First, nobody cared. But over time, the dreadful whine of those who did began to overwhelm us all.

Okay, well, not really. But it's still annoying.

Thus, in the tradition of foo_stfu, I bring you foo_syfm. An acronym for shut yer @$!#@&in' mouth - that's exactly what you gots ta do now. Mostly.

That's right - a plugin to swap TAGZ configs on-the-fly, with no copying & pasting, no reloading and renaming - just a double click on a listbox.

Considered armed to the teeth with bugs and extremely dangerous, it's a beta. By which I mean, just because it seems to work fine for me, don't come and burn my house down just because your computer catches suddenly aflame. That only happened to me once during testing and I think I fixed that bug. (j/k of course).

Grab it at http://billcow.cjb.net/foo_syfm.dll, copy to your foobar 0.7 beta27 & up components folder, and create a folder named "configs" under the main foobar folder.

Source code would be availible, were I not extremely embarassed about it's quality.

Known "features" (figure out for yourself which deserve the quotes):
1) Loads and saves TAGZ strings for playlist, statusbar, system tray, window title, and copy command.
2) Does not load and save colors or fonts. They are not global variables. Believe me, I would have done this if I could.
3) Does not whiten your teeth while you sleep.
4) Drives your boss slowly insane (no? try and prove it! BWAHAHAHAHA!!!)

I'd better quit before I say something stupid.

Hey cool, just wanted to suggest that someone should make something like this in the Title Formatting thread this morning. Seems like you got ahead of me there.

Nice work.

Seems to work fine so far. Guess it's time for me to find out your adress now, in case my computer will spontaniously combust within the next few hours

Well, the only thing that is missing now would be downloadable configs on the Title Formatting Page. But I guess you've already got some devious plans about that.

Thanks for this plugin, no problems so far, but I haven't tried it that much yet.
It's a pity you can't do anything with color and font. I guess that makes it less useful for some.
But, would it be possible to add the option to cycle through configs with a shortcut key? I would like to use this to cycle trough variations of my own config.
E.g. Album mode <-> Single mode.
That would be really useful to me from time to time, but that's just me...

Edit: typo

Edit 2: Small bug. A character is added at the end of status bar code.
(first time it was a 'd', the next time an 'e'....)
Shows up after reloading a saved config.

must've been pretty late (or early?) when you posted this, huh

Anyway, nice job. I'll be sure to give it a whirl later and whine here if it causes my pc to explode.

Alrighty. The extra character bug is now fixed. I wasn't writing a null character to terminate the strings, and somehow that was screwing things up. Go figure.

Anyhoo, regarding the hotkey suggestion, that seems pretty easy - with one exception. How to handle them. Should I have a set number of hotkeys, each of which can have a filename assigned to it? Or should I have two that cycle through all the availible configs, forwards and backwards. Or something completely different?

EDIT: You can grab the new version at the same place as before.

How about three commands: two for cycling backwards and forwards, and another one for directly picking a config. Should be easy to implement and use.

PS: Is it normal behaviour that I have to restart fb to see all the available configs? And that the plugin only shows the DOS (8.3) filename? I'm running Win98SE, in case that this matters.

Thanks


This would probably be good for people that plan to have alot of different configs, if they don't want to cycle through them all. IMHO the fact that a config can't change the background color and font, makes it even more likely that you don't want to cycle through them all.

Very much related to the above. It will be no good if configs need different background colors to work. To use this approach I think you would have to add the option in preferences to select which configs to cycle.

In the end it doesn't matter that much to me. Only one single button would do all I need if it cycles through them all. This is because I at the moment, plan to use only two configs. I'm happy if you just make it possible one way or the other

Yes, it's normal behavior - sort of. It actually refreshes the list when you go to the config page - so if you just switch to another page and then switch back that oughta do it.

As for the DOS filename thing, that's cause I cheated at filling the list box with files. I'm meaning to do something about that when I get the chance. However, I'm gonna be out of town until tomorrow afternoon, so it'll have to wait a bit.



Sounds good. I'll look into that when I get back tomorrow.


On somewhat of a side note, I'm just about done implementing an "extra info" window, where you can store some extra stuff about the string (in text format only though). That should be done within minutes of my arrival back home.

It's now been replaced with a new version, compiled for beta29+ and now has "Extra info" support.

You said that about 4 lines too late. :-D

Edit: Quoted the wrong thing, lol

You should compile a Beta37+ build that allows you to activate a "Shut Your F@!&!ing Mouth" toolbar, and you could put on buttons for each layout. That would be truly useful and would elimitate the number of mouseclicks needed to change the thing. Also you might want to set the default save directory to configs, took me a while to figure out thats where i had to put them, the default was where I last loaded music from (no thanks. haha).

