Archive for the 'News' Category
March 28th, 2007
One of my main gripes with fb2k is the lack of components that have web-interactivity, in fact my comments in the “How can foobar continue to improve?” post were something to this end.
For those out of the hip circle or the cool loop; Last.fm is a service that aggregates tracks user’s “scrobble” and with this information generates recommendations, similar artists, charts and a lot of interesting relationships. There already exists a standalone Audioscrobbler component to submit tracks to Last.fm, yet with all the information contained within this personalised radio service foobar2000′s 3rd party components can get and give a lot more.
So here comes the news! Chronial has been working on a new “scrobble-charts” component. It is still very much in beta (i.e. it crashes) but its features are too impressive not to announce here. The component uses Internet Explorer connection settings to retrieve information from Last.fm’s web-services. Using this information two features are currently available;
- Create an artist playlist with tracks ordered by the Last.fm Artist Charts – essentially this mode re-orders your tracks in order of their popularity.
- Create a playlist of similar artists using the Last.fm similar artists list – this creates a new playlist filled with the artist selected and performers similar to. This makes creating theme based playlists extremely easy and is surprisingly fun to play with.
These playlists only select songs in your library. You can check out the latest version, change-log, some information and most importantly a download link here: Chronial’s Foobar Components (Thread).
I’m looking forward to new features.
March 17th, 2007
Firsty, I apologise for the lack of posts this week, I’ve been intensively studying mandarin – it’s a hard language to learn, no doubt. Anyway, I’m back now and working as hard as ever on the new FofR configuration, lots of juicy new features coming soon. Back to the point, a lot of these features have been enabled by the new pUI release. The changelog states:
0.8.0
+ “windowsize” button will now work inside child track displays
+ new user globals / layout globals will be run before all title formatting in TrackDisplay / SCPL.
layout globals will change between layouts and are saved in the .pui, while user globals stay the same for all layouts.
+ various bug fixes / improvements
What this doesn’t say is that Persisting Variables (PVARS) now really do persist – they are saved between foobar sessions right to the .pui file. This means making a configuration panel in a track display works as expected, saving settings between sessions rather than having to change them on each load. This has enabled me to make customising my configuration a lot easier and hassle free.
The download link never changes, if you seem to download the wrong file then something is getting cached in the wrong place. Terrestrial prefers this approach as it prevents old versions of pUI from being distributed, so I am afraid I cannot give you a unique URL, merely point you here:
Preview of the new globals box after the break Read the rest of this entry »
March 7th, 2007
The changelist states:
0.7.5
-
Tooltips for buttons. (add TOOLTIP:mytooltip or TOOLTIP:”my tooltip” to override the default)
-
Free cached images in not used for a while
-
Options for WINDOWSIZE to set anchor points (eg: WINDOWSIZE:x:y:LEFT:TOP, WINDOWSIZE:x:y:RIGHT:BOTTOM, etc)
March 1st, 2007
Terrestrial has just released the latest version of his PanelsUI component. With it come a few new features.
0.7.0
- Multiple buttons over same area can be executed
- Move window by click & drag on empty area
- Button to set window size: WINDOWSIZE:width:height
- Moved location of PanelsUI subfolder from profile directory to foobar directory
- “context-selected” and “context-playing” options for buttons
- Various bug fixes / improvements
Note the highlighted text – when upgrading make sure to have a backup of your existing PanelsUI directory which is situated in foobar’s profile folder, for example: “C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application Data\foobar2000\PanelsUI“. It has now moved and you will have to copy this backup into the foobar application directory, e.g. “C:\Program Files\foobar2000\PanelsUI“.
When executing multiple buttons (i.e. four buttons that cover the same area, when clicked each is executed sequentially), if one of these actions is from the context menu or main menu the sequential execution will stop, thus any actions after this point will not be performed. It is important to layer your buttons in the correct order. A general rule of thumb – set PVARs first, then perform your PanelsUI functions (e.g. a window resize), then perform your final main menu or context menu action.
February 24th, 2007
Not a lot of people seemed to have noticed this so I will bring it to your attention here. As of PanelsUI 0.6.1 beta (Feb 16th), Terrestrial has included a maths evaluation function, $eval.
Valid operators are + – / * @(modulus) {} (instead of parenthesis)
Here are some simple examples:
$eval(1+2*3), outputs 7 – multiplication performed first.
$eval({1+2}/3), outputs 1 – example of parenthesis
For a progress bar example of width 100:
$eval({%playback_time_seconds%*100}/%length_seconds%)