New Mini Player

[redwing]

mikebo's mockup looks great. But mouse-over control layout would look better with no overlay of the original layout.

[Alexis]

I would also like to weigh in that a revamp of the mini player is more than welcome.  I have been finding myself  really wanting to use it sometimes lately, but it just seems pretty plain compared to the rest of the achievements over the past year or so.

An appearance of the sorts below may be very welcome  (From Redwing's post),  but this is really not so much a mini player but compact.  However, some distribution (comprising a single row) of what is displayed and the appearance would  be nice.  But then again I do not think we are able to get that kind of skinning appearance currently, correct?

[mikebo]

It would be neat if some sort of click toggled this mini view between two line (to show the image) and the original single line view... this would allow the existing tiny single line screen estate to be maintained while also reaping the rewards of this new larger view in development.

Yeah the initial mockup is as far as i'm willing to go in height and generally i think we should strive for making the mini player smaller rather than bigger, unless there's a good reason.
Here's a single line mockup

I would love if the colors, trim & styles would change based on the actual album colors & genre.

I'd rather keep it simple.

You have a fan here, your work never ceases to amaze me  

Thanks for the kind words but i'm only pushing pixels around, Steven does the the real work.

I would also like to weigh in that a revamp of the mini player is more than welcome.  I have been finding myself  really wanting to use it sometimes lately, but it just seems pretty plain compared to the rest of the achievements over the past year or so.

Pretty plain is exactly what the mini player should be imo. No bells and whistles, only the essentials.


I'm against bitmap skinning because it is simply unnecessary.
I'm also against a separate metro or modern mode for the mini player. We already have that choice for the main player panel and it's a mess.

[Iasc]

my personal preference would be to be able to bitmap the mini player, but i guess it depends on how many users would be willing to make the effort to create one.

[Steven]

i've done a "modern" layout variation with artwork, configurable fields and an optional spectrum visualiser - it is now the default (you can switch back to the old layout if you prefer). It doesnt have skin overrides as yet.



http://www.mediafire.com/download/fowyw0kyfw1qrcm/MusicBee_Exe_Patched.zip

I am willing to spend some time enhancing the TheaterMode support if anyone wants to do custom mini-players that way - let me know what you need and i will see how much effort would be involved

[Alexis]

I like it Steven.  Thanks.

[SimonBRT]

really really nice! 

[Iasc]

looks really nice steven.

one request i would have is to have the spectrum visualiser take its colour from the album cover.

[redwing]

I am willing to spend some time enhancing the TheaterMode support if anyone wants to do custom mini-players that way - let me know what you need and i will see how much effort would be involved

This is what I can get with the current fixed TM.



Obviously many features are missing including the following:

- ability to hide top border
- click and drag for moving the player
- "always on top" feature

If anyone wants to try it, save the following as a text file with "xml" extension.

Code

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<root>
<settings enableScaling="false" />
<settings fixedWidth="444" fixedHeight="58" />
<element type="Block" x="0" y="0" width="444" height="60" bg="235,235,235"></element>
<element type="AlbumCover" x="0" y="0" width="58" height="58" brightness="1.0"></element>
<element type="Field" id="Title" x="62" y="3" width="105" font="Segoe UI" style="Regular" size="9" fg="0,0,0"></element>
<element type="Field" id="Artist" x="62" y="20" width="105" font="Segoe UI" style="Regular" size="9" fg="141,141,141"></element>
<element type="Field" x="63" y="36" width="110" >
  <child id="RatingLove" visible="MusicBeeSetting" fg="176,176,176" size="12" ></child>
  <child id="Rating" visible="MusicBeeSetting" fg="106,106,106" fg2="212,212,212" size="13" ></child>
</element>
<element type="ProgressBar" x="59" y="52" width="385" height="8" fg="235,196,0" bg="220,220,220" ></element>
<element type="PlayerBar" x="155" y="15" width="220" height="30" bg="235,235,235" fg="99,99,99" fg2="0,0,0" ></element>
<element type="ProgressPosition" x="392" y="3" width="50" align="right" font="Segoe UI" style="Regular" size="5" fg="141,141,141"></element>
<element type="SpectrumVisualiser" x="260" y="0" width="180" height="48" bdr="200,200,200" ></element>
</root>

[Steven]

one request i would have is to have the spectrum visualiser take its colour from the album cover.

i have made a change but i dont think its very effective because it needs to incorporate the default colour so its visible in all cases - however it is a mild effect and might be ok for the mini-player. To be really effective i think the entire mini-player would need to change colour based on the album cover and i am not sure most people would want that in a mini-player ie. to me its something that should not be too distracting. Perhaps others have a different view on that

[Steven]

this has support for the following skinning overrides:
PlayerMini.Background  bg bg2 fg
PlayerMini.ProgressBar bg fg
PlayerMini.Control.Default fg
PlayerMini.Control.Disabled fg
PlayerMini.Control.Highlight fg

and also applies a mild colour adjustment to the visualiser based on the album cover

http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V2_3/MusicBee_Exe_Patched.zip

[lnminente]

Speaking about fixed theatermode there is something would be very welcomed here. The ability of restoring a non maximized window with main view of MB to the position it had before calling a fixed theatermode.
I think the best result could be remembering two different top left corner coordenates, one for the main window and another for fixed theater mode.

I found this need when i wrote the AlbumArt theatermode, i use to have that view at the right of my browser, so when switching to main view in MB it is restoring with the same top left corner of the theatermode instead of the top left corner from before.

Here is a succession of what happens:

[redwing]

one request i would have is to have the spectrum visualiser take its colour from the album cover.

i have made a change but i dont think its very effective because it needs to incorporate the default colour so its visible in all cases - however it is a mild effect and might be ok for the mini-player. To be really effective i think the entire mini-player would need to change colour based on the album cover and i am not sure most people would want that in a mini-player ie. to me its something that should not be too distracting. Perhaps others have a different view on that

I don't think this change was necessary at all. Depending on the selected skin and album covers, now the visualizer is sometimes hard to see. And even when it's visible, the color combination often looks awkward. The previous version worked flawlessly.

[Steven]

not disagreeing with you but i have already made some improvements to it so lets see what feedback there is
http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V2_3/MusicBee_Exe_Patched.zip

[redwing]

Still getting cases like these with the new version, of course not always.