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Advanced topics

Autoplay

Too lazy to manually enqueue songs all the time?

Use Yammi's autoplay functionality to let Yammi automatically enqueue songs for you!

Choose a folder to enqueue songs from and choose "Autoplay" from the folder's context menu. Then set the autoplay mode from Yammi's "Autoplay" menu.

Currently, Yammi offers two modes:

"Random" randomly selects songs from the autoplay folder (Yammi does not select songs already enqueued in the playlist).

"Longest not played" chooses those songs, that haven't been played for the longest time. For this to work correctly, you need to enable the "logging of played songs" feature in the settings (If more than one song haven't been played at all, Yammi chooses randomly from those songs).

Tip: You can still manually enqueue songs without having to stop the autoplay mode. Yammi just fills up the playlist if there are less than 5 songs in it. The selected autoplay mode and folder are also saved for the next session.

Checking consistency

The menu offers the possibility to check your complete database for consistency. From the context menu, you can also apply this consistency check to only a selection of songs.

The consistency check is a tool meant to help you organizing your song collection. You can configure the aspects to be checked in a dialog, right now Yammi supports the following checks:

- check for existence of files: are the song files existing and readable?

If files do not exist on the location given in Yammi's database, the entry can be updated with a blank filename and path (if the file is existing on a media) or deleted (if the file is not existing on any media).

- check tags: consistent with Yammi's database?

If tags are not consistent, they can be corrected in two ways (only possible for mp3 and ogg files):

1. the tags in the corresponding files can be set to the values in Yammi's database (Yammi database => file tags, default mode).

2. Yammi can re-read the tags from the files and update its database content with the new values (for example if you edited tags with another program outside Yammi).

Be careful using this function, as it might overwrite all the tags in your files!

- check filename: consistent with the configured filename pattern (such as "{artist} - {title}")?

If filenames are not consistent, they can be corrected according to the filename pattern.

Be careful using this function, as it might rename all your files!

- check directories: consistent with the configured directory pattern (such as "{artist}/{album}")?

If directories are not consistent, the song files can be moved automatically to the correct location according to the directory pattern.

Be careful using this function, as it might move all your files!

- no song contained twice in the database?

Songs are considered the same if they have the same artist, title and album. These three fields serve as the "primary key" for Yammi's database. As Yammi uses this primary key for identification (eg. for logging and categories), you should never have more than one song with the same primary key. On addings songs to your database, Yammi will add a "(2)" to the song title if the added song's primary key is already existing.

Yammi also detects two song entries pointing to the same file, and one of them will be deleted.

Before writing tags, renaming or moving files, Yammi asks you for confirmation before performing that operation. You can confirm for a single song or for all songs.

After checking consistency, the folder ProblematicSongs contains all the problematic songs that were found. A column "reason" explains why a song was found to be problematic. This allows to resolve any inconsistencies. Note that this folder will not be saved for the next session, so please resolve any inconsistencies immediately after checking consistency.

Burning files

For most users, there are two reasons to burn files on CDs:

1. To burn an audio CD from a selection of songs, to play it on a normal CD player

2. To make an backup of some files on harddisk to CD (possibly to remove the files locally and use the removable media management of Yammi).

Burning an audio CD from a selection of songs

I highly recommend the fantastic burning program K3b (http://www.k3b.org) to burn an audio CD.

If you have k3b installed, you can simply select the songs you want to burn, and use the "Burn with K3b(audio)" plugin of Yammi. It will start k3b, open a new audio project and add all selected songs to it.

In that way, burning the favorite songs of a friend to an audio CD is easy as pie:

1. Create a new category

2. Let your friend put all favourite songs into that category

3. Mark all songs of the category and select "Burn with K3b(audio)" from the plugin menu

4. Start the burning process from within K3b.

5. Deliver the CD ;-)

Burning files to CDs as backup

For assistance in burning files to a CD, do the following:

1. Select the songs you want to burn

2. In the context menu of the songlist choose "Advanced"->"Burn to Media".

3. You will be asked for a name and a start index for that collection of songs.

4. Now Yammi will create subfolders in the "Media" folder, taking care that none of these subfolders exceeds the maximum media size configured in the preferences.

For burning the song files to CD, you can now simply invoke the "Burn with K3b(data)" plugin from the context menu (assuming you have installed k3b) for each created subfolder.

Yammi also remembers on which media a song is contained. This allows to delete song files from harddisk to save space, and let Yammi request the corresponding media the next time the song is in the playlist, so that the song can be loaded from the media on demand.

Playlist management of yammi

Yammi takes over the playlist management of the media player and has its own folder named "Playlist" where you can move songs up and down, remove them from the playlist, or directly retrieve information about them. You should not directly modify the playlist of the media player any longer, as Yammi might overwrite your song ordering or songs added from within the media player. Yammi also disables the random play setting of XMMS, as this would confuse Yammi's playlist management.

When Yammi is closed, it saves the current playlist and position within the song and restores this setting the next time you start it.

Updating song database

The "Database" menu offers the possibility to update your database in two ways: By scanning your harddisk (or selecting single files to add to the database) or by scanning a removable media (eg. a CD). After choosing the corresponding entry in the "Database" menu a dialog will show up which allows to set the directory to scan and the file pattern for scanning.

Yammi starts in the chosen directory and recursively scans your harddisk for new songs. It scans all files matching the given pattern and checks, whether the song is already contained in Yammi's database. For all new songs found, Yammi tries to get the song information such as artist, title, album... by looking at the id3(v1.x or v2.x) or ogg tags. If tags are not present, Yammi tries to extract the information from the filename, using the configured guessing scheme. If the filename contains an artist or title that is longer than 30 characters, and the tags contain only the first 30 characters (as this is the limit for id3v1.1), Yammi tries to take the full name from the filename (Yammi's database has basically no restriction for the length of the entries).

