Mobiuslogic

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.

natedawgg

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

Attached Images

    

Bugbyte

Nice looking app! Good job on the coverflow and album art capability. The day/night mode is a nice feature.

Looks like this will be a solid music player FE. Nice work!

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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.

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

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. I have been contemplating adding coverflow to NBB but it feels laborsome to scroll through a large library. have you implemented a way to filter which songs/artists/albums are included in the cover flow?

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natedawgg

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.


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?


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.


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.


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.

NeonDev

that is ONLY true for the "local" folder (ie the folder containing the itc files for the songs with embedded album art. worthless imo because if the song has embedded art you can simply get the artwork from the file) so you will still be unable to view the album art for songs where you used the itunes advanced->get album art function. there is no album persistent id in the itunes XML.

please correct me if I am wrong and you have found a way to match an itc from the "download" folder to a song in the itunes library


I no longer use the itc file directly. I use leopards quicklook framework which will work for any song downloaded art or not. But when i did all i did was read the itc file into memory and extract the image portion into a new image object

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natedawgg

yeah i have done all my tests with artwork from the downloaded folder and have been able to extract the persistentId. i have yet to actually test it by matching them to the album only because i have been spending so much time trying to actually extract the image data itself.




that is what i am attempting to do now. AIR gives me a nice tool to look through a directory to get all the files inside, and i can write out new files, problem is that in trying to write out the new files the images will not display. i am trying to do a seek and destroy of the .itc files so i can then be done with them and move on with my life. anyway if you have any ideas or methods to do that, i would really appreciate the help

NeonDev

right let me clarify. I know that the itc files in the download folder carry a persistent id, however, that id is not the track id like it is with the local folder and the xml file contains only track and library ids no album id. unless i am wrong, in which case i have to ask where in the xml/wherever else you are finding the album id?

as for extracting the art if you read the itc file from byte 492 to eof that is the image data 90% of the time. you can parse the itc file if you want to be precise. you can play around with it using a hex editor. simply delete the header off the file (header end with the ascii string:locl, if i remember right) and rename it with the proper image extension (either jpg or png depending on the data) and preview will open it just fine.

my advice on how to move forward would be different depending on how you are constructing you music library. if you use the itunes.xml file exclusively or if you simply drill down through the itunes music folder. if you are building off the xml file you can just use the "track persistent id" (for local folder only) to find the proper itc file and display the image data. this will prevent your users from having to do "imports".

of course if you are simply drilling down through the folder hierarchy I would suggest simply reading the embedded art in the files ID3/atom tag. I can help you with how to do that as well since that is how NBB did things in the beginning.

I find that ALOT of people ***** about FEs not being able to display the art downloaded through the itunes download album art function, however.
since those downloaded that way are only stored as itc files in the "download" folder your only hope would be to decipher the way apple generates persistent ids or if AIR can somehow use quick look but that is mac only

regardless I really don't have AIR exp so my advice may be shaky

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onepuff

Looks great. Keep it up. Don't go to medical school or lose your job or anything so we can finally have a great front end.

natedawgg

haha well i dont think any of you have to worry about that, at least i hope not (especially on the job front). anyway thanks to everybody for the support.

NBB,

hey thanks for the help with the .itc files. i had been fishing around byte 348 and couldnt figure out where the actual image data was. anyway, you were right about the persistent id for downloaded files not corresponding to anything in the xml. first off that is really weird. but there has to be a way that they are linked, i mean itunes knows soemthing. have you been able to figure anything out as far as correlation?

NeonDev

I am quite confidant through my vast experiments (changing the album on various songs mostly) and research into the matter that it is the "Album persistent id" not present in the XML file and I do not know how apple generates these ids. My only thought on how to get the id would be maybe ask itunes via applescript

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natedawgg

yeah i am beginning to believe that iTunes hates me and everything that i am trying to do here. i finished my app that strips out the image data. it goes through the album art folders and grabs all the .itc and spits them out to a new folder with a name that corresponds to the persistent Id that is found inside the .itc file. so there are a couple ways that i can see to go about this.

this would be ugly but, now that i have all the artwork sitting in one folder, one could drag the artwork back into itunes which would cause iTunes to store it with the track persistent id that is in the xml file. then run my app again and theoretically you would have all your artwork named in a way that you could associate with itunes xml file.

as suggested before, neglect the itunes xml, traverse through music folder and essentially build my own xml or something that would allow me to quickly jump to a certain song/album/artist. but then the user would still have to put their artwork in with the album

either way the user is going to have to manually add the artwork in some way. i just cannot see how to automate the process.

on another note, i spent the better part of the day switching coverflow components. the old one was put together in flash using some basic shape bending and masking. it worked, but was painfully slow. when pushing close to 100 album covers, my whole system would come to a crawl. the new that i just emulated is really cool. it utilizes real 3d rendering and physics. the exciting thing is for one, it is much faster, and b i will be able to use a series of calculations to (hopefully) create the iphone-esque feel. in other words as you drag your finger across the screen, the app flips through the images according to how fast you move your finger.

well thats all i have for tonight. please if anybody can think of a way to associate the album to music please share your thoughts.

NeonDev

i say just do the embedded art. if people are going to be finicky and demand all their art work there are several 3rd party apps/scripts that will go through itunes and embed all their downloaded art directly to the mp3/aac

also good job on sticking with it. good to hear the cover flow is actually usable. I was going to question how fast it was before. you see cover flow is the reason those itc files exist in the first place, it is much faster for itunes somehow ;-)

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onepuff

YAFE sounds like an interesting cool name for your project front end. I hope everyone sees where i got it from.

Bugbyte

This is the most expedient way to do it. If you want the artwork, download one of the scripts that embeds it and run it. It's ridiculous to try and work around the iTunes issues.

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