Another remote control alternative for MM5 (MMRemote5)

[Degeim]

Hi there!

[This was previously a post requesting beta testers. While there might still very well be bugs, MMRemote5 has now been officially released, so there's no need for side-loading unofficial testing apps anymore.]

I've finally finished the first version of my MediaMonkey Remote for MM5. For all the people who have asked me about it, I am sorry it took me so long! The changes between MediaMonkey 4 and 5 were huge, and required an almost total re-write of the code needed to "talk" with MediaMonkey. (And for the majority of people who probably have no idea what I'm talking about, it's an old remote control app for MediaMonkey that stopped working then they released MM5.)

I have now renamed the old app to MMRemote4 (which still exists, and works with MediaMonkey 4), and the new app is called MMRemote5, and will work with MediaMonkey 5.

The new app can be found here on Google Play, and the server application can be found on https://mmremote.net.

If you try it out, please do let me know if it works or not, and if you discover any issues -- either here, or by contacting me on my e-mail (erlend dot dahl and then the gmail-stuff at the end). Thank you very much!

[JSNBLK]

Thanks for this. Been waiting for a good long while now.
Just got it up and running. Worked way better than the last one.
So far so good. I like that you've kept the layout and GUI as before. No need for a learning curve.

In the previous version having the artwork displayed was quite bandwidth intensive, is this one similar? I only ask because currently I'm on a shared network and it struggles when too much is happening at once.

Once again, thank you for getting this done. Much appreciated.

Cheers

[Degeim]

Thanks, sounds promising that it seems to work well so far.

I kept as much as possible like it was before -- there was more than enough work in the back systems, so if I were to create new user interfaces as well, you'd probably be waiting another year or two.

The artwork transfer is exactly like in the previous version. If you want to save bandwidth, you could try enabling "Compress album art" in the server settings, if it isn't already. If you want to compress it even more, I could consider adding a more flexible option (with multiple compression levels), but be warned that it would probably reduce the quality a lot as well.

Thank you for testing it! And please let me know if you discover any issues.

[hintergrundrauschen]

Amazing, finally, thanks!

[JSNBLK]

After spending, admittedly not enough, time with this now I can, mostly, safely say WELL DONE. It does everything I need it to do while looking neat and compact and most importantly user friendly.

Have just gotten your official release.

Thank you again for the work put in.

[Degeim]

Thank you! Very helpful to get some positive feedback here, so that I know that it actually works. I'm working on an update that hopefully makes it a bit more stable for some of the people who have reported repeated disconnects, and some general optimizations.

EDIT: Oh, and I have investigated the excessive data usage you reported when sending album art, and discovered that each art is downloaded several times, when only once would suffice. I'll try to improve that, both in MMRemote4 and MMRemote5.

[JSNBLK]

Splendid.

Thanks for looking into that.

Cheers

[JSNBLK]

Hi again

Not sure what's happened, but I can no longer connect to the server.

When clicking on the server button in Windows it tells me that either both Monkey and server are sleeping or that MMonkey is Running but no clients are connected.

Have reinstalled both the server and the remote, have made each forget each other to no avail.

I see now that on the server MMonkey goes to sleep after a few minutes regardless.

Cheers

[Degeim]

Sorry, I didn't see this before now! Hopefully, this is fixed in the newest version of the app and server (v1.11, released just now). I have fixed some bugs that could cause problems like the one you describe.

(As long as the remote works, the "Sleeping" status isn't dangerous, by the way. It just indicates that no remotes has sent any commands for a while, so to save system resources the app entered a passive state. But it will wake up again on demand.)