Updating your song database does not touch your song files. Exception: If a new song is already existing at another location, either the new or old version will be moved to your configured trash directory.

Scanning removable media

This is quite similar to scanning your harddisk. The difference is that the songs added to Yammi's database will not contain a path and filename, but instead will contain the scanned media's name in their "contained on" media list. This means that you can't directly play these songs, but have to enqueue them, and load them from this media into the swap directory before playing. You can load songs from a media into the swap directory by using the button in the toolbar. If a song is already existing in the database, Yammi will just add the media to its media list (if not contained already), so scanning a media twice should not create any inconsistencies.

Selecting single files to add to your database

Sometimes you don't want to scan your harddisk, but just add one or two files to your database. Select the menu entry "Import Selected File(s)".

Grabbing and encoding new songs

Especially on a party it might come in handy to directly grab and encode some songs from an audio CD. Yammi offers a basic support for that, but for grabbing a large number of songs I recommend using one of the many tools out there. For grabbing and encoding a single song, choose "Grab and Encode CD Track" from the "Database" menu. You will be asked for track number, artist and title. Then Yammi executes in the background the script "yammiGrabAndEncode" (which is included in the distribution and normally installed in /usr/local/bin/), which grabs the track from CD using paranoia, and then encodes it using (not)lame. (You might want to customize the script to fit your needs, eg. setting the bitrate for lame, which is defaulting to 256kb/s. Just have a look at the script, it's easy...). When the script has finished, a new song file exists in the directory given in the preferences under "base directory for scanning". Yammi then automatically adds this song to its database and informs you with a dialog box.

Child-safe mode (currently disabled)

This mode is thought for parties to protect your precious song collection from users deleting files or changing tags by accident. The following operations are not permitted, if this mode is switched on:

- the complete "Advanced" submenu in the context menu is disabled

- delete files

- clear the complete playlist

- update song database

- check consistency

Once enabled, you can only disable this feature with a password, which is: "protect". Alternatively, you could edit Yammi's preferences file by hand to disable this mode.

Okay, this is NOT SAFE IN ANY WAY, it's just meant to protect users who have very little knowledge of computers to do any harm to your song collection by accident.

For better safety, I recommend creating a new user "dj" on your computer with limited access rights, and start Yammi as that user. You can then use the command line option to specify the location of the .yammi directory and make that directory (and the directory with all your songs) read-only for the user "dj".

Sleep mode

Want to listen to a few more songs while falling asleep? But how do you turn off the computer then?

Enable Yammi's sleep mode by pressing the button in the toolbar, and specify the number of songs Yammi should play before initiating a shutdown on your computer.

Yammi will shut down in the following two cases:

- the number of songs to play (visible and editable in the toolbar) has reached 0

- the media player stops playback because the playlist is empty

A dialog box appears giving you the possibility to cancel the shutdown.

Via the settings you can configure the shutdown command, which defaults to 'dcop ksmserver ksmserver "logout" 0 2 0' (this corresponds to choosing "Logout" -> "Turn off computer" in KDE). Be careful with shutting down your computer in that way, as open documents might not be saved properly or running programs might not be terminated properly...

Removable Media Management

Yammi has support to function as a "Jukebox". That is, you don't need all your songfiles on your local harddisk, but can load them on demand from removable media (such as CDs) into a swap directory. Yammi still keeps all songs in its database to enable you to search and enqueue conveniently. However, before enqueuing the songs to the media player, Yammi will check for availability and enqueue only those songs that are on the harddisk.

To use this jukebox functionality, you should first create a swap directory on your harddisk and set the path and the size limit in the preferences. (I recommend to create a special swap directory and not to use "/tmp/" as your swap dir.)

To remove song files from your harddisk to gain disk space, but keep the song entries in Yammi's database, choose "Delete..." (from the context menu, "Advanced..."), and enable the checkbox "delete file" (and leave the "delete database entry" checkbox disabled). Take care only to remove song files that have a media location stored in their database entry (you can check this when you select "Info..." in the song context menu), or otherwise the deleted song will not be accessible anymore.

To scan a removable media and add all the contained songs to the database, use "Scan removable media" from the file menu.

For the removable media management, Yammi has an extra toolbar consisting of a media list and a "Load" button. In the media list, Yammi collects all the media that are needed to load the songs in Yammi's current playlist, the most urgent ones listed first. (For songs that are available on more than one media, Yammi lists all possible media in this list.) From this media list, you simply select the media that you inserted into your computer (eg. into your CD-Rom), and click "Load". Yammi will then load all songs that it needs in its current playlist from this media into the swap directory (given in the preferences). After loading, Yammi will update its playlist (and the playlist of XMMS) and update the list of needed media to reflect the changes.

For the swap directory, you can give a size limit (also in the preferences). If the size that all the swapped song files use in this directory increases beyond the given limit, then Yammi will remove song files from that directory, using a least-recently-used (LRU) strategy.

External Scripts / Plugins

Yammi offers support to call external programs with parameters like song titles or filenames. This can be extremely useful for calling a program for burning songs to CD or for creating a CD label.

These plugins can be configured in Yammi's preferences, and are available via the context menu in the songlist. There are two types of plugins, the first one ("single mode") is invoked for each song, the second one ("group mode") generates a list of items and invokes a program on this list.

Yammi has a set of standard plugins already configured. For other plugin examples, have a look at Yammi's website.

Customizing the playlist view

Yammi uses a template to display the playlist in the upper left corner of its window. This template can easily be customized, just have a look at it in the configuration dialog. The placeholders like {artist} and scope definitions like {scope:1} should be almost self-explanatory...

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