Hello Brian,
There are two things that I would like to add.
For starters, I haven't seen a media player that lets you record from the
line and mike in jacks on your sound card.
Audio editing would really be a nice touch too as well.
And I would also like to have the ability of ripping and burning CD's too.
John.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Hartgen" <br...@hartgen.org>
To: "PC Audio Discussion List" <pc-audio@pc-audio.org>
Cc: <blindi...@freelists.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2009 12:46 PM
Subject: My thoughts on the Mapler media player
Hi
There has been some discussion on the list about the new Mapler media
player and playlist generator. I thought I would give my overview of how
I found using the player from a user's perspective.
Many media players are either fairly complex to use from a screen-reading
standpoint or they require special plugins to achieve tasks which we as
visually impaired people may like to do. Mapler is designed to make the
playback of audio files and the creation of playlists easy while
incorporating some unique features.
As has been discussed, Mapler is an audio player and playlist generator
produced by a small company in Germany. At least one of the developers is
visually impaired, a fact derived from the podcast downloadable from the
company web site which explains clearly how to use the program. All
functions can be accessed using the keyboard or through the menu system.
Because Mapler uses standard windows controls, no special scripts or
screen-reader configuration files are required. It functions well with
jaws, window-eyes or system access and I imagine all other screen-readers.
Mapler costs 7 Euro if PayPal is used (about 10 dollars), or 11 Euro if an
external company processes the credit card payment.
Learning how to use Mapler is best achieved in my view using the podcast
or by exploring the menus. The help topics are not accessible via the
Help menu for some reason, but you can access them via the shortcut off
the Programs menu, available from the Start menu. However, not all the
files have been translated into English as some still remain in German.
Having said that, Mapler is an incredibly easy player to use. For those
people who do not want to learn how to use a complex media player,Mapler
probably is for you.
Advantages of using the Player:
1. It is easy to start, stop and pause the playing of a file, or move
forward and backward it in predefined steps, such as five seconds, 30
seconds, or a minute at a time.
2. Files or folders can be added to create a playlist to hear the tracks
immediately or the playlist can be saved with an .m3u extension.
3. One of the things I liked about Mapler was the ability to change the
order of tracks in the playlist. Tracks can be rearranged by pressing
Control+Up Arrow or Control+Down Arrow to move the selected track up or
down in the playing order. Keystrokes also exist to move an item to the
beginning or end of a playlist.
4. The volume of playback can be adjusted independently of the
screen-reader.
5. The variable speed without pitch adjustment is particularly impressive.
Many hardware and computer-based players often disturb the overall quality
of the playback when audio is reproduced at high speed and I found
accessing audio at a rapid rate using Mapler to be very easy on the ear.
6. There are a number of functions you can select when audio is being
played, such as to repeat tracks, shuffle, continuously play, fade out or
cross-fade. Parameters in the Settings menu allow you to control the
cross-fade process.
7. A special sleep timer allows you to have the computer shut down or go
into hybernation when the track or playlist has finished playing, or after
a designated time period has elapsed.
8. One really cool feature is that you can pause and play the audio from
within any application by pressing the Pause key on the computer keyboard,
located on the top right of the qwerty keyboard.
If for example you are located within Microsoft Word, and the Pause key is
pressed once, the audio from Mapler is either paused or playback is
resumed. If pressed twice quickly, focus is set to the Mapler window for
any manipulation you may wish to do. When the Pause key is pressed twice
quickly again, focus is reset back to the application you were previously
using, very nice.
9. The supported file formats are audio CD, wav, MP3, MP4, OGG, WMA
unprotected, AAC and FLAC.
As a summary of the advantages of using Mapler, given this is version 1 I
think this is going to be a fantastic program. It already has some great
features. While some people may be a little scathing of specialist or
accessible programs, undoubtedly there is a significant computer user base
who can benefit from them. The only way in which the program will improve
would be if people constructively submit feedback to the developers.
Before I do that, let me write a few words about the demonstration copy of
the program because the concept is quite interesting.
