What's a simple plugin I could write?

[psychoadept]

I'm taking a class on GUI and C# right now.  I want to start writing plugins for MusicBee, and this seems like the perfect opportunity.  Any suggestions on a fairly simple plugin I could try my hand at?

[sveakul]

Hi psychoadept,

Not sure about the "simple" level of this, but man I would sure appreciate your try at a re-write of the existing mb_vst.dll VST host plugin!  I realize that Steven does not have the time for this and he posted links to the source codes for anybody to give it a try here:

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=22824.msg138903#msg138903

As you can see by the posts on that thread and the ones in Plugins/VST Effect Plugin, many folks have been having trouble with using VST plugins with the mb_vst host but it seems to be a hit-and-miss affair--some work, some "kinda" work, some crash & burn.

I hope that by the fact that there is pre-existing code to work with it might be something you are willing to take on.  At any rate, good luck with the class and can't wait to see what new plugins you come up with!!

P.S.  on a "wish list" would be a plugin that writes radio streams to a file, like unto Streamripper but which handles FLAC or Opus stream formats as well and does it in a more "native MusicBee" way.

[Steven]

An album artwork retrieval plugin to get artwork from amazon or some other place. If you wanted to make the project harder it could include a scripting language to parse any website (like mp3Tag or the albumart plugin on hydrogenaud.io)

Another place for ideas is to look at what foobar plugins there are and see if anything takes your fancy

[boroda]

Another place for ideas is to look at what foobar plugins there are and see if anything takes your fancy

this is a good place to start with.

[Steven]

another could be to write a google-play store plugin for the music explorer, where the plugin would perform the equivalent queries thats needed for iTunes Store. There is an unofficial google-play store api i believe (because its unofficial thats the reason its not already directly integrated in MB). I would need to provide you the queries required and make some enhancements to MB itself if you wanted to do this one.

[frankz]

Maybe you could build something off of this?  I would absolutely love to be able to integrate my Google Play Music library into my local library through MusicBee.

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=11072.msg130404#msg130404

[boroda]

Maybe you could build something off of this?  I would absolutely love to be able to integrate my Google Play Music library into my local library through MusicBee.

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=11072.msg130404#msg130404

new api dll (written not by me) works fine, but doesn't support track uploading/downloading/playing. if you could complete its functionality then i'm happy to help you to integrate it to my plugin (plugin itself - except for api dll - is working fine now).

[frankz]

I only wish I could do those things.    I learned PHP no problem and am kind of OK in Python if I have documentation at the ready, but for some reason I just have a mental block when it comes to C stuff and .NET and the like. Maybe I'm past the age where that kind of stuff clicks with you.

Maybe I just need to buckle down for a couple of months and get my head around it, because it's seeming more and more like it would come in handy.

Just to be clear, are you saying there's something that half-works with the GMusicAPI for MusicBee already (not the playlist synching, I'm not looking for that, but streaming through Musicbee as a Google Play Music client)?  I wasn't aware.  If there is, it may be a good starting point for my learning quest.

[boroda]

sorry, frankz, that my post has been addressed to psychoadept

[frankz]

Ahhh!  Well, that makes more sense, then.

[Freddy Barker]

Any suggestions on a fairly simple plugin I could try my hand at?

As MB already has so much awesome functionality, it must be nearing capacity for fresh options, maybe ROON could provide a few ideas for our Classical lovers?
I'll wager Steven already has several ideas for 3.3 and 3.4 - [Hey Google! play my OLDIES playlist...]?
Coverflow and Auto-DJ were about the only functions I know that most friends actually used (other than loading iPods with music). Both were discontinued in 2012 -  much to the irritation of i-Toon forum users.
Media Monkey had a pretty good Coverflow running in Visual Basic. Code available to download:  Monkey-Flow This is the Foobar2000 version: CLICK
Store or backup MB settings and database on Dropbox option maybe?

Kind Regards and best of luck with .NET - Freddy  

[s4zando]

How about something that would convert MP3 Tags from one version to another.

For instance, I have a device that can only understand certain versions of ID3v[version x, where x is 1, or 2] tags and will not read MP4 tags. So it would be great to be able to select a file (or files) and have their tag(s) downgraded (or upgraded) to other versions (when applicable/allowable by the standard).

I would guess that more often than not, a file would need to be downgraded from an MP4 tag to an ID3 since, if a device can read MP4, it will also most likely be backwards compatible to ID3v[version x, where x is 1, or 2].

I believe that MP4 file types (*.m4a) can have ID3v tags (see here: http://www.mp4ra.org/specs.html).

Thanks!

[psychoadept]

Thanks, I'll think about these suggestions as I fumble around learning this stuff.  No promises!