Bugs/Mark

Notes in italics

In order of priority (subject to change):

Fix "save MSI default"

Dave, this ^^^ is a separate thing® from the item below it

Right now, saving the default text and sweep colours and font size etc does NOT work. It was supposed to be fixed, but never actually was. Some things sorta, kinda, partially save, but mostly it just doesn't work.

Steps:

Select track

Open in Producer

Select Get Media Info

Change something (say, sweep colour)

Option click "OK" to save

(Dialogue box comes up saying it is saved)

Open another track that you have never opened before in Producer

Select GMI

Note that the sweep colour is NOT the colour that you saved, but rather the original colour from before the save (or sometimes, even, another colour entirely).

The separate thing®

Most time consuming since it has to be done repeatedly on every single track: After you read the metadata in, either when you import the track, or get it from sunfly.csv, or edit by hand, when you first open in Producer, it rereads all the metadata from the fly file again, obliterating all your changes, and baking them into the track. So you have to then close Producer, go back to the track in the playlist, re-edit or re-paste from the CSV, run Producer again, and then rebake. It gets REALLY old after awhile! It would be nice if you could push metadata, have it saved, and have Producer actually aware that it has been, so it stops re-reading it from the fly file!

steps:

1. make sure "auto play when adding single file to library" is turned OFF in prefs
2. add a .fly/.mp3 pair (make sure there is no .xml already) <-- will fill in name, composer, publisher, copyright
3. change the composer to "foo"
4. go to advanced->producer <-- changes composer back to what it was???

Steps: Import as many fly tracks as you want in kJams.
Pick a track and edit the metadata in the Browser Window. Composer or Publisher works fine for this example (as in the e-mail I sent).
Push metadata (this should lock the edits in place)
Open in Producer (This may appear to work at this point).
More often than not, your edits will disappear.
If things are still fine, clear the cache, quit kJams (just to be sure) and relaunch.
Run Producer on the same track
The edits are now gone.

What I feel SHOULD be happening, is whatever data is pushed to the XML should supersede any data in the FLY file, regardless. When no such data exists, or the XML does not exist, and there is no data in the media file, THEN the data can come from the FLY file. This is the only thing that makes logical sense to me. Am I missing something?

please edit the above step-by-step so that it reproduces the problem, above is my best guess, but it does not reproduce the problem.

Better pre-post gap settings

As discussed before, being able to set a maximum percentage to reduce the size of the final blobs on each page to accommodate the post and pre gaps, first shrinking the final blob until it reached 100 - max percentage, and then shrinking the next one, etc., until the post and pre gaps fit, would finalize this procedure. Currently, Producer just shrinks the last blob on the "pre" page to nothing, and only then goes on to shrink the next to last blob, with the result being that the final word just flies by. this has a very disconcerting psychological effect that hampers finding your place on the next page.

a percentage of what though? it can't be "percentage of original duration" because that can vary wildly. i think instead it should just be a "minimum duration" in seconds, then you could enter something like "0.25" for one quarter second? if this seems like it would work, let me know. -dave (talk) 22:56, 12 June 2012 (PDT)

No, I really do mean percentage of original duration. For instance, if the last blobs needs a full second to sweep, but does not have enough time, it gets squeezed. As of now, if there is less time left in the current page than there is space, it gets squeezed to a "singularity" (no apparent width and instant sweep time). If that is still not enough, the next to last blob gets squeezed, also possibly to a singularity, and so on and so one, causing a set of lyrics that can just blink and disappear, which is very psychologically disconcerting. I am proposing that the last blob only gets shrunk to a certain extent, and after that, each successive blob can only be shrunk by 25% (75% of its original size) before the next left-most blob gets squeezed. This results in a minimal disruption of the timing, as well as leaving a reasonably sized blob to sweep. Because of the realities of how the pages get made, I suspect there will be few incidents where the blobs will be affected past the last three. But whatever works. The ultimate goal is just to prevent it from doing those instantaneous sweeps, where the singer thinks he has a certain amount of time, but the word just vanishes, and the page changes. If it is better to do it with a minimum duration in seconds, that is fine. I just suspect that it would be more accurate to the original if it were a percentage.

Word Spacing

Second most time consuming, because every track must be checked, it is hard to do by visual inspection, and since when a track needs one edit, it often needs MANY, and involves lots of zooming in and zooming out, and blob dragging, which is not particularly efficient in the current interface:

Sometimes words that are supposed to be separated are not. They are placed right next to each other. E.g., "Willyou" instead of "Will you", even though they are separate words in the actually .fly file. Because of this, although it is not particularly common, I still have to go through every track, page by page, checking to see if this has occurred. This can be time-consuming and a bit frustrating. When one is found, there are usually repeats, and editing them all can take significant amounts of time. Of almost equal priority, since it has to be checked in every file, and if not corrected, forces a redo (unlike the previous one, which can sneak by the quality control staff!):

please provide a .fly/.mp3 pair that shows this problem

Uploading to server: SFDT-2741 The Beatles - Tomorrow Never Knows 1:35 "nowlove" should be "now love", 01:53 "theymourn" should be "they mourn" 02:23 "soplay" should be "so play"

There are probably more examples in this file. These are the ones in this file that slipped by my first edit, and so were brought up by SF QC.

