X3Photo Gallery Forums

Hi,

X3 has met many of my wishes, it's modern, blazing fast and ultra customisable. The only thing holding me back to upgrade now is the lack of an audio player. It'll take its time to arrive, it's okay but in the meantime, we can maybe summarize things we'd like here.

What I'm missing is basically a very basic player like the one we used to have in X2. Its current available settings are :

Enabled:
Enable or disable the audioplayer
Path:
Sets the initial path for the audio folder
Use Imagefolder:
Sets the audioplayer to load tracks from active imagefolder if mp3 files exist
Basically, it will override the "global playlist" in favor of a "local" playlist.
Autostart:
Sets the audioplayer to play when gallery starts
here, there is a "secret" feature : if user has turned it off previously, the next visit will keep it off.
Startvolume:
Sets the initial volume of the audioplayer
Repeat:
Sets how many times a track or playlist will loop. 0 for unlimited
Minimum Connection:
Sets the minimum connection speed|kb/s| required for the audioplayer to run
gives an answer to karl's own argument about hogging users bandwidth
Sorting:
Sets the sorting order for list of audio tracks. Set to auto to have the tracks sorted manually from the admin.
Id3tags:
Sets what ID3 tags to display
Showplaylist:
Show or hide the playlist
Showcontrols:
Show or hide the 3 controls previous, playtoggle and next

Well frankly, I don't miss much here. Getting this "AS IS" would be fine for me as "phase 1", getting back what we had.

Now for a "new" version that would be in line with X3 top modernity :
-Integration of online Spotify/other services playlists

-For advanced storytelling : bind track to image.
Say you have a photostory of 12 images in a folder, there could be a track bound to each photos. Navigating in the photos would play the next song. So in effect, "track to play" becomes a meta data of your photo. --> photos play the tracks

-The other way around (although it looks even more overkill to me) : a single track with timecodes matching photos. --> tracks play the photos. (see soundslides).
This would have to make the player evolve in a modal player : "classic" or "story telling" with forward & back functions are to be rethought.

That's it for now.

Regards,
S.

mjau-mjau wrote:Thanks for the reminder. There certainly won't be as many settings for the widget as there was for X2 ... These things need to be simplified. Unfortunately, we won't be building it to synch with photos in slideshows ... It's a technical nightmare, and it just seems like a bad idea to believe that more than 10% of your visitors would have any interest whatsoever in letting a website manipulate audio on their computer. Not to mention the bandwidth required ...

Sorry to say this won't likely be happening ... How would you expect each visitor to stay more than a few seconds on each photo anyway? That would be highly irregular. It would be some furious preloading of excessively-sized mp3-audio files for a single visitor.

Sorry to let you down to these additional requests. Our first goal will to implement a simple mp3 player that fits nicely in the interface, with a minimal amount of settings required.

Hey Karl, thanks for the answer.

-About the minimum player : agree on the first goal, something that works but I can't think of what you could simplify further and I would be disappointed if you couldn't keep at least what the previous player was. You also have to think about the customers relationship you've built. So far, we've had HUGE improvements in the gallery engine, I cannot undermine that but we had quite a bit of regression on the audio side. May not be relevant to you, but it is to me.

-Okay for spotify, I guessed it, considering their current ugly integration schemes, but perhaps they had some api around... whatever

Just a little word about "expecting that 10% of your users will let..." : it is not about "expecting 10%" of your users to "discover and endure that", it's about them going there because they know it will be there, or because they're curious enough to try it.
It's about having specific galleries, designed as soundslides (without relying on a video file. I understand that it's maybe a lot of effort for a limited audience of your global customer list, but you cannot state that my visitors would only be 10% of mine interested in it...

It's been now a few times that I read you "conclude" on the usefulness of requests based on your own expectations. I understand that you develop features for 99% of people rather the 1%, that is fine, but make sure that you leave it out because it's in that 1% and not because you cannot see the use of it...
Some past examples on my requests: "hogging the bandwidth of users with music files" (seriously?), "how strange it was to display such small photos" (but you fixed my issue there, thank you!). Well, all my users like it with the music. All my users have looked at some soundslides before...

Just my two cents,
Z.

Thanks for the reply and being able to take some criticism.

Now with : "you will not find many respectable websites", again, this is bordering "opinion" maybe a side effect of your focus on developing a cutting edge high performance website.
I'll call that irrelevant : It is still the owner's call to do it smart and with taste or to ruin his website. Performance is for horse races and benchmarks. Now then, I agree that "autoplay" is bad

Now I'll let this sleep for a while and let you go on with X3,

S.

Hello Karl,

I've been checking status updates and somehow spotted this :

Video Intro Plugin
The video-intro plugin allows you to add a video intro at top of page. Read all about it:
https://demo.photo.gallery/examples/plu ... deo-intro/

I don't see how this fits in your past argumentation , especially reading the page long list of limitations coming with it but I wondered if maybe you were going to consider the audio player anytime soon ?

Well that video intro is clearly a nice feature going in the direction of more creativity to the editors of their website, regarding possible bandwidth impact which they get to decide about, and that's clearly how it should be, kudos.

I won't be buying x3 until I get that and it's really not a pressure or anything - I have zero leverage on you anyway- I bought x2, loved it and right now I can't actually migrate my old site to a similar experience in X3, it's as simple as that. It's a shame as X3 really is the best thing on the market.

Greetings,

Karl,

As always, thanks for the constructive answer !

For your question, I know because my audience is very limited, it's mostly friends and family and they spontaneously gave positive feedback on the music element, saying they'd sit back and let play for quite some time. As I wrote before, I know my target and most will find it easy to turn off. Then again, an editor can always have bad taste to others

Better yet, there is perhaps an elegant solution to that, perhaps there could be a slight animation pointing to the player upon first visit to cue how to disable it. Then the player state (autoplay, or off) could be saved for later visits ? Seems to me there are ways to meet both ends. Somehow X2 player state is already saved IIRC. The webmaster can also decide in the site config if he wants a player at all.

Thanks and looking forward to migrating,