Is there a future for OrangeCD

[helfo]

Wondering, that there is no improvement since Nov last year. This is it?
What about a new modern UI, tagging features (like mp3tag) and so on?

[frederf]

Been wondering the same thing.

Andrei... what's up? Give us some news... you have been rather quiet of late.

Fred

[hardbop-man]

This software "project" is managed by his left hand. Obviously he has got other, more important stuff to do than develop OrangeCD.

The only future will be Andrei letting someone else take over this. There's requests for a lot of
features but nothing happens. As a serious music collector I'm not happy with this because it lacks very important features.

The worst of all this is that, according to Andrei, there's no way of exporting all the fields to XML and import it back to a competitor (although it's possible to import the same fields ..... and to me, that's very strange!

[Joebugs]

This is all speculation friends. We all love OrangeCD and we all would be very sad if Andrei stops this great project. Andrei never said that he is going to stop OrangeCD and twice stated that an update is imminent, although in both cases it never materialised.
However I think users deserve a few words by Andrei to update us on the future of OrangeCD/Racksandtags.
A few years ago it happened with DVDP……., a DVD cataloguer I use. Updates stopped for many months. Finally after a lot of speculation in the forums, a new version with great new features was released. Maybe it will happen with OrangeCD. Maybe not. It’s all speculation until we hear from Andrei.


PS What OrangeCD misses out is user support. DVDP..... users are very active and share/upload templates - themes/reports/plugins/layouts regurarly. I am sure that there are many users who can contribute more towards OrangeCD.

[frederf]

PS What OrangeCD misses out is user support. DVDP..... users are very active and share/upload templates - themes/reports/plugins/layouts regurarly. I am sure that there are many users who can contribute more towards OrangeCD.

Well here is what he had to say about themes


Theme approach proved to be unsuccessful as it took too much effort to keep it in sync with the rest of the application, while offering almost no additional value.

For example, in last few years we added about 20 new fields to the program, including some pretty complicated stuff like collaborations or custom field system. To support all these new features, every theme needed update, and that's really a deal breaker.

So we don't encourage using the obsolete themes anymore, because they don't support essential OrangeCD features. Eventually they will be removed from the website. Of course, any customizations to standard Default V6 theme, or any custom-made themes will still continue to work for the time being!

Andrei

So there is no real incentive in developing themes for general consumption.. I would love to write plugins for OCD, but don't know where to start.. are they even still supported? If someone knows how please share that info with us.

I would love to write programs using the OCD database, but I don't think that is currently possible... (Andrei tell me if I am wrong)

Fred

[andrei_c]

Wondering, that there is no improvement since Nov last year. This is it?
What about a new modern UI, tagging features (like mp3tag) and so on?

Unfortunately there are bigger problems than just obsolete UI.

Storage mechanism used in OrangeCD needs refresh. The infamous Norton Antivirus problem is one example where it fails to keep up with modern requirements.

In past few months I've been working on new modern, cross-platform, SQL-based storage engine that would simplify extending OrangeCD to Mac OS X and fix few other long-standing issues (multiple images per album, etc.) Unfortunately this work is still very much in progress and far from being usable.

So there's currently two branches of OrangeCD source code: one is from November 2010 with some additional fixes made in between. The other is very unstable due to its new database engine. There is also a backlog of unsolved issues that need to be done in old branch (mostly bugs reported through this forum) before these two branches can be converged. I hope this explains the hiatus of last 8 months.

At this point I see no other solution as to stop working on new database engine and resume frequent incremental updates as it happened in 2009-2010.

Which means annoying Norton issue and some other problems will not go away for some time :(

Andrei

[hardbop-man]

Unfortunately there are bigger problems than just obsolete UI.

Storage mechanism used in OrangeCD needs refresh. The infamous Norton Antivirus problem is one example where it fails to keep up with modern requirements.

In past few months I've been working on new modern, cross-platform, SQL-based storage engine that would simplify extending OrangeCD to Mac OS X and fix few other long-standing issues (multiple images per album, etc.) Unfortunately this work is still very much in progress and far from being usable.

So there's currently two branches of OrangeCD source code: one is from November 2010 with some additional fixes made in between. The other is very unstable due to its new database engine. There is also a backlog of unsolved issues that need to be done in old branch (mostly bugs reported through this forum) before these two branches can be converged. I hope this explains the hiatus of last 8 months.

At this point I see no other solution as to stop working on new database engine and resume frequent incremental updates as it happened in 2009-2010.