Just a Thought
-diskreet-

mmm. Sounds like a good idea. At the very least I could put a "load from file" button there. To be perfectly honest, I haven't even taken a look at the new SDK yet - i'll have to do that when I'm done being pissed at my computer (I have what appears to be a relative of that W32/Blaster virus that is much less consistent in it's pain-in-the-ass rating - in other words, I can't figure out what the hell is and isn't actually related to it).

As for the default directory thing, near as I can tell, it *does* default to the config dir.


Finally, I've been toying with the idea of (aka figuring out how to) writing a conversion function to swap between ANSI extended characters and Unicode characters. Specifically, taking the box-drawing characters and translating them between the kind used by unicode fonts, such as Lucida Console and Anadale Mono, and the kind used by bitmap fonts and some old TrueType fonts, such as Profont, edges, lime, and their ilk.

The main issue there is how to determine whether to run the translation, and which translation to use. I'm thinking i'll add a header to the file format (in a manner which retains backwards compatibility of course) that stores the format used in the file (aka literal ANSI, literal Unicode, quoted ANSI (aka $char(x)) and quoted Unicode). Then there would also be a config var which would be user-specified that would determine what to convert *to*.

The conversion functions for literal chars are done - I just had to convert the Vi script I had written for it to C. The $char(x) format conversion will be a tad tougher, but should go quick.

New version posted. Bumped the version number to 2.0.

Added on-load translation of Unicode Box-drawing characters to and from ANSI. Works with both literal (aka the actual character) *and* quoted (aka $char(x)) types.

What it does is save the current preferences when saving the file - either Literal Unicode, Literal ANSI, Quoted Unicode, Quoted ANSI, or Leave Alone. Leave alone will remain as-is when loading again, no matter what the other preferences - this is good for strings like anza's greenish which use font's with abnormal (actually, probably correct - the conversions are based on the conventions used by the fonts in the bb4win fontpack) box-drawing characters.

Anyhoo, when you load a file, it assumes that the current setting corrosponds to the font you are using - if the file has either Literal *or* Quoted ANSI, and your preference is set to Unicode, it will translate to the corrosponding unicode character set before setting the formatting string. Vice versa for Unicode->ANSI conversion.

Finally, I must warn you - Due to the way I did the conversion (aka stupidly) it may not (aka probably won't) work on non-unicode systems. Sorry 'bout that. I'm not completely sure though, so try it and tell me if it works, just keep a backup of the old version.

Wow, a great plugin! I finally was able to download it (got 404, connection refused etc errors every time I tried to ) and I really have to say "Great job!"
The only thing I'm waiting for anymore is hotkeys (or at least menu items) for swapping the configs. Of course, changing background color (and of course all the other colors also) would be great, but it doesn't matter if it isn't possible, I'll survive. After all, I'd use only 2 formattings just like upNorth, so I can edit the secondary config to use same color-scheme as the primary one
Keep up the good work!

Momentarily not pissed at my computer (and really really bored/undergoing friends-from-high-school withdrawal) I finally got around to implementing hotkeys/menu selection of config strings.

Uploaded over top of the old version, uses beta39 SDK, should work with 29+ though.

As usual, is entirely likely to set your computer on fire (interestingly, a friend of mine's computer actually *did* catch on fire, not after running this, but after running the Juno email client. never say never I guess). So don't come whining to me.

Oh, and I also added a few more characters to the unicode<->ascii translation and finally updated the source on my website.

---

If you're english, shouldn't you say something cool, like "cheers", or "nevermind the bollocks"?
- Strongbad

This happened when I clicked load a profile:

Illegal operation:
Code: C0000005h, flags: 00000000h, address: 00A1340Eh
Access violation, operation: read, address: 00000000h
Module: "foo_syfm", loaded at 00A10000h - 00A19000h
Additional info: main message loop
Code bytes:
00A133EEh: 00 00 FF 75 14 C7 45 FC 02 00 00 00 FF 15 B0 50
00A133FEh: A1 00 83 C4 10 50 B9 D4 61 A1 00 E8 DC F3 FF FF
00A1340Eh: 8B 10 8B C8 FF 12 83 EC 18 8B CC 89 65 14 50 E8
00A1341Eh: 90 EB FF FF E8 2C F0 FF FF 83 C4 18 3A C3 75 0E
Version info:
foobar2000 v0.7 beta 39
UNICODE

It looks great ! But, does it work with beta 40 ?

torji: it seems to work with beta40 for me.

