Topic: Old:Winamp Visualisations in XMPlay (0.9.11) (plus album art with auto download)

[piovrauz]

Nice, all works fine here )), gotta test it at home too.
I'm very grateful to you!!! This was the only thing I missed, the vis done by Geiss/Milkdrop dev.

[Frosty]

a perfect addition to xmplay. really missed the milkdrop, thnx for makin it happen without winamp!!

[Cosworth]

Something wrong after these update XMPlay(3.4.2.27). When i listen musc-set with length 125:00, XMPlay shows 7:15  

[Pike84]

I tested the plugin, and it seems to work nicely .

I was wondering how the album art option picks the file that it shows, and if it was possible to choose another one from the GUI. It would be nice to be able to view back covers, CD images etc. too.

[Barna]

Thanks guys, I'm glad it works for you and you like it.

Something wrong after these update XMPlay(3.4.2.27). When i listen musc-set with length 125:00, XMPlay shows 7:15 :(

Is it wrong only while/after using this plugin or also without? I had some very bad memory leaks/overflow bugs caused by me which resulted in the weirdest behavior in XMPlay, so I hope there isn't one left now :-)

Edit: hmm, seems to be the same bug Pike84 reported in the 3.4 queries thread, will post my comment there.

I was wondering how the album art option picks the file that it shows, and if it was possible to choose another one from the GUI. It would be nice to be able to view back covers, CD images etc. too.

The complete lookup order for the covers is the following:
- The first image inside the ID3v2 tag of the current file (almost only in MP3 files).
- A file named Cover.jpg/png/jpeg in the same directory of the current song.
- Try same above with name Folder, then Front, then Album.
- A .jpg/.png/.jpeg file in the same directory containing the string Cover.
- Try same above with name Folder, then Front, then Album.
- A .jpg/.png/.jpeg file with the same file base name as the current playing song.
- Any jpg/png/jpeg in the same directory as the song

I am aware that this plugin doesn't support all kinds of file storing tags in the ID3 file. For instance afaik ID3v2 allows compression and encryption for the tags, but I doubt it's actually used anywhere. Also covers can be in more than the JPEG or PNG formats (I guess GIF would be used, as the third web format). Oh, and I've also seen programs which store these binary images into text only tagging systems (like Vorbis Text). I doubt many use either.
If anyone has an MP3 or even another file with included images not showing, I'd like to add support for it :-)

But yeah, I like your idea of having the option to show other images if found (either inside the file or in the directory).
I was almost running out of ideas for this project, so this suggestion is more than welcome :-)

[x0r]

R2 (http://www.rabidhamster.org/R2/download.php) doesn't work with this wrapper.

[Barna]

1.65 unregistered (free version) works pretty well here.
Except the play control but thats a bit weird as it seems to control it through it's own Winamp controlling functions and not by going through the plugin interface. You can even control Winamp while running R2 in XMPlay.

[Auren]

Barna
Couldn't you somehow integrate MaresWEB's Amazon Cover Downloader with your Album Cover Viewer? For example, you can parse the Album name with XMPlay and then send it to ACD through command line parameters. After that, ACD saves the image to the folder where the playing song resides and the ACV shows the image as an album cover...
Don't waste your time if it's too difficult — I can do that manually.

[piovrauz]

mmmm, I noticed some slow down in loading plugins (milkdrop, geiss2) with this last build, is this the price I have to pay for new mods? not a big problem, but if it's not the case, I got like 4/5 sec of wait before the wa plugin get draw... Is it possible to speedup this?

apart from this, this wrapper is nearly perfect, works great

[Barna]

mmmm, I noticed some slow down in loading plugins (milkdrop, geiss2) with this last build

Hmm, I can't confirm this here. At least I can't really feel a difference with older versions of the plugin to the current one on my machine (Athlon 64 3200+). Can someone else have a comment on this?
While MilkDrop 2 always took it's loading time (window comes up fast, but visualisation only starts after a few seconds) Geiss2 comes up very fast.
I mostly concentrated on getting it as stable as possible, so maybe I can have a look if some optimization is possible (and maybe check the older loading process' code to try to get back to it's speed :-))

Couldn't you somehow integrate MaresWEB's Amazon Cover Downloader with your Album Cover Viewer? For example, you can parse the Album name with XMPlay and then send it to ACD through command line parameters. After that, ACD saves the image to the folder where the playing song resides and the ACV shows the image as an album cover...

