Thread: hello world

i swear if all these developers could collaborate there efforts it would work better for us all. Nice start!

hey, i'm also a fellow programmer with a some experience in vb6 and planning on learning .net pretty soon. i like the current design and features. i think it would be good to have the "Add Files to DB" use the windows open file menu as a standard, or as an option, instead of the "enter path to import files from..." menu come up. or maybe as an option you click on a little bottom on the keyboard popup and it comes up with the box. it would make it a lot easier, instead of having to memorize or write down C://documents/music/....

i'm at work right now and don't have access to music or movies, but i was wondering what you had in terms of media playing capabilities. i haven't used either in vb6, i did more text and data manipulation, so i don't know how easy or hard it is to work with.

also, i do some 3d modeling and animation along with photoshop, so if you ever need a hand, shoot me an email or pm. i'd be happy to help you make the buttons a bit crisper. also, having a little animation during loading or in dead space would be a nice effect and give it that "classy" look, if you want to go that root.

overall, i thought it was a really good start, and hope to see some more. i currently use itunes on one of my computers and songbird on another, but would highly consider switching to some lighter weight player like this when it's a bit more developed

so, i was really bored and ended up making a little demo of what the interface could look like if it was 3dized. it's a pretty simple little thing i did in about 25 minutes or so, so give it a look and tell me what you think

well its playback capabilities are based on what codecs you have installed.
the player uses an embedded windows media player control so it plays a lot of stuff by default. i also recommend installing fdd show it is a very lightweight decoder package that enables playback of many video formats.. i filter files by their extension but in the future i will add a config file so the user can select what types of files they wish to import into the file library. now its limited to the following: mp3, wma, wmv, avi, mpeg, and mpg. but as i mentioned earlier it has the capability to play anything that the codecs are installed for on the system. however at this time the is no way to override the file filter.

and i agree with you about the browse button in the add files to db function.... there should really be one. since the folder dialog is a standard windows control it would be easy to add. Ive only been working on this for a couple of weeks now so I'm just trying to get the basic functions working smoothly and then ill come back and add the frills.


the other side project i really want to add to this is a skin system.
i would probably make an external skin editor application where the user can resize/move controls, change images, ect. you may wonder why the buttons are so large? well this is designed to be a full screen app on an 8" touch screen running at 640x480. alto it works fine at other resolutions. but its only full screen on a system running 640x480.


i got an updated version thats a Little cleaner but it has a small bug in it.
i post it here when i get it hammered out.

well, feel free to get back to me later on in development

i'd be happy to help out with any of the skin areas, since that's where more of my interest is

yeah i could really use a hand with that stuff....
graphic design really isnt my cup of soup....
im better at the back end stuff.....

Ok heres a new version not a lot of features added but alot of bugs fixed

1.database now handles filenames with single quotes in them correctly
2.fixed database error that caused the datbase to lock under certin conditions while importing files.
3. added a hide button to the menu..... i found it extremely annoyig that i had to close the application when i needed access to the desktop .....since i have no keyboard on my carputer and this is a full screen app.

4. added an on screen dislay with controls to the video window that can be activated by clicking the video window. .... there are some issues with this mainly if you minimized the app while the osd is visible yu will still see the osd over top of other apps.
i have a solution for this but i havent coded it yet.

5. placed the import files function in its own thread so it doesnt bog the UI down.

6. added a spiffy status window with a progressbar to the import files function
so you can see what its doig

7.the x button on the main display will now clear the song que

8.The shuffle or random song function is now much more random

9.pushing the suffle button a second time if it is still active will result in a dialog asking if you wish to stop it.

10.rewrote import files function to make it much more efficient.

that all i can think of atm

i will be writting some code to make the player handle removable media a little more intelligently for things such as dvd drives

since my device has no real hard drives i make mix dvd's which now i have to manualy import into the library and clear the library after i take the disk out.
im planning to have the player handle removable media a little differently.

if you import it once and you remove the disk it will set a status field in the db so the player will know these files are currently un available and to ignore them

when you place that same disk back in it will mark those files as available again

im thinking of using volume serial numbers and an md5 of the first file on the disk as a unique identifier for the disks.....

love to here ppls thoughts.

I'll look at it a little bit later today or tomorrow when I get back home to test it out, since my work computer doesn't have any music files on it.