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Author Topic: Ultimate "Now Playing"  (Read 8562 times)

Petrž

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Ultimate "Now Playing"
« on: March 28, 2017, 01:33:17 PM »
I have a great idea of a plugin which I call Ultimate "Now Playing".
Because while listening songs, there is no reason to see entire media library and playlist which takes so much space.
So after adding songs to playlist, this plugin could open in FULL SCREEN either automatically after few seconds of inactivity or by pressing some shortcut.
And there would be all informations people would like to see: BIG FULL HD album cover on the left, and then on the right at the top there would be info about song (artist, year, album, title, genre, bitrate...) and basic controls.
Below that, there would be synchronized lyrics just like one awesome plugin called "MiniLyrics" does.
Those lyrics would be big, so often, not entire lyrics would be shown, therefore they should automatically scroll just like MiniLirics does it :)
But it would be good if person could also scroll it manually with mouse wheel :)
And then if you want to go back to Winamp, you would just press Esc, and you will be back in Winamp :)

And MiniLyrics already is automatically downloading good lyrics from it's database, so there would be no reason to implement it :) We could just use MiniLyrics to download lyrics to .lrc file and it could just read from that file.
Or even better thing would be, if we could tag it to song's ID3 tags, then we don't have to have these files in music folders... And also that album cover should be read from ID3 tags :)

A already created an image of how it could look in Photoshop, so I will post it here.
Also I will post a screenshot of my Winamp how it looks now, if you are interested :)

[edit - dro]
External links to images have been removed & optimised copies have been attached in their place.
« Last Edit: March 29, 2017, 04:22:26 AM by dro »
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dro

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Re: Ultimate "Now Playing"
« Reply #1 on: March 29, 2017, 04:20:39 AM »
Will have a proper read through and reply to your post later but I've tweaked the attachment settings so have now attached them to the post instead of going to onedrive which I've removed. I've also used http://compresspng.com/ to reduce the size of the images to something that is a bit easier to do with (one saw a ~90% size reduction).

-dro

dro

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Re: Ultimate "Now Playing"
« Reply #2 on: March 29, 2017, 03:28:06 PM »
So on reading through things, it's basically a fullscreen now playing view with basic player controls and related information to what's playing (assuming there is the information there to begin with).

Straight up I'll say that I have a number of issues with MiniLyrics and how it works & integrates with Winamp (which I've never found to be all that good though maybe it's improved since I last tried it out - were placement, skinning and loading issues that I remember which didn't make for a nice experience).

My initial thought is that it could just be done via an embedded web page and hook the HTML5 player controls but I'm not sure how well that'd work with the IE based webbrowser control that Winamp relies upon for such things. If anything, doing it more 'natively' might be the better option and some aspects aren't too far off the bottom part of https://winampplugins.co.uk/gen_classicart/gen_classicart.png from the album art plug-in for classic skins.

And for the final thing about embedding lyrics into files directly, MiniLyrics possibly has the option but for Winamp itself, it would need changes to the native input plug-ins that handle all of those things or (as I'm planning to do) replace that handling with a centralised tag read / write solution so that a lot of the missing things that people want can then be done.

-dro

Juanus

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Re: Ultimate "Now Playing"
« Reply #3 on: March 29, 2017, 04:40:40 PM »
And for the final thing about embedding lyrics into files directly, MiniLyrics possibly has the option but for Winamp itself, it would need changes to the native input plug-ins that handle all of those things or (as I'm planning to do) replace that handling with a centralised tag read / write solution so that a lot of the missing things that people want can then be done.

-dro

I do not mean to hijack this thread so a new one could be made if need be.
I would love to hear about your idea for a centralized tag read / write solution. How would that work?

dro

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Re: Ultimate "Now Playing"
« Reply #4 on: March 30, 2017, 02:06:25 AM »
At the basic level it would get in-between Winamp and the input plug-ins and their metadata interfaces and handle the read / write requests that way instead of having the input plug-in doing it instead. Am sure it's not going to be as simple as I've described it but that's the general idea.

I'm using the same basic approach with in_url to proxy through metadata reads for youtube urls from the plug-in that is actually handling the playback, with tag reading replacement just being the next step on from that if I made the appropriate changes. Though I want it to be generic enough in it's handling so as to be able to provide a greater consistency with what can be read and written (which is not the case at the moment) along with expanding on what can be done (e.g. lyrics, proper artwork embedding, access to custom metadata fields and so on).

-dro