Lockscreen, Tag Editor

[Tomdroid]

Hey Max

Great job with PA! The fact that I can finally start using all my HE-AACv2 encoded music again, thus freeing several gigs of my SD, is enough to make me buy this. All the other awesome features are just sugar coating.

Now for the features I've had in mind:

Lockscreen:

1. It would be nice to have the controls stuffed away in a drawer, e.g. just show the cover with artist/album/title info and have the user slide this up to reveal the actual controls. This way accidental key presses due to screen turning on would be prevented (see e.g. Mort Player for inspiration).

2. I'd appreciate if you could make sure future versions of PA cooperate nicely with Widgetlocker. There's some code given on the WL website on how to enable/disable or suspend/resume WL while other lockscreen apps are running. I guess you could implement it so that WL gets suspended whenever the PA lockscreen is running, then resume WL once PA is paused/stopped? Would be great for it'd finally make it possible to have a decent player with lockscreen controls AND a customized lockscreen for general use.

You can find the relevant code here: http://teslacoilsw.com/widgetlocker/developers

Tag editing:

It would be nice to have the option to quickly edit tags on a per-album level, meaning editing tags globally for all files in a folder / an album instead of having to do it for each song. Would come in very handy whenever one realizes that e.g. a whole albums genre is wrong.

Thanks for considering and keep it up!

[admin]

Thanks for the feedback and the requests.

1. Sounds like a good option, I will consider adding this into one of the next minor releases.

2. I think PowerAMP lock screen should be disabled completely if you use WidgetLocker or any other lock screen replacement - you can just put 4x2 widget there and it will give the same functionality.

3. Yes, mass tag editing may be useful. My only concern is slow system library here. Each edited song should be checked against system library and should be updated there also - and system library is slow on this. With the custom own PowerAMP library it will be very fast, so I will probably add this into TODO for v2.0.

[Tomdroid]

The thing with WidgetLocker is that

a) The widget on the lockscreen makes the problem of accidental clicks permanent, in fact worsens it. It's bad enough if the phone starts doing unintended actions while one's listening to music, but it's even worse when it accidentally starts playing music just because the screen turned on and a button on the PA widget got pressed. The only way to counter this with WL is by deactivating widget interactions (which I have mine set to). But then, using the PA widget on the lockscreen would require another 2 steps - and this kind of defeats having the widget there in the first place, as simply unlocking and going to the full player takes the same amount of steps.

Having the PA widget there defeats the purpose of having a clean, everyday lockscreen with essential information only. I mean, The user does really not need to see the PA widget all the time, even if one's not listening to music.

E.g. on my WL LS I've got the time & date (TypoClock), missed SMS & calls (SMS Unread Count), forecast (Snowstorm), battery level (BattStatt) and a drawer that get's me straight to the camera and straight into PA. If I wanted to have the PA widget on there, I'd have to get rid of at least the forecast (for space) and also use one of the sliders to unlock interactions (for accessibility) while "wasting" the space with a 4x1 widget that I only use a small percentage of the time.

It's no matter of life and death obviously but seeing that the WL dev even offers the interfaces, why not just using them in your app? Think of it like this: It'd make PA the first and only media player to play nicely with WL (afaik).

[admin]

I got your point. I will try to work a bit with WL and check if it's possible to integrate. If it is, this will be added in one of the next updates.

[Tomdroid]

Awesome, thanks!

[Tomdroid]

Hey Max

Just wanted to let you know, seems Kevin has tweaked WidgetLocker to better work with (all?) other lockscreen replacing apps. I only knew he'd done something about better compatibility with GentleAlarm, however since the last update it seems to be working quite well with Poweramp:

When PA is running and one unlocks the screen for the first time, there's a tiny delay where one sees the WL, then it switches to the PA lockscreen. From there on any further turning on of the screen immediately brings up the PA ls.

Quite perfect and unless that's rather a bug than a feature, I'd say this issue got solved already.

[admin]

Cool, thanks for the update.

[Tomdroid]

I've asked Kevin, the WL dev about this and his answer is:

"In 1.2.8 I added support for the PauseMediator: http://code.google.com/p/pausemediator/

This is an attempt to be a standard way to control third party lock screen. GentleAlarm uses this so that was my reason for adding it, but it sounds like Poweramp uses it too."