Guybrush

Hah! You're the man, noise

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noise

happy to help!

to be honest, it's great finding someone else who's as enthusiastic about this sort of thing as i am

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Guybrush

It's just the sort of stuff the slightly compulsive side of me thrives on

If you'd like some more ideas on stuff to do .. Today, I was thinking if there was anything else I could do and I thought why not add a background picture to that track mod info box based on genre? I googled some pics, grayscaled them and put'em in there. It's a hasty job and I might change the pics for better ones, but it's good enough for a demo



Here I've just slapped 3 such panels together in photoshop. They're based on my supergenre2 tag, from left to right : rock, jazz and country. I got more, but the image got a bit wide and I see now the jazz picture isn't even fitted correctly, grr. Anyways, they interfere just slightly with the visibility of the text so I might change some colours too.

I also made an "album rating" tag so now stars show up in the group title as well!

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noise

ooh i like that a lot! perhaps you can share the images when you're done

i played with genre images for a while. i actually set my lower image viewer to cycle between the artist picture and the genre picture. but i was going crazy with them, doing one for all of my genre-style combination. it got a bit intense.

but i love the background image idea, it looks really great

album ratings - yikes. for me, the only way i could do that is by manually calculating it based on the mean of all the track ratings. i really wish there were a component that did it for me, but alas, nothing like that exists...

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Guybrush

Will do!

I have a habit of listening to albums so I have a pretty clear opinion of how I overall compare them, but I'm not really sure if it's going to be useful. It might turn out to be a bit redundant considering there's already track rating .. we'll see.

When I first thought about the images and genres, my first thought was also to make pictures for genres, but I thought it would be too much work. The supergenres are excellent for the purpose though!

Another idea I had which I eventually dismissed or at least pushed way back on my priority list is mood icons. It's easy to download packs of mood icons used on sites like livejournal and so on. I thought using a mood tag to display such mood images could be fun, but then I noticed I have nowhere to squeeze in another picture and then I got dizzy from thinking about all the tagging I'd have to do .. I prefer tags I can sorta do by bulk at the moment.

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noise

i've also thought long and hard about moods, but it's so hard to judge what category to put an album in! some are slow and happy, others slow and sad...

then i saw this: Moody - Mac OS X / Windows app to mood tag your music in iTunes

it's for mac, but the idea is pretty basic. one axis is tempo, the other is mood.

it would be very possible to implement a panel like this in foobar with either 9 or 16 colors.clicking a square in the panel would write the appropriate value to the %mood% tag. of course, this would work best at a track level.

then in the playlist, you could make a column with showing a solid square graphic of the appropriate color.

anyway just something i was considering. it could probably done in Track Info Mod even. maybe i'll work on it this weekend

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Guybrush

Wow, something like that would be really cool. I have to admit it sounds like quite an undertaking as well, but if you're feeling ambitious, why not?

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storymilo

So this is my foobar so far... not much at all. There are two things I'm wondering right now; how is it you make the column of artists on the side, and not at the top like this? And, is there a section to make playlists?

edit: and a freaking search bar! It seems to have disappeared... am I just being stupid?

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Guybrush

It looks like you have UI Columns installed, so then all you have to do is set up your panels right. Go to preferences -> Display -> Columns UI and press the "Layout" tab.

I'm guessing you've played around there already - you have some filter panels put up. Just play around with it and you should get an idea how it works. At the most basic, just think of your foobar as a canvas you're going to fill with panels and each panel contains one thing, for example album art or a playlist. There are two main kinds of splitters you should know. Splitters can "contain" other panels and are used to organize them.

If you have a horisontal splitter, adding panels into it will align them horisontally. New panels will be added to the right of the one you added last. In a vertical splitter, they will be aligned vertically.

To add a panel, splitter or whatever, just right click and choose "insert panel".

The basic setup I'm using has First one horisontal splitter, then three vertical splitters underneath it in the hierarchy dividing the screen up into 3 horisontally split parts. Library tree, playlist view and album art/info/bio.

At it's most basic, my setup looks like this :

• Horisontal Splitter
  • Vertical Splitter
  • Vertical Splitter
  • Vertical Splitter

That gives 3 empty sections split horisontally. Then I've basically just populated those vertical splitter panels with more panels like artwork view, track mod info, NG Playlist, library tree and more.



As for playlists, I'm still a little puzzled by them myself. They're not quite as intuitive as they were in Winamp .. I installed "foo_queuecontent" which gives me a playlist called Queue that I can view the playback queue in. It's almost like your typical Winamp or whatever playlist except songs disappear from it once they start playing as it's actually a queue and not a playlist.

Read about it / Get it here

However, I'm also looking for some better solutions to this. I'd actually quite like a plugin which has similar functionality to Winamp's. It's the feature I miss the most at the moment.



Unless some of you are unfamiliar, it's just a list of songs and it goes down the list, playing one song after the other. If you want, you can set up a playback queue inside the playlist by marking a song and pressing the Q button. A song's place in the queue shows as [#], # being a number indicating it's place in the queue (in the pic, first Jessica, then Ramblin' Man, then Melissa). When no more songs are queued, it just resumes going down the list .. unless shuffle is on. Then it'll jump around the list at random.

It's such a simple design, there has to be a component out there which supports this? Anyways, I've been a bit busy with other things but I'm definetly gonna look for one. If I find it, I'll let you know.

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noise

hey tore, just right-click and choose 'add to playback queue'. if you have a queue manager panel set up you'll see it there.

but really, it's not so different than making a new playlist. which is a better system once you get used to it. you could even make a hotkey (or button) that sends selected items in the current playlist to a 'now playing' playlist and get the same effect.

how do you have your library filter set up? when you click things - artists, genres, individual albums - do you send them to a new playlist? that's a good way to do things.

playlists are just so quick and easy to make in foobar you might as well use them!

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