UberView is a small utility to easily manage your music collection. It merges all you album directories, sorted by artist, so your whole music collection appears to be in one place. The albums can be spread across many different directories, or even drives, but will appear as one large collection, making it easy to find and play your favorite songs. It also does other nifty stuff like show you the album covers, create playlists and has a super fast search function.

It is written in assembler, hence it is very small (~27kb) and is very fast. It is designed to work with Winamp or Foobar as your player.

 

UberView looks best when all your albums are in "Artist - Year - Album" format. This way it will combine all albums of the same artist together. The tracks in each album should be in either long format like "Artist - Track# - Title" or short like "Track# - Title" for best results. Any format should work however, as long as it has " - " (hyphens) in the name, as this is how UberView seperates Artist and Album.

Check out the UberStandard for a great guide to ripping and naming your mp3 albums.

 

Of course! UberView will use whatever cover art images you like, whether you download them, or scan them yourself for example. Simply place the jpg images in the album directory. As of version 1.16 you can set the default name for cover images.

 

UberView tries to detect your default player for your audio files. Hopefully this is either Winamp or Foobar. If either of these is found it will be listed in the menu bar at the top. If neither of these are found to be the default, it will just say "Play" in the menu, and the status bar will show "Unknown player". In this case it may still work (?) as long as the player uses the same argument passing scheme as Winamp/Foobar.

Sometimes Windows Media Player can hijack your default player settings without you knowing. If UberView is not playing things as you expect, first check that WMP has not changed your default player settings.

 

If you have Foobar/Winamp set as your default player, but UberView keeps playing stuff in WMP check the associations on "m3u" files. Sometimes Foobar will own mp3's but not m3u. The easiest way to fix this is run the Foobar Associations program and make sure m3u is ticked.

 

Officially UberView supports either Winamp or Foobar as the media player. It should work with any player that supports "m3u" playlist files.

 

You can add both albums, or individual songs to favorites. To add complete albums, right-click on a thumbnail in the right hand pane. You can also right-click on an artist in the left hand pane and "Add to Favorites", and it will add all the albums for that artist to favorites.

When adding favorites, it basically adds whatever is selected in the right pane at that time. If nothing is selected, it will add everything.

 

Use the scroll wheel while hovering over the cover art to change its size.

 

You can move the cover art image by simply left clicking and dragging it around. Right click on the image to automatically dock it again in the lower right-hand corner.

 

These option's affect the way the mp3's are displayed in the right-hand pane. If you use the short scheme in your filesystem, selecting short in the options means that it will extract the ARTIST from the directory name and show the mp3's as ARTIST - TRACK -TITLE instead of just TRACK - TITLE. This is mostly of use when you select multiple artists/albums, because you would lose track of "which artist/which song" in the mp3 list.

 

Closely check the spelling of the artist(s). If they appear to be listed twice, then the spelling is different. Also things like "The Grateful Dead" and "Grateful Dead" will be listed seperately. UberView will treat these as different artists.

 

The album art download feature will attemp to grab the Large jpg from amazon. It does this by searching for the artist and album name. Although it returns the correct cover about 80-90% of the time, there are some cases that will confuse it. For example, self titled albums usually return a cover by the correct artist, but may not be the correct album. Various artist albums can also be a bit hit 'n miss, but this is due to the non-specific naming such as "Pure 80's Hits".