[Music UCI] Flow by El Maco

[da1writer]

Music UCI Flow was created by and maintained by El Maco! I'm only a messenger and will try to post his updates !



So... this thread is about my third music screen UI for the S9.

I have to say it straight up: this UI is not for everyone. For example, I cannot give you that normal music.swf file because you have to build it yourself... And not just once, but every time new albums are added to the S9 or old ones are removed.

Sounds inconvenient and unpractical? It is. But its also the only solution I could come up with, because I wanted to have as fast cover art browser as possible. After a lot of experimenting I concluded that the only way to get the browser perform well enough is to embed all cover art images inside the UI program itself. This way the UI doesn't need to read cover art images dynamically because all required artwork is already available in the internal data library. As a result the browser performs quite nicely (well, there is always room for improvement but its quite good, even when music is playing and flash interface gets that infamous slow-down).

Other notable features include full-sized, anti-aliased cover art view in the now-playing-screen. You can use larger images than 272*272 without the usual aliasing artifacts, optimum size being 544*544 theoretically.

User interface is divided into four components. Below is a short description of each of them.

album browser

• the UI will start from the integrated browser if playback is paused
• swipe up/down to scroll the music library. Scrolling will wrap around from both ends
• swipe left/right to swap to the now-playing-screen
• tap an album shortly to activate it, tap again to see the tracklist
• long press on an activated album to start playback immediately
• long press when no album is selected opens the shortcut page

tracklist view

• swipe up/down to see next/previous page
• tap track name to activate, double tap to start playback

now-playing-screen

• swipe left/right to return to the browser
• swipe up/down to adjust volume
• tap on the timeline to enable seek
• tap the album cover to launch the standard browser
• pull down command panel by swiping down at the top of the screen
• command panel contains four buttons: play/pause, shuffle toggle, jump to settings and quit

shortcut page

• alphabetical "quick" jump based on first letter of the album name
• history of four most recently played albums

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To build the Flow UI (semi)automatically one must run a utility program called MakeFlow.exe. Some facts:

• MakeFlow is available for Windows only (there have been reports of freezing under Windows 7... However, both my XP and Vista machines have been running it without problems so far.)
• it does NOT support embedded cover art. Each album (=folder) needs to contain cover.jpg file in order to show up in the browser!
• it does not support deep folder structures:
  • "X:\Music\Artist - Album" is ok (1 level)
  • "X:\Music\Artist\Album" is also ok (2 levels)
  • "X:\Music\Genre\Artist\Album" is not because it is too deep (3 levels)
  • finally "X:\Music\LargeFolderWithManyAlbums" is not a good idea because it will show up as one big album in the browser
• Currently MakeFlow does not recongnize unicode characters. This means that any 'special' characters in filenames may cause albums to be unselectable and/or missing in the browser. Consequently, if you are unable to select some albums in the browser, check their names! The easiest way to make an album unselectable is to have a "^" character in its name (which is used internally to indicate a folder separator)
• MakeFlow needs an external SWF linker called swfmill. That is free software which can be downloaded from swfmill.org.

Installation & use:

1. Extract MakeFlow.exe together with resource.uci into any folder.
2. Copy swfmill.exe into the same location
3. Connect your S9 (and wait until the drive letter gets assigned)
4. Create a back-up of all of your data, just in case!
5. Launch MakeFlow.exe
6. Select the drive letter of your S9
7. When prompted, press "D" or "N" to skip missing covers for the first time. They can be added later.
8. If everything went as planned, MakeFlow should finally produce the music.swf and place it in the System\Flash UI folder.

You will notice two additional cache folders created into the filesystem. These files are required for the UCI to work properly. They should be removed only if you decide to stop using this UI.

Disclaimer: You use this program at your own risk! I take no responsibility if you manage to lose data or brick your S9 (or your computer or whatever). No, it should not be possible but, you know, don't blame me if something unimaginable does happen.


Download: MakeFlow_102.zip


Changelog for version 1.02:

• fixed crashing on 8-bit greyscale jpg's
• added support for folder.jpg's
• optional possibility to disable the light reflection effect on covers

Changelog for version 1.01:

• fixed browser bug (showed only first album when language setting was not english).

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ps. Thanks for everyone involved in beta-testing! Special mention to uphaillife for giving a name to the uci !

Da1writer Speaking:
Here is a video of it in action for those who are on the fence !

You Tube

You Tube

*NEW* BLACK EDITION
Just replace the resource.uci from the original Flow download with this one below.
Download: http://www.mediafire.com/?zm1r4tndztw

[da1writer]

Sooo... over 100 views but not even one comment ...
Does anyone like this or have any thoughts?

[Life is Good.]

Its awesome.

