Migrating to PM123 1.4x

There are some major changes in the GUI that you should be aware of when moving from an earlier version. The most important ones are listed below. For further information see the change log. See also the compatibility issues if you want to continue using earlier PM123 versions.

Main window

Song title

You need a double click to change the title display. This prevents from switching the style accidentally.

Visual plug-in

You need a double click to change the visual plug-in style. This prevents from switching the style accidentally.

Alternate navigation

While playing a playlist you can navigate with the slider through the entire list by pressing the Alt key. The exact behavior is controlled by the navigation settings of the properties dialog.

Equalizer has vanished

Well, that's true. The simple equalizer from the context menu has been removed because the only plug-in that supported it was mpg123. Any other plug-in including WAV and Ogg-Vorbis playback silently ignored it. This caused the sound to depend on the encoding and to change within playlists. A bad thing.

I recommend to use the powerful RealEQ plug-in as an alternative. If you do not care about its precision use conservative setting like an FIR order of 4096.

If you do not like this alternative or it eats too much CPU for your purposes, you have to wait for a parametric EQ plug-in which uses very fast IIR filters. This will require nearly no CPU cycles and work with any source although. However, one must do the job.

Playlist windows

Playlists, the playlist manager and bookmarks are now basically the same thing. Furthermore you can open multiple playlists at the same time. That means:

• The Playlist Window is now nothing more but a detailed view of a playlist.
• The playlist button will open the default playlist.
• The default playlist is used if you drop more than one object on the player.
  So, do not use the default playlist for anything that you want to keep.
• The Playlist Manager is a tree view of another default playlist, which usually contains other playlists, of course.
• The bookmark editor is now a detailed view of a special playlist that is visualized in the player's context menu.
• You can use drag & drop and direct manipulation to modify all of the above.
• Different views of the same content are immediately synchronized as long as they are part of the same PM123 instance.

Nested playlists

Playlists may contain other playlists and they may contain further playlists and so on. This has the following effects:

• All items of a child playlist are played when the playback reaches the sublist and before PM123 continues in the parent list.
• In shuffle mode items in different sublists are not interchanged.
• The PM123 main window flattens the nested lists and shows always the index and the time offsets within all songs in the nested list structure. To see what's going on open a tree view of the currently played list (Context menu/Current Playlist/Show tree view or simply press Ctrl+T).
• Nested playlists in the bookmark list create sub menus. Use this to structure your bookmarks.
• When the playlists are nested recursively the player will ignore sublists that are already in the call stack. This avoids an infinite recursion.

File system folders

PM123 is able to play the content of file system folders directly without the need to load all files into a playlist. This works as follows:

• The content of a folder is handled as a virtual playlist.
• Optionally sub folders are virtualized as nested playlists too.
• Unplayable files are skipped.
• Changes in the file system are reflected to PM123 only when PM123 is restarted or a folder is manually refreshed.
• If a folder is selected in the open dialog or by drag and drop the content is no longer copied into a real playlist as with earlier versions.

This feature also changed the behavior when dropping a folder at PM123. The objects in the folder are no longer expanded immediately. Instead, they are read when the folder is actually played. This allows to reflect changes to the folder to PM123. See Drag & Drop for further details.
To get the old behavior add the folder to a playlist and choose Expand content from the context menu of the folder.