I haven't submitted the addon yet. There is a lot to unpack so I wanted to have this page up first to link to. I'll submit it when I'm done here.It's now available -
https://www.getmusicbee.com/addons/plugins/481/3dbee/First off some credits. This is based on the source code from a program called
CoverJuke by Mikaël Le Berre.
It was written in C++ and I planned to just translate it to C# but I ended re-writing most of it as the code is quite outdated. But the formulas that make the covers spin around are all the original author and this plugin would not have happened without that source code to base it off.
I also used some icon artwork from hiccup in the Musicbee skin I created and the plugin icon I'm going to use on the addon page.
InstallationMake sure you are on Musicbee version 3.5.8402 or later. It will not work on earlier versions.
The zip contains 4 x DLL files and a "3DBee" folder. The "3Dbee" folder needs to go into the persistent storage folder of Musicbee, the plugin will not work without this folder present.
On my computer its in C:\Users\BoringName\AppData\Roaming\MusicBee
If you are not sure, it should be the same folder the Musicbee settings file is in, so just search for MusicBee3Settings.ini and place the 3DBee folder in the same folder.
Place the DLL files in the usual plugin folder, something like C:\Program Files (x86)\MusicBee\Plugins
When you first open Musicbee you may have to enable the plugin before you can see it in the arrange panels section. Edit Preferences->Plugins and click enable for 3DBee. Hopefully it works. There is a configuration button here that displays some settings, I will go through that later.
Once enabled, go to View->Arrange Panels. There should be a 3dbee element on the right hand side that you can drag to any panel you want. When placed in certain spots, the height cannot be adjusted, eg) the top panel or
above the files element in the main panel. This patched version allows 3DBee to be resized when placed above the files element in the main panel -
https://getmusicbee.com/patches/MusicBee35_Patched.zip I tried implementing a way to set the height but they all caused graphical issues. The easiest way is to place the 3dbee element in a spot that lets you set the height, like under the files element in the main panel. Adjust the height to what you want and then place it back to the original location, it will maintain the adjusted height.
When moving the element around to different panels, you may notice the track and artist info will disappear or start displaying gibberish. I'm not sure on the cause of this but just restarting Musicbee will fix it. It's only a problem when moving the panel around to different places. Better font handling is on the to do list.
SettingsEdit Preferences->Plugins-> configure button under 3DBee will give you access to most of the 3DBee settings. There are also skin settings I will go through later.
Move flow when playing track changes - When enabled the flow will navigate to the album cover of the current track playing.
Move flow on selection - When enabled the flow will navigate to the album cover of the song you selected in the main file list. If you select multiple files it just goes to the first one in the selection.
Use Musicbee no image artwork - When enabled, albums without cover art will display with Musicbee's no cover artwork. When disabled it uses the nocoverCD.jpg/nocoverCD.png file located in the currently active skin folder.
Disable no artwork image - When set, albums without artwork will not display an image in the flow, it will just leave an empty gap. It will also leave you with an empty screen if the flow is moving too fast to load the images, more on that in the how it works and limitations section below.
Use Musicbee default Font - When enabled 3DBee will use whatever font is currently set in MusicBee. This setting overrides any font names listed in the 3DBee skin configuration file.
Use Musicbee foreground colour for progress bar - When enabled the progress bar "should" be the same colour as the current Musicbee text. This overrides the current 3DBee skin configuration settings.
Maintain Cover Aspect Ratio - When enabled, covers will be displayed with their current aspect ratio. This can look a little janky if covers are inconsistent sizes. But so do distorted covers...
View Scrollbar - Sets the visibility of the scrollbar.
Mouse scrolling - Enables the flow to be swiped across with the mouse (like swiping with your finger). It's a bit clunky if you try and do it too quickly. I found it easier to just click between the scrollbar button and one of the arrows, that skips forward or back 20 albums at a time. But I left this in case someone wanted it.....Enabling this setting disables the View scrollbar setting.
Load all covers in memory - When enabled 3Dbee will attempt to load all covers into GPU memory for a better experience. Be careful with this setting. More info about this in the how it works and limitations section below.
Album Buffer - How many albums to keep in GPU memory. This setting has no effect if "Load all covers into memory" is enabled.
Max framerate - The maximum framerate 3DBee will attempt to run at. Anything over 100 is probably a waste. The higher it's set, the more CPU will be used when the flow is active.
Animation Threshold - If the selected album minus the current album is greater than this threshold, it will immediately jump to within that threshold and continue scrolling to the selected album. It reduces scrolling considerably on large libraries. To disable it, set the number to a value greater than the number of albums in the library.
How to useOnce 3Dbee is loaded up you will see a display of your album covers, depending on the settings you choose you can navigate this display in different ways.
Rolling the mouse wheel when the pointer is in the 3DBee window or clicking the arrows on the scrollbar will move the album cover left or right by 1 album
Clicking between the scrollbar button and one of the arrows will move the album covers left or right by 20 albums.
Clicking the scrollbar button and dragging it left or right will navigate across the whole collection.
If mouse scrolling is active you can click and drag across the covers, depending on how fast you drag will determine how many albums it scrolls through. It needs some work...
Depending on settings, the flow will automatically navigate to current playing albums or whatever you select in the files list.
