Author Topic: Remote Control for musicbee  (Read 10568 times)

zuglufttier

  • Guest
Hi there,

first of all: Thanks for making this great program! I like it quite a lot but there's one feature I'd love to see.

I use this on a remote windows machine and always open up an rdp-connection to control musicbee which works fine. It would be even more convenient if musicbee had a web interface or the possibility to control one instance of musicbee either with another musicbee instance or another program.

Before switching to windows on my htpc I used mpd [1] which is really great and there are quite a few different clients available. You can control from every operating system, web browsers, mobile devices or even gaming consoles. It would be great if you could implement some kind of client server principle for musicbee. I know many people won't think this is important but I'd be very happy anyway ;)

[1] www.musicpd.org

Antonski

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+1 Vote for such functionality. Something like foo_upnp maybe? It was already requested, by the way. Maybe we can see it in some next release?

Steven

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it would certainly be an interesting challenge and i suspect a number of people would be interested. I will have a look at this but it will take some time for me to do this and i plan to do a number of the easier wishlist items first, so i couldnt promise anything in the next few months

zuglufttier

  • Guest
No problem, I can wait ;)

I don't know whether you'll stick forever to the Windows platform but if you were going to, you could even think about making musicbee a service in Windows. Then a user would just start the computer and even without logging in, you could control the programm from some other place.

I guess this is just something to think about in the future :)

donjulien

  • Guest
A possible first step on automation of MusicBee could be to add some command-line options to pass to an already running instance of MusicBee
Say:
c:\>musicbee.exe -playpause
would toggle between play and pause the current instance of M
c:\>musicbee.exe -append "song.mp3"
would append it to the end of Now Playing

and so on, leaving the chance to automate through something else. Not a complete solution, but can help, and solve many needs in itself.

Crosmanrond

  • Guest
what donjulien suggests would actually be EXTREMELY helpful, from there Autohotkey could handle the rest of the remote. it should also be relatively easy to code.
Cheers,
Cros

Steven

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these are already supported:
musicbee.exe "song.mp3" /Play
musicbee.exe "song.mp3" /QueueNext
musicbee.exe "song.mp3" /QueueLast

Crosmanrond

  • Guest
could you please add support for(in order of most useful to most whimsical):
play/pause
next
previous
stop
vol up/down
display the now playing pop-up again

The reason I request this is it would both add support for my remote(Via Autohotkey) AND resolve an issue I'm currently having where my MB doesn't respond to my media keys when it is minimized.

Thanks!
Cros

Steven

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/PlayPause
/Next
/Previous
/Stop
/VolumeDown
/VolumeUp

are implemented in this:
http://www.mediafire.com/?1ggymdznemo

Crosmanrond

  • Guest
*girlish screams* Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Crosmanrond

  • Guest
For anyone else interested in integrating their remote to work with MB feel free to message me.
Also a note the volume steps implemented by this are 10%

Cheers,
Cros

Steven

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if you have any useful tips, the How-To forum section is a good place to put the information as well - even though some people mistake the purpose of that section :)

Crosmanrond

  • Guest

donjulien

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Strontium

  • Guest
Thats great you are adding some commandline support.
Like the OP I have also used mpd and found it great for mangaing my music with a remote, though the frontends are lacking compared to MusicBee.
I have been using Foobar2000 since I made a switch back to Windows and am now re-evaluating different players yet again.

I am using a Harmony One remote with eventghost and for the basic tasks (play/next etc) use multimedia key mappings and the global hotkeys in the music player. But I also have buttons setup on the LCD to change genre, which I was achieving by using a different playlist for each one.

So I am wondering if it would be possible to add a commandline to select a playlist
Even better would be a "search" command where I could use a query string to add the songs to the playlist, eg /search "Artist=Blah OR Artist=Blah2", then I could create whatever I wanted on the fly, but I assume this would be a harder feature to add.