I get rid of them?

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Spice: this refresh thing still an issue : / sorry for that, the thing is we need to always force refresh, but for those with 8gb cards this maybe painfully slow, so we need to come up with a better notification way to do that (we are improving the framework for that)

So, after deleting, did you do a "refresh library"? I know it will sound painful, but for now you can also go to media library, uncheck everything, refresh... and then check back your disk and refresh.. this will make sure things are clean : /

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

While I've only been getting into the customization of my N810 recently, I finally downloaded Canola2 last night (with youtube and Last.FM plugins) and when coupled with the flat black theme, this is an amazing UI / application. EXCELLENT JOB!!!!!!

My only issue is that YouTube vids either stutter or the audio is not sync'ed appropriately. I know this appears to be an issue with mplayer embed mode (thats what I believe I read in the previous posts in this thread) but just thought express my experience of it too. Last.FM is working pretty darn good. My only oddity is that when I search on a specific artist (Lets say "Nightwish"), the station that starts doesn't play a single song from them while when using the Last.FM plugin on my laptop it usually plays at least one song FIRST from the band entered then other similar songs. Maybe this is just me being weird and not an issue with the plug-in. Regardless it appears to be working flawlessly with the streaming and showing of the album art.

Again, excellent excellent app so keep up the awesome work :)

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Sorry for not saying a word this long, was away from the tablet. Just wanted to confirm: no stuttering at all with mp3s, but not with wma files. Vanilla media player does not have problems with any filetypes.
Again, thanks to Marcelo and the whole team. I'm fully a Canola convert these days:)

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Hey handful,

I found some other problematic mp3 files in Canola. The files are tagged (they show up in other media players and PC media players) yet in Canola the only way to see it is through looking for the folder. Should I send them to you to see if you guys can figure out what's causing Canola not to read its tags (or if it's just an issue on my end though I tried deleting the .db and rescanning and it made no difference). I've since moved the problematic files off the n800 and onto my computer (so I have the retagged files on my tablet now so it works).

Also I'm noticing another issue. I'm not sure what's causing it but occasionally album art has problems. It will show the same album two or three times (complete with the album art). Though only one of them works if you try to press it. And the other ones won't let you click on them. If you navigate in the single cover mode (the one where you can click the side and the next album comes into view). When you get to the duplicated albums, it will sort of glitch up and not let you move the interface anymore.

The album art of the duplicated album will cover up the names from the previous album, and pressing anything just results in it playing files from the previous album in the cover art (and that's about all you can do).

Seeing if this is related to what I mentioned before I went to albums (where it lists all the albums but with text names scrolling vertically). The albums were not duplicated there, so it seems to happen only in cover arts mode.

Edit: I was wrong and it happens in both album and cover arts mode. Interestingly they both show up in the same problematic order. H

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Recently bought a N800 and upgrade it to os2008 and installed canola (duh), I copied a video (mp4) and it worked just fine in media player, but in canola it hicups and goes to next video, and went back to media player and still plays with no fuzz....any suggestions or questions?, the N800 uses two 2GB SD, virtual memory set to 128mb (just in case), anyway the good thing it looks beautiful and i really hope to experiment more with it...

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

If you have mplayer installed ( or installed youtube plugin) you Are probably playng some mp4 made for the default player not mplayer so take a look (search) for atabake configuration and change from oms to mplayer

Br

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

So when is Beta 10 due???

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Spice, I really don't know :) we are training some new folks, so it can take a little more, also july is the month most of guys will take vacations, so it will be at least in the end of august.

Marcelo

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

ah ok. Guess I just need to be patient.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Upgraded to Diablo firmware on my N800. I'm finding that I don't get the stutter when playing WMAs and navigating the UI like I did before.

Re: Canola Beta 9 : Bug reports, Feedback, Suggestions
 

Spice: I am noticing that canola is smoother on diablo :) I think a lot of optimizations are on the platform level and is benefiting everyone :) dragging my album art was way better :)

But: my upnp server (while using ps3) is having trouble with my router when I try to download covers, need to investigate if this is related to canola in anyway :)

MArcelo