Notices

Car-mode is really nothing else than pressing the fullscreen button on top of the device in the music view.

The current playlist is visible in the playlist view (2nd icon from left on the menu panel). There you have by default a list called "Queue". This is not really a playlist, but a queue. The queue doesn't get saved across sessions, and played items are removed from the queue automatically.
You can press the [+] button in the toolbar to add new playlists. The currently selected playlist is the target playlist when enqueuing media. Playlists are saved across sessions and can be reordered by dragging the items.

If you have ideas of how to make this simpler and easier to understand for users, I'm interested to hear them. Usability is a top priority.

@pycage:

Been lurking 'round here for a while and am VERY impressed by the advances you've made over the last several months. Thank you for all the hard work: MediaBox is rapidly becoming my preferred player on the 800 (and we're talking about a serious audio collection stored on a 32GB SD card!).

Think I've spotted a bug or two, though, as well as a usability issue, so here goes:

1. Shuffle is terrific, but it only seems to work on the "Track Info" screen of the music section for me; in the playlist editor section shuffle just never... well.. shuffles. If, for some reason, this is by design, it seems like an omission to me.

2. Given the rich set of information and controls onscreen at any given time, can we get the ability to opt for the screen staying lit while MediaBox is active and the device is charging (or even not)? It's a royal pain to set this in Control Panel before and after a MediaBox session and (I hate to put it this way, but...) Canola can do this...

The issue (for me) is that when tapping the darkened screen I'm more likely than not to accidentally activate a control...

3. I'm having an issue where the default Media Player app can play the internet radio stations I've fed it (local re-streaming of XM Radio Online via the uXM server app running on a PC on my LAN) but MediaBox simply hangs at "buffering".

Thanks again for ALL of your hard work... and Happy New Year!

what impresses me about mediabox is that it seems to have all the features of canola, but without the "bulk".

that and i love the concept of the slide up shelf hiding the main menu

Thank you very much, pycage, for this new release.
I've always preferred MediaBox over Canola because it is lighter and simple.
In my opinion this new release brings big improvements to the usability of MediaBox. The last release also seems to mostly fix the cpu usage of the first 0.96 release, although in the audio player cpu usage is still high (20%) while in the album manager it is right (1%) when playing music.

Thanks for this great Canola alternative!

Has anyone else noticed that when using the dark theme and car mode...that the next / previous buttons are not visible?

Also is there any graphical representation of the current volume or volume controls in MediaBox? (not the hard keys)

thanks,realy thanks

I've used MediaBox sparingly, but I can't see how the new version works. It doesn't see all my files and I don't see how to us the upNp. I have a server on my network but it doesn't seem to see it. I find the interface very confusing now. I guess I'm missing something.

Same here. I used in the past MediaBox, and i liked it. Since the last 2 updates I think that the application have more functionality, but it lost somehow in the user friend side. Probably I need to dig deeper.

I also do not find out how to set up the upnp (it works in canola).

Anyway, keep up the good work.

UPnP shares get discovered automatically. You'll notice this by a popup message saying "device XYZ discovered". Discovered UPnP devices are listed in the folder view (the one where you can browse the filesystem of your device also).
If the UPnP devices don't show up there, they're either not compatible, or don't answer when MediaBox issues a network search for UPnP devices.

The basic idea is that there is a filesystem browser and more specialised views for video, audio, and images. In the filesystem browser, you can add a folder to your library. The first item in a folder list represents the folder itself. There is a button you can press for opening a little menu with buttons for "add to library" and "enqueue to playlist". Folders added to the library are being watched and their contents appear in the specialised views. By default, the library contains only the internal media folders of your device (where the Nokia example files are).
You can manage folders in your library by going to the "library" view in the filesystem browser (button on the right). There you can select what kind of media MediaBox should watch in the folder, or you can remove the folder from the list of watched folders again.

I agree that this whole concept is a bit hard to discover for yourself, and some kind of first-steps tutorial for MediaBox would be a good thing.