All the functions of Mapler are available in the demo, and in fact if you
just wanted to use it for creating playlists alone, you can do that
forever without encountering any restriction. So in theory you could use
it to create playlists with all the nice accessible features without
incurring any costs, and transfer the playlist to your mobile phone or
portable player. However the demo restrictions apply when you begin to
play audio content. When you have played audio content for 90 seconds, a
spoken message interrupts the playback alerting you to the fact that you
are running the program as a demo. The audio then resumes playing until
the next 90 second block.
The demonstration is unlocked using an unlock code as is the case with
many software packages which are downloadable from the web.
Areas to Improve:
Please note that some of these observations or suggestions may be due to
me not fully understanding the program.
1. When viewing the content of the playlist, if your screen-reader allows
you to activate a mode where full MSAA information is delivered rather
than columns of data viewable on screen, you may like to invoke this mode.
JAWS has such a facility and System Access will do this anyway by default.
While from within the settings menu it is possible to change the width of
the displayed columns, for even track titles with a reasonable length they
were often truncated and so the screen-reader does not announce them
fully.
2. The playlist view is presented with the item number first, then the
album name, artist, then track name. It would be useful if the order of
this information could be changed by the user or perhaps some aspects of
it removed, such as the album title if not desired.
3. Alongside each item in the playlist is an edit window which displays
information such as the current position within the playing track, the
total length of the track, etc. Much of this information is not very
understandable as it contains a series of figures representing the minutes
and seconds as opposed to displaying meaningful text, such as "2 minutes
30 seconds".
A. It is recommended that such information is converted into text which
the user can easily understand as illustrated above. when a screen-reader
announces numerical data continually, even at a slower rate the output can
be confusing.
B. While it is possible to move line by line through the Edit window, it
is not possible to move character by character or word by word to examine
it more closely.
4. It would be nice if the user could specify through the Settings menu a
default location for playlists which have been saved. Currently, if you
select a location to bring an audio file into the playlist, the next time
you select a playlist the program looks by default in the folder just
selected for audio files. There may not be playlists in that folder so it
is necessary to browse to a different folder.
5. If audio is being played, pressing down arrow allows you to view the
next track title in the playlist and the audio for that track immediately
begins to play. The problem with this is that you may wish to view the
upcoming tracks without actually playing them. This is particularly
important if Shuffle Play is selected. I would recommend that a separate
list of the tracks should be made available for viewing purposes only.
6. Pressing Enter on a given track allows you to view its properties or,
if you Tab through enough times, you can change the ID3 tags such as the
track title, artist name, album name, year, etc. It would be useful if
these fields had shortcut keys to move directly to the specific fields in
the Dialog so that you can easily and quickly amend specific parts of the
file properties if necessary. This is important if you have a large
number of tracks you wish to tag correctly and the advantage of this
player of course is that you can play the track if you are unsure what it
is before tagging it. The shortcut key implementation would help a lot.
7. The ability to convert audio cD content to an audio file format would
be very useful. Although programs like CDEX work well, it would be nice
to have that functionality in the program.
8. It would be good to have a means of moving to a specific segment within
the file, such as 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Winamp has an edit box you
can invoke into which a value in time can be entered and it would be
advantageous if Mapler had a similar function.
9. Unfortunately, the developers have fallen into the trap of not
conveying all on-screen text to the user when he or she Tabs through the
settings dialog. I find this often happens with programs. As an example,
when a user tabs through the Settings dialog, the screen-reader will
announce "Start of Crossfade, 5", where "5" represents the number of
seconds relative to the crossfade. However the user does not know what
this means. Visually, the on-screen text says "Start of Crossfade, 5
seconds before end of track". In fact there are a number of labels in
that dialog where the meaning is not clear. The caption for each label
should reflect the true meaning of the field.
10. The player should ideally have a graphic equaliser.
I think that is all for the time being, but if anyone has any questions
about the player I will try and answer them.
The web site for the player and podcast is at
http://www.mar-dy.com/MaPlEr/MaPlEr.php
Brian Hartgen
Jonathan Mosen List Founder
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