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[Feature] More PlayerType values for NowPlaying plugin

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Nachtschade
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[Feature] More PlayerType values for NowPlaying plugin

Post by Nachtschade »

I'm using MediaMonkey and I would really love to be able to build a skin for the NowPlaying plugin that supports more PlayerType values than is currently the case. I would love to be able to show the Comment tag as well as the five Custom tags from MediaMonkey, among others.

Is there any possibility this can be a thing in the future?
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tjhrulz
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Re: [Feature] More PlayerType values for NowPlaying plugin

Post by tjhrulz »

While I can't speak for the devs NowPlaying is pretty old code at this point and supports a rather large amount of players, if new PlayerTypes were to be added it would have to be ones that were supported by all players or all but like Spotify and MSN/WLM Messenger interfaced players
Nachtschade
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Joined: August 1st, 2017, 10:02 pm

Re: [Feature] More PlayerType values for NowPlaying plugin

Post by Nachtschade »

I'm not sure why they'd have to support all players? Some players don't have custom tags for instance, so that's gonna be difficult.
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jsmorley
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Re: [Feature] More PlayerType values for NowPlaying plugin

Post by jsmorley »

I have good news and bad news.

First the bad news. The developer who created and worked on NowPlaying has other life priorities, and is no longer able to work on the code. This is some moderately complicated code, and the various interfaces to the many players out there are also complicated, and often change. What this means is that for now at least, NowPlaying is what it is. The other developers can tweak around the edges and hopefully correct a bug or a minor change, but NowPlaying is really kinda ossifying. It's more or less parked with the current feature set and supported players.

What we need is for some pretty experienced and talented C++ developer to take an interest in this. It would be a reasonably big commitment, as it would mean installing Visual Studio, creating a git fork of our code, learning how the NowPlaying measure works and how it fits into the world of Rainmeter code, and creating pull requests with changes. We would be happy to have this happen and would love to work with anyone who is feeling ambitious.

Now the good news.

I lied, there isn't any good news...
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tjhrulz
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Re: [Feature] More PlayerType values for NowPlaying plugin

Post by tjhrulz »

While adding more player types is not something I want to do. However I have talked with Azack in the past about maybe updating NowPlaying with more players.

The biggest worry though was that it would not be accepted as some are missing features like genre or track number or they only interface over websockets. I also have a work in progress and making web players work with rainmeter but it requires an extension for your browser. Also I could update spotify to use their API so it could be a full player but in order to support seek and volume we would need a private OAUTH key.

I am pretty familiar with the code though so I could update it if you really wanted me to to support comment tags and other more player specific features.


Edit: Also another thought I had in the past was making NowPlaying be able to dynamically select a source if non were specified based on which has updated last.
Last edited by tjhrulz on August 2nd, 2017, 8:40 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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balala
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Re: [Feature] More PlayerType values for NowPlaying plugin

Post by balala »

Would be a good idea to add the new Music Groove and eventually Movies and TV.
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tjhrulz
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Re: [Feature] More PlayerType values for NowPlaying plugin

Post by tjhrulz »

Groove does not work, I looked at it in the past. The API is limited and it does nto include any info in the title bar to extract from that way. You could do simple controls but I dont see a good way to get the info from it about the current playing song.
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balala
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Re: [Feature] More PlayerType values for NowPlaying plugin

Post by balala »

tjhrulz wrote:Groove does not work, I looked at it in the past. The API is limited and it does nto include any info in the title bar to extract from that way. You could do simple controls but I dont see a good way to get the info from it about the current playing song.
That's not good. I thought to have a complete support, as same way as the other players are supported by the NowPlaying plugin.
Bad...
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tjhrulz
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Re: [Feature] More PlayerType values for NowPlaying plugin

Post by tjhrulz »

Actually I take that back while going through windows docs with Azack I found it might be possible to using a windows 8+ API to get media playback info the volume on screen display. That would work then with Groove. Ill test it tonight once I get back from a sailboat race.
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balala
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Re: [Feature] More PlayerType values for NowPlaying plugin

Post by balala »

tjhrulz wrote:Actually I take that back while going through windows docs with Azack I found it might be possible to using a windows 8+ API to get media playback info the volume on screen display. That would work then with Groove. Ill test it tonight once I get back from a sailboat race.
Ok, thanks. Supporting the new Groove would be a great feature, I think.
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