Yeah sounds like a cool idea.
I looked at the tool just today and noticed one thing... It's not unicode compatible at all :-) Something I'd really depend on for such a utility. But I took all my Visual Basic knowledge to get that feature into ACV and sent the source code changes to the author.
I hope a new version gets released soon.
I'll add support for it anyway I guess.

[piovrauz]

mmm, tested @home (athlon64x2 6000+), and work (athlon64 3500+), and I confirm it lags on loading plugins (now). Like you said, milkdrop is slower than geiss, but the bigger wait-time is on drawing the plugin window, like 4/5 sec, not on showing the "animation" in it. v3 didn't lag so much, not sure about v4. I'll try later with a clean xmplay setup (not that I have that much stuff "installed"), just to be sure it's not some plugin.

[piovrauz]

update to previous post: on my home pc (the dualcore) the slowdown is gone, doing nothing... good for me since it's the one I care the most, but still strange...

plugin request: I have a plugin that loads with the wrapper, but doesn't get feeded by audio. can you look in it please, just to see if it's easy to fix it? thanks.

I attached the plugin, the full installer is available at wa site.

[Barna]

I was wondering how the album art option picks the file that it shows, and if it was possible to choose another one from the GUI. It would be nice to be able to view back covers, CD images etc. too.

Couldn't you somehow integrate MaresWEB's Amazon Cover Downloader with your Album Cover Viewer?

Both features are now in 0.6.
The automatic cover finding through ACD works better than I had expected. It even kinda works with radio streams. But most of the time radio stations send Artist - Title in their stream title, so it doesn't find the album covers most of the time. Still, it's nice :-)

update to previous post: on my home pc (the dualcore) the slowdown is gone, doing nothing... good for me since it's the one I care the most, but still strange...

plugin request: I have a plugin that loads with the wrapper, but doesn't get feeded by audio. can you look in it please, just to see if it's easy to fix it? thanks.

I think I fixed all problems with Tripex3, please test it again with the new version.
I also think these fixes could fix any slowness you experienced since once of the recent versions, as the new one goes back to just one thread for the plugin wrapping as it was before, not two anymore. Seems to be just as stable (and faster), I hope.

Download: http://www.nukular.ch/winamp_svp_0.6.zip

Also here's the unicode capable version of MaresWEB's Amazon Cover Downloader compiled by me, as it's not yet up on maresweb.de. Sourcecode and License included of course. Just copy the contents of this archive over an existing ACD installation: http://www.nukular.ch/ACD_Unicode.zip

[Lesmo16]

Barna, thanks for this great plugin!
I don't need any visualization ... BUT the cover feature is something I was waiting for.

It would be fantastic, if your plugin would cycle through all valid images in the playing folder.
The cycle time should be user definable.

I hope you'll like this feature.

[Auren]

Barna, thanks a lot! It works perfect!

Literally, 100 kb of pure happiness...

[piovrauz]

yup, Tripex3 works now, exept for the "playtime bar" in the plugin, that crash xmplay if clicked . I don't really care, I never used it, but a bugreport is a bug report XD

about loadtime: I'll test later, right now pc is busy...

ah, another thing. even minimizing before fullscreen, when changing volume a bubble still flickers... could it be the cursor? taskbar stuff? fake fullscreen is checked, as you suggested.

[bornyank1]

Hey, I really like this plugin--I've been waiting for a reliable way to display album art in XMPlay for quite some time, so thanks for taking the time to make it. I do have a couple questions that have more to do with XMPlay itself than the plugin. For one thing, can the info window be docked on the main window? I often move the main player around while I'm doing other things, and I don't really want to have the player on the right of my screen and the album art floating around somewhere else. Is there a way to join them together, so that if I move one, the other will move with it? Also, I sometimes re-size the info window, either by accident or because I want to see a bigger view of a particular album cover. Is there a way to make it so that if I close it and re-open it, it will revert to the default size, instead of remaining at the size I made it? Thanks.

