Thread: yet another Front End!

Originally Posted by NeonDev

ummm. NBB doesn't do that. it uses the itunes.xml exclusively. the reason NBB can display album art that is not embedded is because I use leopards quicklook framework that knows how to associate itc files with their respective albums.

sorry about that, i guess i misunderstood a previous post.

I think it would be sad to see your FE become mac only over a rather trivial issue. Im sure there are 3rd party apps for windows users to embed their art somehow.

Yeah i agree. the whole purpose of this project to be built in AIR was for the whole cross platform. i just been to busy getting the app to work in one os before i can start searching for apps to streamline the process in another os.
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do you ever plan on supporting linux since adobe has said it is porting AIR to linux?

i havent given it a whole lot of thought, mainly because i don't have a linux box (could be quickly fixed with bootcamp). my plan is to make sure that the app works well in mac, then test in win and then linux (sorry linux fans). but yeah i will try to support it.

I know there is no itunes for linux however...

Originally Posted by Bugbyte

There must be. Plus, your point about Linux is well taken. For this to be a cross-platform app, it would be a shame to unnecessarily base it on a different app that isn't available on that platform!

this is true. this is why i am starting to lean towards having my app just look into a folder and build a list from whats inside. if the album art is in the album's folder then everything should work just fine, without iTunes. my secondary app will only be needed by users that don't feel like re-downloading all their artwork.

Make sure you put lots of error handling in there so it runs on Linux!

done and done!

Originally Posted by NeonDev

so I'm thinking that maybe it would be a good idea for you to simply have your app traverse a folder hierarchy since that seems to support not only itunes structure but also those of win/linux based media players. that way your app isn't dependent on itunes.xml or any other itunes file. Its prolly not terribly difficult either.

yeah that is exactly what i am going to do. AIR makes it really easy to traverse a folder and all of its sub folders. in fact that is what i am already doing with my album art app. what i am going to do is traverse the folders and while i am doing that i will build my own xml to map out the artist/albums/songs/album art/etc. this way i can get away from iTune's horribly formatted xml file. this will actually give me nice performance boosts since i wont be having to make ridiculously long e4x queries to find a given song. as you have pointed out earlier, this will also allow me not have to do a import (what AMP had to do) to add new music.

oh and here is a pic of the new cover flow up and running

here we are everybody, i have here a stable version of my new front end for you guys to try out. this is a near complete version, meaning, all the audio functions should work, but there are still some features that are not complete with the rest of the app.

with this build, i have officially given itunes the boot. my app no longer relies on itunes to get its info. when you first install the app it will ask you for the location of your music folder and it will build out a xml file accordingly. one note on that, i built my app using a Artist/Album/Song music folder structure. this is how my app will look at your folder. Also if you want to use the cover flow function, you will need to make sure that inside of the album folder (along with the album's songs) you will have the cover art for that particular album. if you don't have the album art and you want to use the album art downloaded by itunes then my app will decode all the album art from itunes and will put it in a folder named "NASArt" in your documents folder. you can then use those images to copy them into the corresponding albums ( i know that this is kind of a pain, but there just is no other way to associate the images with the album).

in this release, the app will play mp3, m4a, aac. it will not play protected files. i have only done minor bug testing, so if you run across a bug please let me know.

i hope you guys enjoy!