MediaMonkey forum

Hello everyone,

I've been using foobar for many years now and I'm very happy with it. Nevertheless, from time to time I take a look at other music-players to see how they are doing. Unfortunately the choice isn't as big as one might suggest and mediamonkey is pretty much the only alternative to foobar - at least for me - but there are some issues, for the most part peanuts, preventing me from using mediamonkey as my main-player.

First of all, I like a clean and consistent UI. Since foobar uses the native Windows-UI toolkit and is also very customizable it looks pretty much like a native Windows-application. Here's a screenshot of my foobar-config:

Mediamonkey on the other hand has a lot of glitches and annoying UI-behaviours.
- When selecting a song in the playlist it's highlighted like this:

but in the preferences-dialog or in the library it looks like this:
(tabs behave the same way)
There's an additional dotted line drawn, which makes it look a bit weird and out of place.
- When selecting/switching a song with the vitreous-theme enabled the player-controls at the bottom start flickering.
- the highlighting of songs in the library-view with non-skinned mm looks out of place:


- selected tabs at the top of the screen have a black line seperating them from the rest of the UI, whereas selected tabs at the cover-UI element behave normal and merge fluently with the UI:



- resizing the playlist or library is very choppy and takes, depending on the theme, a lot of cpu-power

These are the issues I've noticed so far. I will use mm more extensively the next days, concentrating myself on the database, tagging etc., and will give you my feedback.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Wander

Wander_homer wrote: - selected tabs at the top of the screen have a black line seperating them from the rest of the UI, whereas selected tabs at the cover-UI element behave normal and merge fluently with the UI

No, that only happens after changing the skin. It will disappear when restarting MM. (already reported as bug)

Wander_homer wrote: There's an additional dotted line drawn, which makes it look a bit weird and out of place.
- When selecting/switching a song with the vitreous-theme enabled the player-controls at the bottom start flickering.
- the highlighting of songs in the library-view with non-skinned mm looks out of place:

I already put in a request for skins to be able to change the look of this selector, but no progress yet.

This could be an interesting topic. I've always had my eye on Foobar as the only possible candidate to replace MM I can think of. And indeed mainly because Foobar can be made to look very pretty whereas MM GUI has always been mediocre at best (including MM4).

But looks are not as important as functionality so i'm wondering what functionality TS can find withing MM that Foobar lacks.

nohitter151 wrote:

Wander_homer wrote: - selected tabs at the top of the screen have a black line seperating them from the rest of the UI, whereas selected tabs at the cover-UI element behave normal and merge fluently with the UI

No, that only happens after changing the skin. It will disappear when restarting MM. (already reported as bug)

On my setup, the line stays even after a restart.

nohitter151 wrote:

Wander_homer wrote: There's an additional dotted line drawn, which makes it look a bit weird and out of place.
- When selecting/switching a song with the vitreous-theme enabled the player-controls at the bottom start flickering.
- the highlighting of songs in the library-view with non-skinned mm looks out of place:

I already put in a request for skins to be able to change the look of this selector, but no progress yet.

Yes. Hope this get included soon.

But there is still a problem: There shouldn't be dotted tines on the tabs.
I think it 's a regression that appeared a few builds ago. ( its visible on the screenshot above )

@Wander_homer:
I agree with you on the UI.
It's glitchy and lags a lot ( redraw is slow, things are flashing, ... )

The developers seem to put a lot of efforts on this but unfortunately they are very limited by the theme engine. I think they try to keep compatibility with MM3's skins.
And keep delaying the replacement of the old theme engine.

Dreadlau wrote: No, that only happens after changing the skin. It will disappear when restarting MM. (already reported as bug)
On my setup, the line stays even after a restart.

I think that's because it's how the skin is made, check Vitreous instead.

Dreadlau wrote: But there is still a problem: There shouldn't be dotted tines on the tabs.
I think it 's a regression that appeared a few builds ago. ( its visible on the screenshot above )

No, not a regression. It was actually reported as a bug that you could not tell when focus was on the tabs. Rusty reported it, and this was the solution. Too lazy to look it up in Mantis, but I'm sure you can find it.

http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=8085

The dotted line on tabs will probably be fixed soon.