Which means annoying Norton issue and some other problems will not go away for some time :(

Andrei

Thank you for this update! You just saved my day and a lot of work (migrate to other databases ... currently I have 3 databases in 3 different programs and this work is killing me).

If you, at some point, releases a OS X version, I'd be happy to buy a license!

[BLOWERS]

Thanks for the heads up, Andrei. Thought you'd gone to the moon...

[gurnemanz]

Thanks for the update. OCD continues to work fine for me as it is and any quibbles are minor. I use it all the time and it has become indispensable to me in overseeing my large music collection. Speaking selfishly, given all the hours I have spent on getting the database just as I like it, I just want the project to keep going and am grateful for all efforts that go into achieving that.

[Jazz_North]

I am pretty much in gurnemanz camp on the update issue. If there were no future updates it would not matter much to me. It does what I want my music manager program to do and isn't bloated with features that are useless to me. The interface is just fine and I can make the displays do pretty what I want. Sure there are a couple of glitches (it reads data from MP3s in the wrong order so that the reference number is screwy, but it is no problem to edit this when I am entering other data on the Library tab). Orange CD isn't the only program of mine that Norton would make a mess of, but there are lots of good options to Norton and I use one.

[frederf]

Andrei.. that is good news to see that you aren't abandoning OCD.

I know how time consuming a new project can be and I am glad that you are going to keep doing the minor fixes to the current version while you work on the new one.

On that note I will throw in my top request... Generate playlist from an advanced search result... as to why... I have purchased a WDTV Live Plus Media server... Just a little box that you can attach external USB drive or connect to your network to access all of your viedo, music and photos... and then to your TV. Their music support kinda sucks if you want to just use it as a jukebox to play random music. It will support playlist, but not generate them, and I don't necessarily want it to always play selections from my entire collection. But I also don't want to create playlist manually selecting what songs to include in a playlist. I want the function of the Advanced Search in OCD to create say a playlist of all songs from the 1960's OR 1970's with a genre of rock OR folk, AND NOT the artist bob dylan or artist joan baez... etc etc... Or a playlist of 1950's female jazz vocalists. There is nothing on the market that I can find that would do such a thing except OCD.

Looking forward to seeing beta releases of the NEW and IMPROVED OCD soon ;O)

Again thanks for letting us know that you are alive and well and working hard on our behalf.

Fred

[imcp]

Which means annoying Norton issue and some other problems will not go away for some time :(

OK Andrei, we can wait for the new version (the modern one).

We will stand all inconvinieces till new OCD appears

:):):)

[Joebugs]

I used Norton for many years until I started getting problems with OCD. I changed to Microsoft Security Essentials and solved all my problems. MSE is one of the best antivirus and is free.

MSE has great detection rates, particularly for rootkits. Even more impressive is that MSE has very few false positives, is light on resources and is good at removal of existing malware.

MSE is a great choice for average users because of the minimal user interaction required. It automatically updates and removes threats. No registration is needed, apart from a quick validating of Windows, and there are no nag screens or advertisements.

[davidagbr]

At this point I see no other solution as to stop working on new database engine and resume frequent incremental updates as it happened in 2009-2010.


Andrei

Wouldn't it make more sense to concentrate on moving OCD forward, rather than treading water trying to plug the gaps in an ageing and increasingly obsolete UI??

I for one would much prefer a product that was moving forwards rather than looking backwards.

Regards

David

[andrei_c]

Perhaps I should reformulate.

There are two strategies:

1) Finish new storage engine and release it as next update. It may take months. There will be no updates in between.

2) Fix backlog of issues that can be fixed without new engine and release them as they come. Work on new engine in parallel until it's ready for prime time. Then, merge two branches and finally release the combined version with all the fixes and the new engine.

I'll focus on #2 from now on.

Andrei

[Joebugs]

Perhaps I should reformulate.

There are two strategies:

1) Finish new storage engine and release it as next update. It may take months. There will be no updates in between.

2) Fix backlog of issues that can be fixed without new engine and release them as they come. Work on new engine in parallel until it's ready for prime time. Then, merge two branches and finally release the combined version with all the fixes and the new engine.

I'll focus on #2 from now on.

Andrei


Andrei,

Thanks for letting us know about the future of OCD.

Joe

[BLOWERS]

Thanks for that, Andrei - sounds like a plan! Hopefully making playlist creation as a priority (selfish of me...)

Keep up the great work!

[frederf]

Hey Andrei ;O)

Just wondering if there is any update on making the playlist output fuction... and/or a new update which would include this?

Thanks for any info..

Fred