The general usage of Yammi is intuitive:
On the left, the "quick browser" provides a list of folders, each containing a list of songs (or subfolders).
On the right, the "songlist" lists all songs contained in the selected folder.
Normally you would use the quick browser to pick a selection of (or all) songs, then the songlist to pick one (or more) songs to play, edit, categorise, ...
The most important actions are available in the toolbar, others in the menu or the context menu (right-click on a song or a folder).
The first step for using Yammi is to get your songs into Yammi's database by having your harddisk scanned.
For this to work correctly, you should first check your configuration (Configuration->Settings) and make sure that the directory "base directory for scanning" is pointing to the base directory of your song collection. Also, give a path for "trash directory for deleted song files", as this directory is needed when you want to delete songs within Yammi (Yammi does not delete any files, but moves them to this directory and skips this directory when scanning for new songs).
Now start your database update (Database->Update), which should insert all found songs into Yammi's database. After the update you are ready to use Yammi, for example search for songs, categorize them or enqueue them to your media player. For more information about scanning your harddisk, or for information about scanning CDs, see "Updating Database" in "Advanced Topics".
Type in anything into the search field, Yammi immediately shows you the best matches, rated with a percentage (you can configure the threshold for the shown matches in the settings). That's basically it, simple but effective, just give it a try!
Yammi looks into title, artist, album and comment for similarities.
Yammi will automatically switch to the folder "Search Results" whenever you type in anything into the search field. Ctrl-F or ESC set the focus to the search field and clear it.
In the songlist there is one row per song, containing various information about the song. The following columns are available:
(* = corresponds to id3/ogg tag info, + = extracted from mp3/ogg layer info)
artist*
title*
album*
length+
year*
track*
genre*
addedTo
bitrate+
path
filename
comment*
last played
Depending on the chosen folder, there may be additional columns, for example:
Match (folder "Search Results")
Pos (folder "Playlist" and "Categories")
Played on (folder "SongsPlayed" and "History")
Reason (folder "Problematic Songs")
The songs entries in the songlist are normally written in black, except:
currently played song (red)
song enqueued in playlist (blue)
song already played in this session (green)
song not available on local harddisk (grey) (=> probably needs to be loaded before playing)
song available in swap dir (dark grey) (=> song is already loaded, will be only checked for folder "Playlist")
The following folder structure is provided automatically:
Contains all songs in Yammi's database.
Contains all songs that are still to play (including the currently played song).
In this folder you can move songs around to change the order of songs to play. However, you are not allowed to drag a song to the top position, as this is the currently played song. Please note that you can only drag songs if the folder is ordered ascending after the first column ("Pos"), which is the default ordering when you click on this folder.
Contains a subfolder for every album (artist, genre) for which there are more than x songs in the database, with x=group threshold. The group threshold defaults to 5, but can be configured in the settings.
This folder contains "categories" (or "playlists") of songs, that can be created and filled by the user. You can add a song to a category by right-clicking on it and choosing "Insert into..." and the desired category. The songs in each category can be ordered by dragging the songs to the desired position. Please note that you can only drag songs if the folder is ordered ascending after the first column ("Pos"), which is the default ordering when you click on this folder.
This folder contains the history of played songs, each song shown with the timestamp when it was played. For played songs to be logged, you need to activate "logging of played songs" in the preferences. This folder only contains the songs loaded from the history file at startup. Songs played in this session will be appended to the folder "Songs Played".
Contains all songs that have been played in this session of Yammi, together with a timestamp. When Yammi terminates, these songs will be appended to the history file, appearing in the folder "History" the next time Yammi starts.
Contains a subfolder for every media (eg. CD) that you prepared with Yammi.
When burning song files to a CD with the assistance of Yammi, the program adds information to its database about on which media under which path each song is available. This enables you to quickly find on which media you have song files, and it enables Yammi to request the required media to load songs into a swap directory.
This Folder contains songs that were found problematic when performing a consistency check or database update (eg. songs contained twice). This folder will not be saved to Yammi's database.
This folder contains the result of the last search process.
Yammi automatically groups into this folder the latest additions to your song database.
This folder contains all songs that are not appearing in either
- a category
- the folder "Artists"
- the folder "Albums"
This folder can assist you in organizing your songs into categories.
Song files can still be organized in a directory structure according to your own needs. Yammi keeps its own database of songs with all necessary information (artist, title, album, filename, ...). This song databse is saved as a simple xml file in the user's home directory under $HOME/.yammi/songdb.xml. You should not move your songfiles from outside Yammi, because Yammi might not find the files any more (although Yammi tries to detect files that have been moved on a database update). Yammi provides a function to move song files, which at the same time updates the information in Yammi's database. Please make use of that function when you reorganize your songs on your harddisk.
