Ha ha, charade you are! The MM developers are playing naive here as politicians. I am pretty sure that they know very well which add-ons are the most popular and they don't need some users to tell them that. It is even more depressing if they really don't know that, 15 years after they introduced the scripting support in MM, because that shows how much they care about scripts and scripters who support their own program.
You cannot conclude about popularity of some add-ons from the opinion of one or two users who are willing to participate in this farce. There are several ways to determine that, beginning with the number of downloads of add-ons from their site. However, MM developers want you to think how they are doing their best to remedy this ugly situation in which they put us on all. They want from users to blame scripters for this fiasco, as it is our fault why there is no MM5 add-ons four years after their announcement.
First of all, you should know that I am not the one who gave the subject of this thread. Actually, I haven't even started this thread, although my post is now the first one in it. I posted it as a response to the announcement about MM5 in one other thread while this Forum was still opened only for a few scripters and hidden for public, but some moderator created this new thread and moved my post to it. Why I am mentioning this? Simply because the subject of this thread is misleading and I wouldn't called it like that. There is no such thing as "Porting MM4 scripts" to MM5. Well, maybe it could be done, but only with very small and very simple scripts.
Just for your information, Magic Nodes has 1 MB of source code before obfuscation (not including its masks full of SQL queries), RegExp Find & Replace has 650 KB (again, without its presets full of code), and my other scripts have in total another 1.5 MB. That is not small amount of source code at all. I have spent more than 10 years developing MM scripts, they are not developed for one lazy afternoon or one free weekend.
If you think that I am just stubborn and don't want to waste my time anymore on such things as "porting" to MM5, you are wrong. I was always ready to implement features of new versions of the program into my scripts, even when that required a lot of my time. My scripts are full of conditional executions allowing the same script to be used in different versions of the program because I want them to be vertically compatible as much as possible. Many of my add-ons still works with MM2, as well as with the newer versions.
However, this time it is really impossible to allow them to work with MM5 without writing them from the scratch, and most probably not even then. It is not because of me, but because of MM developers and their decision about the application programming interface with the scripts. This new API is completely incompatible with the previous versions, it is very unintuitive, poorly documented and I think it is severely crippled comparing to the old one. That is the main reason there is not a single MM5 add-on four years after they announced the new API in the Forum.
If that fact doesn't tell you anything, here is another story. I jumped on the MM bandwagon back in 2006 when I learned that MM has added scripting support, which was my main decision factor to switch to another software. I cannot know for sure when MM exactly added that support, but I searched Internet and here is the information from MM whatsnew (
https://www.mediamonkey.com/sw/whatsnew.txt):
"MediaMonkey 2.3.1.811 (Alpha 2)
- Added scripting is now part of MediaMonkey standard functionality"
Unfortunately, there is no specified date of that release, but it is mentioned in the Forum on Nov 30, 2004 (
http://mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2870), so I suppose it was released immediately before that.
Now, take a look at that how many MM scripts was created four years after November 2004 when MM added scripting, i.e. until November 2008. I don't know about others, but I will tell you about myself. I developed four scripts in that period (even with my late start by two years): Magic Nodes, RegExp Find and Replace, Invert Selection/Select None and Export/Create Playlists for Child Nodes. It is a little bit more difficult to check out the initial release dates of scripts by other authors, but there is an old thread with the list of scripts (
http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... f=2&t=5803) where you could see that there was hundreds of them created in just that period.
MM developers, please compare that number with the number of MM5 scripts created in the last four years and ask yourself why is such difference. Do you really think it is a fault of the scripters why there is still no MM5 scripts? If your whole excuse is that "the original ones (scripters) don't have spare time to do this job", how do you explain that the old MM got so much scripts for the same timeframe of four years? Do you think that the scripters had more spare time back then than now? How many years should pass further before you figure that?
I think the explanation is obvious to all, but MM developers: the new scripting model is an unsuccessful experiment and complete failure. The MM developers should forget about it and try to make their application as much compatible with the old scripts as it is possible. There is no point in adding something that nobody sees a real benefit of it. Is it really better to have something full of empty promises that nobody is using instead of something else that already works fine?