Author Topic: Coverflow Plugin  (Read 4676 times)

musicman180

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Hi All,

Long term MB user here but new to the forum. I have had a look through the Plugin section and couldnt find if there is a coverflow plugin for MB. In the Config/Theme section on page 17 there appears to be a coverflow view. Could anyone point me in the right direction if it indeed is a coverflow plugin.

Many Thanks & Best Regards

phred

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I seem to remember something like that, but it may have been a Theatre Mode. But, again if I recall, it was created by a former forum member who left and deleted all this creations. So if you find it but the link is dead, that's why.
Download the latest MusicBee v3.5 or 3.6 patch from here.
Unzip into your MusicBee directory and overwrite existing files.

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Searching the forum with Google is  here

musicman180

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Hi,

Thanks for pointing me in the Theatre Mode direction. The view is there and still downloadable but sadly it is only a view for the next 10 tracks. I was looking for an operational coverflow selector like the one back in the day on itunes 10.7.

Many Thanks

BoringName

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If anyone really has an itch for cover flow. I found this Cover Juke

It's a simple program that displays all your library album covers EXACTLY like iTunes cover flow. I added MusicBee as the external player and clicking on a cover launches Music Bee and plays the song.

It's open source so it might help someone turn it into a plugin for MB.... I'll take a look but I've had a hard enough time with C# and this thing is in C++....

BoringName

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If I get this thing working, someone owes me a bourbon....

It's taken all day just to create a spinning triangle with OpenGL.... it doesn't help half the libraries and examples online don't work in visual studio 2022... some of them are missing important bits of code like the vertices.

Anyway, I got the SharpGL library working and got my head around a fair bit of it, I'm mildly confident I can translate the CoverJuke code over to it.... but it's going to take a while.

Steven

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Thats great news. If you are finding you need enhanced API support to get any library or file information then send me a PM - just off the top of my head you might want a way to tell MB which album is selected in order to see the tracks and details in a panel

BoringName

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Thats great news. If you are finding you need enhanced API support to get any library or file information then send me a PM - just off the top of my head you might want a way to tell MB which album is selected in order to see the tracks and details in a panel

Have to see what happens there. I'm still chipping away at this. Over 14,000 lines of code has been a bit of a slog to get through. The author was french so I had to translate their comments to help me out. In hindsight it probably would have been better creating my own from scratch and just using their formulas to handle the OpenGL transitions.... anyway I'm too far into it now.

So far I've stripped out the code I know I don't need, like the internal player as MB will handle that. There was A LOT of repeated code and inconsistencies that made it a bit of a battle.

I've translated everything from C++ to C# so visual studio isn't giving me any errors and currently troubleshooting the OpenGL aspects. There are a few conflicting things with the existing OpenGL commands and SharpGL. Original code used GL_QUADS so I'm having to convert the vertices so I can use GL_TRIANGLES. I think I have most of that sorted now and it's displaying images properly

I'm currently getting my head around threading and event handling. It's not fun.... and then it's onto sorting out the inputs although most of that code is ready to go.

So the plan is to get it working similar to how it originally worked, reading album images from my music folder just to make sure everything is displaying correctly and moving as it should. Then look at integrating it into MB. I think I'll just make it work in it's own separate window first and make sure I can grab the album artwork through MB and it works as it should.

After all that's done I will probably need some help working out how to get it into an MB panel and any other functionality it will need. Or someone else can take it over and do that. I honestly don't know how practical it will be really but I did convince my other half to use MB and that meant she lost cover flow from iTunes. So here we are.

Coverjuke had plugins that changed how the flow of albums displayed (Cover Flow is just one of them), I think I'm just going to hard code them in as a display option as each one is only a few lines of code. It will be easy enough for anyone to edit the source if they want to add their own.

threap

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Hi,
Did you ever get your plugin working?
I would kill (metaphorically) for a decent coverflow-like view in Musicbee. Like someone mentioned above, the gold standard in this area was itunes 10.7 (the rest of it was a clunky mess, but...)
I really, really liked being able to flick through my music collection as though it was a carousel of physical albums.

Any positive news to report?

Thank you!

BoringName

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Real life has got in the way a bit and I lost some momentum with this but I haven't forgotten about it.

I think it's fairly close to being functional outside of MusicBee as a C# coded app. The background threads for gathering images are working but I still need to do a bit converting vertices from quads to triangles and debugging OpenGL which isn't very intuitive. I often get faced with a black screen and not much info on why....I think I'm at the tail end of it though.

Once that is sorted I think integrating it into MusicBee will be the easier part of the process. At least I hope it is....

I can't give you a definite timeline but I'd like to have most of it sorted before the end of the year. No promises...



threap

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Cool, I'm glad it's still progressing. Hey, Duke Nukem Forever surfaced, eventually.. so as long as you beat the Gnu Hurd to release... :)

I have some C# expertise myself, albeit no familiarity whatsoever with OpenGL, so I have some empathy for the challenges you're facing and what must be involved with it.

Thanks for your surprisingly quick response to a 3-month old thread. If you do manage to get your plugin functioning inside Musicbee, I will be first in line to download it (and donate). As I said earlier, "flicking through" my MP3 collection - which, over the course of the last 25 years*, has grown and has metadata and album artwork of obsessive completeness - in the old itunes was a delight. Trust Apple to bugger itunes up, of course... hmph.

(*yes, 25 years. I still remember the first MP3s I got, from a friend in London, and being utterly gobsmacked that an entire song could fit into only a couple of MB)

Good luck!

BoringName

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So life got in a way again but I've made some progress.

I currently have a working C# coded app that displays covers just like iTunes used to with a scroll bar so you can navigate through them. That's all it does at the moment but its working! It's currently just standalone and doesn't talk to MusicBee at all, it just loads the images directly from my music folders.

I have to clean up the code a bit but I should be able to start looking at integrating it into MusicBee soon. Retrieving the cover art and song info from MusicBee shouldn't be a problem but I'm not sure how I will go getting OpenGL stuff to run within a plugin.

Anyway, I'll give it a shot. At least all the hard graphical stuff is sorted out, I'm sure if I can't get over the last hurdle of getting it into MusicBee, someone else will be able to figure it out.

BoringName

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More progress.

It now loads as a plugin in Musicbee and grabs the required info directly from it. It's currently displaying in it's own window and works quite well.

I should probably start a thread in the plugin section of the forum. I'll wait until I've got something worthy of release.

It still needs a bit of work to setup interactions with Musicbee and get it into a panel within Musicbee but I think all the really hard work is done.

Getting there!

threap

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Excellent news (and Happy New Year..)! I'm still here, watching this thread, and still first in line to test it when you deem it worthy of release!

BoringName

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Excellent news (and Happy New Year..)! I'm still here, watching this thread, and still first in line to test it when you deem it worthy of release!

It's out. Test away.
https://www.getmusicbee.com/addons/plugins/481/3dbee/

Please give any feedback in the related thread.
https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=38740.0