[Pike84]

For one thing, can the info window be docked on the main window? I often move the main player around while I'm doing other things, and I don't really want to have the player on the right of my screen and the album art floating around somewhere else. Is there a way to join them together, so that if I move one, the other will move with it?

Not docked, strictly speaking, but you can either drag with both mouse buttons pressed, or tick "Move info window with main" under Options and stuff->Appearance.

[bornyank1]

For one thing, can the info window be docked on the main window? I often move the main player around while I'm doing other things, and I don't really want to have the player on the right of my screen and the album art floating around somewhere else. Is there a way to join them together, so that if I move one, the other will move with it?

Not docked, strictly speaking, but you can either drag with both mouse buttons pressed, or tick "Move info window with main" under Options and stuff->Appearance.

Thanks, that's exactly what I was looking for. Now, is there a similarly simple answer to my second question? Is there a way to make it so that every time I open the info window after closing it, it returns to the default size?

[Pike84]

I don't think there's such an option yet. Might come in handy though.

You could propose adding it in the suggestions thread ("Suggestions for 3.5", not the sticky concerning the support site).

[bornyank1]

OK, so I posted before about my desire for a re-sizing option, but now something weirder is going on. Before, when I closed XMPlay after re-sizing the info window, and then re-opened the program, the info window would revert to the default dimensions. Now, it doesn't; it stays at the same size that I made it. I liked the default size, and I'd like to go back to it. This behavior happens with "auto-resize to fit contents" checked and un-checked, so it can't be that. What am I missing? Thanks.

[Zarggg]

Did you close the info window before closing XMPlay? When I hit that bug, doing that usually works for me.

[amit]

Hello Barna, Thank you for a nice plugin.

I am playing network files as streams. it takes a few seconds until xmplay reads the files' tags - more than the time amazon cover downloader needs to return a negative response. Can you allow ACD to try multiple times to download the cover or alternatively allow to set a delay before its first try to download a cover?

 

[Barna]

yup, Tripex3 works now, exept for the "playtime bar" in the plugin, that crash xmplay if clicked :P. I don't really care, I never used it, but a bugreport is a bug report XD

It's so weird...
Just before I released 0.6 clicking on the bar in Tripex3 was disabled/not handled. Then I tried if XMPlay accepts the scrolling to a given timestamp (IPC_JUMPTOTIME) and it really did work... Well, at least I seem to remember that it worked then.
Then after I read your posting I tried again, and it didn't work anymore, but it didn't crash XMPlay here, it just restarted the song at 0:00 when being clicked anywhere.
So now I didn't change anything, but I may remove it again if it crashes other XMPlay installations (newest version).

ah, another thing. even minimizing before fullscreen, when changing volume a bubble still flickers... could it be the cursor? taskbar stuff? fake fullscreen is checked, as you suggested.

Yeah, the whole full screen flickering is still quite annoying... I ran out of ideas so nothing changed now...

I don't know if Ian wants to add another special input QueryInt for disabling all info bubbles (well, the title ones can be disabled in the options but the volume ones still remain if the volume is being changed by a plugin). Or maybe a change that XMPFUNC_MISC::ShowBubble with empty text or time <= 0 hides the bubble instead of showing just a small one which still fades out and causes flickering.

It would be fantastic, if your plugin would cycle through all valid images in the playing folder. The cycle time should be user definable.

It's available now in 0.7. It is set to 10 seconds per default and can be changed by closing the visualisation (after enabling the cycling) and changing albumart_cycleseconds in vis.ini in the XMPlay directory. Hope thats fine.
I also added some fancy cover art fading. It looks nice here, but may be annoying on slower computers or when displaying album art in a bigger window/full screen. So the fading can be disabled easily in the usual middle mouse menu.

I am playing network files as streams. it takes a few seconds until xmplay reads the files' tags - more than the time amazon cover downloader needs to return a negative response. Can you allow ACD to try multiple times to download the cover or alternatively allow to set a delay before its first try to download a cover?

It should be more intelligent now.
The plugin already retried before when the radio station/cue title changed. Now it does on any kind of song title tag change. Hope it works for you.

Here's the new version (not any change on the Winamp plugin wrapping, only cover art, as described above):
Download: http://www.nukular.ch/winamp_svp_0.7.zip

[sanb]

Barna
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