User Guide

Note: words appearing in italics represent the remote control button associated with that function.

• Remote Control
  • Up/Down/Left/Right navigate between Genres, Artists, Songs, Playlist
  • Select selects the highlighted Genre, Artist, Album or Song and adds it to the Playlist. The first song begins playing.
  • Menu brings up a menu of choices available with the remote control. These are functionally equivalent to the corresponding functions accessed by mouse clicking on the Menu button except for Help. Help displays a reference chart showing which remote control buttons perform what functions. This relies upon the Settings you have entered in the Remote tab of the Settings dialog. When you choose Save Playlist with the remote control, the playlist is automatically named with the date/time. Note that you can rename it later in the Playlist editor.
  • Exit generally exits from subwindows. For example it will exit from the Menu opened by pressing Menu
  • Delete will remove the selected song from the Playlist.
  • VolUp/Down are not used at this time.
  • Page Up/Down scroll a page up or down in the Genres, Artists, Albums, Songs or Playlist windows.
  • Alpha Up/Down jumps to the next letter in the alphabet within the Genres, Artists, Albums or Songs windows. This can be faster than Page Up/Down when you have a very long list of Artists or Albums to navigate through.
  • Play begins playing the current song in the Playlist, i.e. after pressing Pause.
  • Pause pauses play.
  • Stop stops play.
  • Next advances to the next song in the Playlist.
  • Previous moves to the previous song in the Playlist.
• Keyboard/Mouse
  • Tab, arrows, page up/down and mouse operate in usual Windows fashion. Tab/Shift and left/right arrows advance to the next/previous window. Arrow keys and page up/down scroll up/down within the current window.
  • Typing an alphabetical character key will jump you to that position in the Genre, Artist, Album window. For instance if you press 'Y' it'll take you to the Ys in your Genre, Artist or Album window. Continue typing the name of a Genre or Artist and it will automatically locate the word typed. If you are sorting Albums alphabetically (see Settings/General/Album Sort) it works there too. Songs are sorted by track # and this feature doesn't work in Songs.
  • The Alt+Up/Alt+Down arrow keys have a special function inside the Playlist. They allow you to reorder the songs in the Playlist. To do so first select a song in the Playlist you wish to move up or down. Then use the Alt+Up or Alt+Down to move the selected song up or down in the Playlist.
  • Delete key will delete a song in the Playlist/Library.
  • Right click on any Genre, Artist, Album or Song to access and optionally edit tag information.
  • Menu. Click on the Menu button in the upper left corner of Muzikbrowzer to access the menu of the following functions:
    • Open. Muzikbrowzer will open and begin playing any audio file on your disk.
    • Music Library functions:
      • Add music. Add specific files/folders to your Muzikbrowzer library.
      • Search for new/modified music: Searches folders (specified in Settings/General) for music not currently in the library and adds it. Also finds files that have been modified and re-adds them to the Library, for instance if you do tag editing with other software this is a quicker way to get Muzikbrowzer in-sync.
      • Complete rebuild: Searches folders (specified in Settings/General) for music and rebuilds library from scratch.
      • Export tags: Export audio file tags into a .csv file, importable into spreadsheet programs. Choose which tag keys to export: Genre, Artist, Album, Title, Track, Length, Year, filename. Or specify additional keys in a comma seperated list. Exporting the named keys exports from Muzikbrowzers database. Exporting additional keys requires the tag be re-read and takes longer.
      Skin: choose desired skin. For info on creating your own skin email support@muzikbrowzer.com
    • Player:
      • Clear Playlist. Deletes all songs from the Playlist
      • Fast Forward: Advances in current song
      • Load Playlist. Opens the LoadPlaylist Dialog allowing you to choose from your previously saved playlists.
      • Next song, in playlist.
      • Pause, Play, Stop do the obvious.
      • Play.
      • Previous song, in playlist.
      • Randomize Playlist. Scrambles up the Playlist in random order. Successively randomizing the Playlist will yield a different Playlist each time.
      • Save Playlist. Allows you to save your Playlist for later use. Saves the playlists in industry standard .m3u format. These may be importable into other devices/software.
      • Shuffle, the playlist. "Shuffles" the Playlist in Artist/Album order. Takes the first song from each Album and adds them to the Playlist, then the second song from each Album and so forth. Successive shuffles on the same Playlist will always yield the same shuffled Playlist.
      • Stop
      • Reverse, skips backwards in current song playing.
      • Volume up/down.
      Each of the above player functions has Alt-key keyboard shortcuts.
    • Playlist editor. Allows you to modify/delete playlists.
    • Settings. See Settings
    • Search. Allows you to search the Muzikbrowzer library by keyword(s).
    • Help. You are here.
    • About. Displays version info, credits etc.
    • Exit.
  • Progress slider. You can use the mouse to fast forward or rewind the song currently playing.
  • Minimize, Maximize and Exit buttons appear at the upper right.
  • The Muzikbrowzer dialog can be resized with the mouse. Size and position are saved and restored next time Muzikbrowzer is opened.
  • The Library columns can be adjusted by dragging with the mouse.
• Keyboard shortcuts

