Thread: yet another Front End!

they didnt. i just wasnt clear in that one post. what i meant to say was that if you ripped your own cd or bought from the itunes plus store then the music will play fine, but if you buy from the regular itunes store then you will have to strip the drm before it will play in flash. i really hate drm, and i am really glad that most music stores are starting to offer drm free selections. anyway there are several scripts and apps out there that will automate the process of stripping drm, so i will see if i can implement something like that to streamline the process.

hey everybody just thought that i would give a quick update to where everything is standing as of this moment.

currently the app is a functioning music player, however with restrictions. as it stands the music side of things i mostly complete, however there are some known bugs that i have to work out. some of the restrictions that apply right now is the fact that you can not play actual ".mp3" files. I know that sounds weird but there is a reason behind it. in the flash player there is a sound object that can only play mp3 files and then there is a netstream object that plays everything else (mp4, aac, mov, flv, etc). i opted to go with the netstream seeing as it plays the majority of formats. i will in the near future add the ability to play mp3 files just to alleviate as many restrictions as possible. secondly you cannot play protected music files, which is kind of a givin, but still a pain i know. the app is stable despite its restrictions, and it runs on both windows and mac for you cross breeders out there.
Also i added a feature that i had always wanted in AMP, and that was the ability to change the color scheme based on the time of day (white during the day, black at night), in order to make the screen easier to see. this feature is active on the app now, but is has to be manually activated by a button. i am working on a way to have the system calculate sunrise and sunset and then change skin accordingly.

i should have some screen shots up shortly, however all the graphics are the default flex skin and i plan to change that all in the near future as well.

i would like to have some people test it out and let me know what is/isn't working. also my mini has a fried motherboard, so i am unable to test in a car environment, so i also need some feedback on how well the app fits the screen, and how well/poor the UI is laid out. if anybody wants a copy to screw around with please let me know, and i will send it to them. i really appreciate any help you guys can give.

Looking forward to see this, if you need me to test it out let me know

Excited!

I have absolutely NO practical coding ability so I have no way of creating a front-end (for OSX) by myself.

The other offerings out there are great, but few to choose from.

Can't wait to see some pics, would help with dev. if possible.

Although... I AM good at breaking computers, so when you get a stable code I can bug test for you.

Lemme know if you need it.

ok everybody, i have some updates about the project that brings all a little bit closer to a usable app. first off i have finished up some little things like getting the app to remember what page you are looking at and what song you are listening to and things like that, so that if you get up in the morning and jump in your car, only to find out that your mini has completely shutdown (or if you have your power settings set to shutdown every time) and is now rebooting, that the app will start up exactly where you left off, playing the same song. this next week i will perfect that function so that the song will even start playing at the exact time that the app was shutdown.

there is another function that i added this week that i think some people will really like. that is coverFlow! for the album view i have decided to add a little spice to the whole thing. the only prob with the coverflow at this point is the stupid itunes .itc files and the way they keep you from using them in third party apps. the good news is that i am writing a flex app that will let you sift through all of your "protected" album art that itunes uses, and then converts it either to a .jpg or a .png. the app isnt quite finished yet so while coverflow tech works there is no way to actually show your current album art on your computer. everybody can say thank you to apple and their crappy way of trying make things difficult for the little guys like me.

other than that everything else is coming together rather well. the app is stable and very usable as is. however it is just not at a state where it is ready to just be given out to everybody, but it shouldn't be much longer now.

below are some screen shots for everybody to take a look at

remember the coverflow is not actually displaying actual image art at the moment, but that will change very shortly

also the picture where everything is white is the daytime view that can be activated. let me know what you guys think

Originally Posted by NeonDev

one question. how do you plan on matching up the extracted album art from the .itc files to a particular song? that was my problem with using them.

that part should actually not be that hard. what i am doing is parsing through the .itc byte by byte and extracting the data that is contained inside. one piece of data is the persistentId. this matches up to the persistentId that shows up in the itunes xml for a particular song/album.

another approach that i am contemplating is taking the image data out of the .itc file and saving it as .jpg or .png in a seperate folder that the app can the access quicker. this means that the app only has to go through your directory and access your .itc files once and then everything will be set up to use.

the .itc files themselves are actually quite easy to display as images just not easy to match to a particular song.

now i have the first part working great where i can read all the data in the file my problem is displaying the pic. what are you doing to display the actual picture?

nice work on the cover flow tho. I'm surprised to see that feature in an app that is not 10.5 only and not even written in xcode.

that is just the beauty of flash and the newly released flex. but i cannot take credit for the cover flow mechanism itself. it was an open source component that i borrowed the code from and implemented with some minor changes in functionality.

I have been contemplating adding coverflow to NBB but it feels laborsome to scroll through a large library.

it would be laborsome if you are having to click through, i agree. for my personal use, and im sure this carries over for many other users, but i use a scroll wheel from griffin that can emulate key presses which makes scrolling through the cover flow much nicer and acutally much easier in a car environment. but i have the feature in such a way that you do not have to use cover flow if you find that it is to cumbersome. you can order by artist, then album, then song if you so choose.

have you implemented a way to filter which songs/artists/albums are included in the cover flow?

as of right now the plan is to have the cover flow be an album view only, much like it is done in iTunes. it will list all the albums in your library according to artist in alphabetical order. it wouldn't be too terribly difficult to add a sort feature for songs, artists, etc. but that will have to come at a later time.