Trailing Punctuation

It would be nice if, if the final blob on a given line was punctuation, that it actually be placed directly adjacent to the previous word, rather than separated by white space. E.g., "you …." would be "you…." This is important stylistically, not only because of aesthetics, but because of consistency, as some times, for instance an ellipsis will appear as part of the blob, and other times as a separate one, in the same phrase in the same sentence in the same song.

please provide a .fly/.mp3 pair that shows this problem

I can upload, but it is any file where the punctuation is a separate blob from the word before it. So, for example, sometime they might have "love...." as a single entity, and others they may have "love" as one word, and "...." as another. As a result, kJams does what it "should" do, puts a gap between there "words". But not only does this look bad, it makes it inconsistent when SF is inconsistent, and has it so that sometimes there is a space between words and punctuation, and sometimes there is not. IMO, there should NEVER be white space between the word and the following punctuation, be it period, ellipsis, comma, or what have you. Certainly in implementation, this could take the form of an exclusion list.

Words with hyphens incorrectly sized

In the YSTHs tracks, Words with hyphens get incorrectly sized. The hyphen is too long but more interestingly, the bounding box is made too big vertically. This is probably a font issue (Univers 67 condensed bold) but when I replace the hyphen in the blob with the keyboard hyphen, I get the correctly sized character. I thought the preference we added, "producer: interpret hyphens as syllable markers" was supposed to ignore syllable markers, and thus allow the standard keyboard hyphen-minus char to survive the encoding process? If not, it really should!

please provide a .fly/.mp3 pair that shows this problem

can not create break screen

Also in the YSTHs tracks, I still can not create a YSTHs-specific break screen (like "Instrumental/n 10 seconds) that does not crash kJams like a stone.

send me your home-made break screen and any accompanying media, and i'll see why it's crashing

It might be easier for you to just make the same on e I want to use. The YSTHs break screen is just red text that reads "Instrumental xx seconds". As such, I just took the standard SunFly one, deleted the SF graphic, and changed the text colour of the text asset, which had the tag [msg ]. When I do this, it crashes immediately. In fact, no matter what I change it to, even if it has no tag at all, if the screen specified in the prefs is not the SF one, and the track has a break, it crashes.

AE Video Insert

In the last YSTHs issue, it would be nice if I could get a video upcard out of AE that I could correctly paste into QT. As it is now, I get a time code error, and as such, am forced to use AE to re-encode the entire video, just to add the terminating upcard onto the end. Don't know if this is an AE error, or something I am doing wrong.

Note: I think I have fixed this, by opening the asset in QT, and exporting using QT.

send me an AE project and accompanying media, that has an RQ item that exports the file you wish could be pasted into QT, and i'll have a look at it

As mentioned, I got it to work, by bypassing AE, and using QT to reencode. That said, I uploaded the assets along while ago, back when I first brought this up, and they are still on the server. I do believe you opened them then and got the same error trying to C&P in QT.

FLY file fail

Certain .FLY files still do not convert correctly. There appears to be either a math error or a faulty assumption that breaks certain files. I will upload one (Madonna - Borderline) to the FTP.

yep, let me know

I uploaded the pair, but they are not there anymore. Did you get them? I'll re up. Addendum: Okay, upped two pair of the same track, with slightly different versions of the same bug.

crash / slow switching venues

Switching venues multiple times, as I have to do in my copy singers script, often crashed kJams.

send dem crash reports (with log files)

It is also SLOWWWWW, but I suspect fixing that will require a re-architecting.

i've done some optimizations for r57, let me know

random crashes

Heads up: There is still an issue of random crashes, I think server-related, but not sure. More data coming if I can catch it with Activity monitor and get code samples.

As discussed, probably not server related. OSX related.

Editing a playlist for case

Editing a playlist for case does not do anything
Fixed in r54+

duration missing

kJams does not appear to be properly pulling metadata. As of a few versions ago, Most items in the library no longer have an entry for duration. This effects several items, including estimating rotation times.

quit producer with cmd-.

Hitting cmd-. while in an editable text box in Producer does NOT quit Producer (as expected) rather it nulls out the text field, in an obnoxiously non-undoable fasion.

Mark Song as Sung

Please please PLEASE add a "Mark Song as Sung" context menu to a song in a singer's tonight list. Many times there is a song with a LONG outro that you want to fade out and move to the next song, but when you do so, the song fails to be added to the singer's History list.