[jakmanfirby]

WHOA SO AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!! BUt One thing..... When i click the album art from the BIG List of album arts.... when the list comes up.... the titles arent using the id3tag but the name..... like instead of Absolute its comes up like 02-Absolute

[Dr4g0nF1y]

The download link is dead.
Do you have an alternative link?

[da1writer]

Originally Posted by jakmanfirby

WHOA SO AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!! BUt One thing..... When i click the album art from the BIG List of album arts.... when the list comes up.... the titles arent using the id3tag but the name..... like instead of Absolute its comes up like 02-Absolute

Just like the D2's Ultimate Mod... if you use batch processing, which Makeflow is, ID3 Tags are disregarded as it only associates the files names to the covers. If it really bothers you... you could do like me and the others have done [on iaudiophile.net], simply edit the fileto what the id3 tag is but keep a numeric form at the beginning (aka 01-, 02-, etc.). This way your songs play in the order they should be and they look the way the id3 tags are but in file name form. It took me a long time, but was well worth it, this UI is awesome enough to take some time to get things right!

Glad people are posting now and I'm also happy everyone is liking it! Link should be working now !

[jakmanfirby]

Ah yes. LOL Thanks alot! Just using Mp3Tag to convert the Title and track number to the filename! Cant believe i didnt think of that before! XD

SO FAST!!! LOL This is so AWesome! El Maco should make a Main Menu UCI! I cant imagine what it'd be like =D

[jakmanfirby]

Btw is this still a beta?

[morrislee]

gotta say, pretty amazing, but the options are still limited.

Very impressed with the optimization with all the interface.

One bug to report, or could be a limitation

When the music.swf is loaded, everything works liquid-ly-smooth, but when it is exit to main menu, the main menu will become very slow, and going back to the cover art is "slightly" slower. It seems like a memory issue. However, you can always reboot it and it will work fine again until another swf is loaded.

Greetings from Canada!
Morris Lee

[Frinard]

WOW!! This is great... definitely let us know when the final version is released. It would be really great if i could just replace that useless default matrix view with yours. Given the slightly choppy way the browser scrolls, I never thought scolling could ever be this smooth on the S9.

I also recommend that you make the top menubar scroll sideways to accommodate more functionality. Also using a click to access the browser makes me access the by mistake very often every time the S9 misreads a swipe. i think a button would be better for that function since the music UCI takes a while to load.

I personally don't mind rebuilding the UCI each time i add new songs as i don't add new songs to my S9 that often. Besides, the performance is worth the extra step.

[ddickyyy]

it's so great!!
but some bugs.... I cannot use the cover flow to choose songs when the name, artist, ablum, etc is chinese......
and can it be fully replace the main page?

[Frinard]

Originally Posted by ddickyyy

it's so great!!
but some bugs.... I cannot use the cover flow to choose songs when the name, artist, ablum, etc is chinese......

This limitation is mentioned in the intro on the original post.

[Libelaum]

I noticed you have a lot of the same music as I like in your video, so I looked up machinae supremacy. Dude, those guys are awesome thanks

[da1writer]

Originally Posted by Libelaum

I noticed you have a lot of the same music as I like in your video, so I looked up machinae supremacy. Dude, those guys are awesome thanks

No problem, I'm always trying to find off-shore Artists aka Artists outside North America.

Anyway, To those who want a bit of a speed improvement, a Black Edition was released a while ago - I just never got time to post it. Download link is near the bottom of the First post in this thread. Changes are:

+ Small Speedup
+ Improved Album Aliasing
+ Less Streamlined Transitions (less fade between certain screens)
+ Chrome/Black look

A newer update will be coming out soon to reflect Cowon's recent firmwares (1.52, 2.52, 3.52), which should improve the speed of the Now Playing Screen. Kudos everyone that has commented so far!

EDIT: Link fixed...

[chungly]

swfmill.exe where is the file, i can't find it, please help me

[RoloJam]

Originally Posted by chungly

swfmill.exe where is the file, i can't find it, please help me

It's in the Windows binary zip file.
http://swfmill.org/releases/swfmill-0.3.0-win32.zip

[DenSen]

Very nice UCI! Thanks a lot to the author!
1) folder.jpg instead of cover.jpg works just fine thank you very much. No need to rename after Tag'n'Rename has done its part of work.
2) What does these smiles at the bottom mean?
3) Maybe it's will be more convenient to show song's name in the bottom as «x/y %songname%» with «x» as current song position in the list and «y» - total songs quantity?

[Coolvibes]

Fantastic Uci theme this must be the best one
btw, mediafire is up again

[mikey_mike]

wow looks really nice. Im currently using Claws. Do I have to uninstall Claws first to use Flows?

[endersbean]

Flow is a music UCI, so you can use flow just for the Music part of the interface and keep Claw's for the mainmenu. It takes a little getting used to how all this stuff works, but once you do it actually makes a lot of sense.