If you right click in the 3DBee window, a context menu will display. This lets you choose between 6 different flow styles and select any installed skins.
Skins3DBee comes with 4 skins. 3 came with the source code and I made a Musicbee theme for a bit of fun. You can add as many as you want or edit the existing ones. The skins are located in the skin folder inside the 3DBee folder you copied during install. They allow the user to fully customize the appearance of the 3DBee window.
Each skin folder contains a "skin.ini" file that handles the configuration with the following settings
favoriteplugin - this sets which flow will be used when you select this skin, you can change it afterwards.
nbleftalbum - How many albums to display left of the current selected album.
nbrightalbum - How many albums to dislplay right of the current selected album. These 2 settings only apply to certain flows eg) both work with coverflow but vista has the left album hard coded to zero because there are no visible albums to the left on that flow.
reflectheight - how tall to make the reflection.
direction - Currently no effect but future versions will allow you to set which direction the flow moves.
backimage - Which image in the skin's wallpaper folder to use for the background. Use the full name with file extension. If this is set to none or doesn't match a file it will display a background that matches the settings below.
reflecttransparent - Sets the transparency of the reflections.
spacetextscrollbar - sets the space between the artist info and the scrollbar- this setting is actually redundant as the text can be placed where ever you want using the offset options.
There is a bunch of font settings for different things. The fontname has no effect if using Musicbee default font option.
*fontname - Needs to match a TTF font file located in the skin's font folder.
*fontheight - Sets the size of the font.
*fontoffsetX - Adjusts the font position on the screen.
*fontoffsetY - As above.
centerInfoFont - Specifies whether the album and artist font is centered or left justified.
backredbackgreen - The colour of the background if no image is set.
backbluetableredtablegreen - secondary colour of the background. If different to the back settings it will create a horizon with a gradient transition.
tablebluefontartistredfontartistgreen - sets the artist font colour.
fontartistbluefontartistshadow - sets whether the artist font is shadowed.
fontalbumredfontalbumgreen - you probably have these figured out.
fontalbumbluefontalbumshadowloadbarredloadbargreen - Sets the progress bar colour for load all albums mode. Overridden by the use mb skin colour setting.
loadbarbluehorizontalangle - these settings manage where the flow is on the screen. I actually haven't played with the angle settings to see what they do....
verticalangle movehorizscene - moves the flow left or right on the screen.
movevertiscene - moves the flow up or down on the screen.
zoomscene - zooms in or out on the flow. If you zoom in to much it will disappear because the viewpoint is behind the flow.
If you want to add your own skin, just copy an existing skin folder and rename it to whatever you want. When you reload Musicbee it will automatically add the folder name to the skin selection list when you right click the 3DBee window. Then just edit the skin.ini and replace any image files. Just make sure to keep the same file names for the images.
How it operates and limitations3DBee grabs album artwork from Musicbee (effectively your hard drive) and uploads to GPU memory so it can be displayed in a 3D environment. This process can have a few limitations, mostly being hardware related.
Uploading textures to the GPU is a little slow. It could be faster if all the album covers were the same size but they rarely are. It could also be the SharpGL library I'm using and the fact I'm basically embedding a full application inside Musicbee....
If you don't use the "load all into memory" option, you will notice it struggles to keep up with displaying the covers when you move the flow quickly, it will just display no cover artwork if you move really fast. Basically because it can't read them from the HDD and upload them to the GPU fast enough to display them.
When it's all loaded into memory it works perfectly. All covers display no matter how fast you go, but the problem is how much memory you have. I've tested it on 2 systems, 1 with 345 albums with crappy artwork running from an NVME and another with over 2000 albums with decent artwork running from a mechanical drive. The first one uses over 1gb of GPU memory and the second uses over 6gb of GPU memory.
But both have the issue of the covers not loading fast enough if they are not in memory so I'm pretty sure the bottleneck is the texture upload. Then again, both of my test computers are pushing 5 years old so others might not notice an issue.
The album buffer setting attempts to alleviate this problem somewhat. It will keep the specified number of albums in GPU memory. if it's set to 50 it will keep 25 to the right and left of the selected album in memory. Once they have been loaded the first time you browse the covers you will be able to browse through these smoothly until the covers go outside of the buffer range and get unloaded from memory. So if you can't load them all into memory you can play around with this setting and see what works best. You can see how much GPU memory is used with task manager on the performance tab.
I wasn't able to test what happens if the GPU memory fills up. I'm running a gtx 1060 and that has 6gb. it's probably going to take someone with a big library and old or onboard video card to test that out. I also don't know what happens if you load all your covers into GPU memory and then crank up a demanding game...
All my testing has been done with Nvidia graphics cards so I also have no idea how it will with other brands.
To Do ListAdd a font picker
Add the ability to create/manage skins from within the UI.
Improve mouse scrolling to make it less janky.
More interactions with MusicBee like
- adding context menu items to play next/queue songs etc...
- filter displayed albums based on a search
- display all the songs for the currently selected cover in the files element.
Add a panel showing current album/track information
Optimize the OpenGL code.
I'm just going to stick this here.
Buy me a BourbonI can be a pretty big procrastinator but I'll feel guilty dragging my feet if people put some hard earned down waiting for an update... and also, I put a lot of work into this thing, in any case, it's totally optional!