All song actions are available from the context menu (i.e. clicking on a song with the right mouse button). The most important ones are also available in the toolbar.
...Enqueue - Enqueues a song to the end of Yammi's playlist.
...Enqueue as next - Enqueues a song as the next song to play in Yammi's playlist.
...Play immediately - First enqueues the song as the next to play, then causes a song change, so the song is immediately played.
...Dequeue - Dequeues a song from Yammi's playlist, ie. removes all occurrences of this song in Yammi's playlist (if applied on a song in the playlist, only removes that occurrence in the playlist).
(only available if a second sound device is configured in the preferences)
...start - Immediately starts playing the song via the second sound device, starting from the beginning.
...middle - Immediately starts playing the song via the second sound device, starting in the middle.
...end - Immediately starts playing the song via the second sound device, starting close to the end.
Opens a dialog with information and edit possibility for the selected song(s). The dialog shows the different fields that Yammi saves in its database.
Multiple selected songs / mass editing
If more than one song is selected, the song info dialog is slightly different:
- Yammi shows the total size and length of the selection
- entries that are not exactly the same for all selected songs are shown as "!". As long, as this is not changed, these entries are not touched. When you change this entry, you can conveniently set that entry for all selected songs to the new value (ie. unifying that value for the whole selection).
- entries that are exactly the same can be conveniently changed for all selected songs by changing the value shown.
Allows to insert one or more songs into an existing category or remove them from a category. The icon in front of the category name indicates whether the song(s) will be added or removed from the category. A check mark means that the song(s) is already contained. Selecting a category with a check will remove the song(s) from it.
This allows you to quickly search for songs from the same artist (or album or title) as the selected song. It simply gets the information you requested from the song and performs the usual fuzzy search with it.
Delete - Deleting can be done in two ways:
1. Deleting the database entry in Yammi's database (does not touch the song file).
2. Deleting the song file, which is done by moving the song file to the trash directory. Yammi still keeps the database entry (the song may be present on some media, and copied to the harddisk before playing).
Move file to... - Moves a file to another directory. The path information in Yammi's database will be updated with the new location of that file.
Check consistency - Performs a consistency check on the selected song(s). See "Checking consistency" in "Advanced topics".
Burn to media... - assists in burning the selected songs to a media. See "Burning files" in "Advanced Topics".
You can configure Yammi's settings via the menu: Settings -> Configure Yammi.
Only some options are explained here, the rest should be self-explanatory if you read the provided tool tips (stay over an item with the mouse for a while).
Consistency Mode
These settings determine, whether Yammi checks and modifies the id3 or ogg tags and filenames of your song collection. If both are activated this has the following effect:
If you change eg. the title of a song via Yammi's song info dialog, Yammi will not only change the entry in its internal database, but also the id3 or ogg tags and the filename accordingly the next time it saves its database. Yammi uses the schema "artist - title.mp3" (or .ogg) for naming the files, but first tries to remove all characters that are possibly not allowed in filenames (on linux as well as windows (vfat) file systems), however no guarantee can be given that "strange" artist or title entries don't cause any problems with naming the files... Please let me know about problems concerning the naming of files so I can try to fix them.
If you don't want Yammi to touch your song files in any way, you should leave these two settings disabled! However, for easy organizing your song files I found it extremely useful to have consistent filenames and tags at any time.
See also "Checking consistency" in "Advanced topics".
Group Threshold
This value determines, how many items of one group must be present for a subfolder within the folder Artists/Albums/Genre to be created. If you set this value to 1, every artist/album/genre will appear as a subfolder, a value of 10 only will create subfolders for artists/albums/genres which contain at least 10 entries.
The following key bindings exist:
ESC/CTRL-F: Set focus to search field and clear it
F1: Play / Pause
F2: Skip backward (SHIFT-F2 skips without crossfading)
F3: Skip forward (SHIFT-F3 skips without crossfading)
F4: Stop playing
F5: Add song(s) to end of playlist (SHIFT-F5 adds them in random order)
F6: Play song(s) as next (SHIFT-F6 adds them in random order)
F7: Play song(s) immediately (SHIFT + F7: play immediately without crossfading)
F8: Dequeue selected (SHIFT + F8: Dequeue all)
F9: Prelisten to start
F10: Prelisten to middle
F11: Prelisten to end
F12: Stop prelistening
PAUSE: Enable/disable sleep mode, see "Sleep mode" under "Advanced topics"
Page Up and Page Down: increase or decrease the number of songs for Yammi sleep mode (only takes effect, if Yammi is in sleep mode)
Ctrl-S: Save song database
Note concerning crossfading: If you use crossfading, it sometimes comes in handy to change to the next song without crossfading (e.g. to quickly listen to the next song). For these cases press the SHIFT key in combination with the requested action.