[gui-talk] Fwd: My thoughts on the Mapler media player

[Steve Pattison]

From: Brian Hartgen brian at hartgen.org
To: PC Audio Discussion List pc-audio at pc-audio.org

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

Regards Steve
Email:  srp at internode.on.net
Windows Live Messenger:  internetuser383 at hotmail.com
Skype:  steve1963