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 Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... http://www.pc-audio.org To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: pc-audio-unsubscr...@pc-audio.org