  Alt+A	Pause
  Alt+C	Clear
  Alt+Down	Move song down in Playlist
  Alt+D	Randomize
  Alt+E	Reverse
  Alt+F	Fast forward
  Alt+H	Shuffle
  Alt+I	Previous song
  Alt+J	Alpha Up
  Alt+K	Alpha Down
  Alt+L	Load
  Alt+M	Menu
  Alt+N	Next song
  Alt+O	Volume down
  Alt+P	Play
  Alt+R	Remote control menu
  Alt+S	Stop
  Alt+Up	Move song up in Playlist
  Alt+U	Volume up
  Alt+V	Save
  Delete	delete song from Playlist/Library
  Enter/Return	Add selected music to playlist
  F5	Reload current skin and other reinitialization.
  F6	Reread database if modified.
  left/right/up/down arrows	navigate through Muzikbrowzer
  Tab	same as right arrow

  If you're using a keyboard emulator type of remote control device, use tab instead of right arrow. Tab will always advance to the next control where as right arrow sometimes does not.

• Tag Editing.
  
  • Access the tag editor by right-clicking in any library column. If you right-click on a Genre you can rename that Genre. If you right click on an Artist you can rename that artist or the genre, etc. Right clicking on "all" in the Album column allows you to change the artist and/or genre for all the albums displayed, enabling simple and powerful cleanup of tag data.
  • Tag editing is a two step process. First by right clicking on a particular library item you're choosing "search" criteria. If "all" is chosen then the "all" will act as a wildcard during the search.
  • Edit the data fields on the right side of the Tag editor dialog to reflect the changes you wish to make. Click Next.
  • A search is performed and you are presented with the list of files matching the search criteria. At this point either confirm or cancel.
  • Muzikbrowzers database periodically performs a garbage collection, once every 500 file edits performed. This process will take a few minutes to complete. When it occurs a dialog will indicate it's progress. I intend to eliminate this annoyance in a future release.
• Miscellaneous
  • Genres and Artists are sorted alphabetically.
  • Albums are sorted by Year if the tag contains the year, or alphabetically. This behavior can be selected in the Settings/General tab.
  • Songs are sorted by track number if the tag contains the track number. Otherwise by filename (this can be usefull if you don't have the track number in the tag but your song files are named with the track number as a prefix, i.e. '01-Here Comes The Sun', '02-Hey Jude', etc).
  • Currently Muzikbrowzer does not "rip" or record from CDs into mp3 files.
  • Certain operations write error and informational messages into the log file, Muzikbrowzer.log located in the directory specified in the Settings dialog. This file may be helpfull in diagnosing problems.
  • While playing music Muzikbrowzer will display the song currently playing in the Playing status field at the bottom right. As you navigate around through different windows, the currently selected field will temporarily be displayed in this status field. After a few seconds the status field will go back to displaying the song currently playing.
  • Album cover art is displayed for the song currently playing and while you are browsing through your music library. Album cover picture is read from the tag of audio files if present. Each picture is displayed as you browse through different artists, albums in Muzikbrowzer. As well the album cover picture will be displayed as songs are played in Muzikbrowzer. Note that you must obtain the album cover picture via software other than Muzikbrowzer. If no album art picture is found in the tag Muzikbrowzer will look in the folder of the audio file for a file called "folder.jpg" or "cover.jpg" This follows Windows XP convention. And lastly [AlbumName].jpg following MediaMonkey convention.
  • Screen savers: Muzikbrowzer attempts to wakeup your screen saver in response to pressing a remote control button, just as if you have pressed a keyboard key or moved the mouse.
  • If Muzikbrowzer is minimized, it will maximize itself when a remote control button is pressed.
  • Playlist and Song duration: When you queue up songs into the Playlist, Muzikbrowzer adds up the duration of each song selected and displays the total Playlist duration above the Playlist.
  • Extra tag info will be displayed for a song when it is playing. It will appear in the Currently Playing status line at the bottom. The following will be displayed if present in the audio tag;
    • Mp3 file: COMM (Description)
    • Wma file: Description,
    • Ogg file: Description(s), Comment(s)
    • Flac file: Description(s), Comment(s)
  • Update notification. Upon starting Muzikbrowzer it checks to see if it has "phoned home" in the past month. If not it checks in with www.muzikbrowzer.com to see if a software update is available. If so it will let you know.