voltron: I think I know what caused that. I rewrote the code to load so I could move the actual loading code to a seperate function (so I could call it from the menu code *and* the dialog handling code). When I did, I changed a couple of things, and as such broke the handling code for the Load Config button. For those of you who know about win32 programming, I had a switch statement, and had the case [button id]: and case: [listbox id] | (LBN_DBLCLK<<16): entries right next to each other. In other words, whichever you did (doubleclick the list or click the load button) it runs the same code. Now, the problem was that I had previously referenced the main window handle to grab the listbox handle based on it's ID (i use that to find the selected item, btw). When I rewrote that section, I simply took the lparam of the configproc (which is set to the handle of the control generating the message) and used that instead. Which meant it worked with doubleclicking (since the lparam is as expected, the handle to the listbox). However, it *didn't* work with the Load button, as the lparam was the handle to the button, and that made it barf. In any case, I just uploaded a fixed version.

@diskreet: while working on yesterday's release, I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to make a toolbar. Any idea how to make one (using the beta40 SDK, if it matters).

Load profile still gives me the same error if there are no profiles to load, this time.

Fixed. Didn't re-implement bounds checking either.

Now you know why I had to absolve myself of responsibility - I make enough stupid mistakes to supply userfriendly and dilbert with comic fodder for a year during the course of a single week.

Well, keep looking, toolbar would be sexy

I know you said it's not possible, but seening some kind of color changing implimentation for the default GUI. There must be SOME way :\\ even if it directly edits the config file? I'm sick of loading TAGZ files and having to guess at what bgcolors I used :\.

Anyway, I'm going to d/l the new version right now. I'll spurt out my feedback here in a few.

-diskreet-

Hey billcow, I've noticed your website is often down. I could probably host the dll on my dad's server. He has a 2.5 GB bandwidth limit, but I'm sure a puny DLL file wouldent hurt that at all. I get 70 KB/sec downloads off of it, so it's plenty fast. Give me a PM if you wanna set that up. I cant give you direct access however, I'll have to upload the file for you when you update.

Neh, it's not down. I just was trying to configure my iPaq for internet access (through a serial connection and MS's internet connection sharing... don't ask - linux. 'nuff said.), and it decided to stick my NIC with a static IP (apparently it only will work with dialup - gots to love 'em). When I gave up I must have ended up with a new IP address.

As for other times it's down, it's pretty much the same reason, trying half-assedly (is that a word? should be) to get some external device (friend's laptop, xbox, etc.) connected to the internet and ending up with a new IP, then forgetting to reset the cjb.net redirect.

Either that, or some as-yet-unknown bozo somewhere in the northeast managed somehow to relieve everyone else in the area of the nuisance of electricity. But that only happened once, I swear. I didn't mean to do it! (notice that this is sarcasm. I don't want to be arrested for terrorism)

In any case, it would still probably be nice if someone could keep a mirror of my plugins (this, and foo_input_cuex) - as I've demonstrated before, i'm quite forgetful/stupid.

As for the toolbar, I'm gonna try looking at the newest (0.7.41 (easier to say than 0.7 beta 41, isn't it?)) SDK for some stuff I can use.

And the colors, well, I think I may be able to figure out a way to edit the config file directly (at least for colors, which are always the same size. fonts would be tougher, since the size of the field is variable), but getting foobar to reload it will be a tad trickier.

But... for the moment, I'm getting hungry, and between fits of anger about why I gained back half the pounds I lost in the last month, then lost them by the next morning, as well as getting pissed at my parents for buying a digital scale (which takes about 20 seconds to produce a readout - and errors half the time, so you gotta start over), I have no idea where I was headed with that. Suffice to say, I'll get hackin' on the plugin later tonight, or maybe tomorrow. Depends on whether not sleeping last night catches up to me or not (I wish I could post a poll about that ).

But, enough rambling. Those of you who haven't shorted out your computers with tmpi-induced vomiting (too-much-personal-info) can now go back to the much less disturbing posts that are likely more intellectually stimulating than this one.

You probably forgot to load avialable tagz files at plugin startup, that's why
keybord shortcuts crashes this plugin if you try to use them after foobar restart.

If you manually refresh tagz list in preferences (or at least activate "Playlist" menu) before trying to use shortcuts, list gets loaded and shortcuts work fine... Otherwise:



Great plugin, anyway, thanks

ERROR (CORE) : Failed to load DLL: foo_syfm.dll, reason: Unable to load dll.
WINDOWS 98 se

cheers
melomane

you need msvcr70.dll: http://gelaed.com/resources/cplusplus/msvcr70.zip

New version. Should check bounds in menu selections now - thus no more crashes even if I do screw something up. Also, added code to check for successful initialization of the config list during menu generation - if the list doesn't exist, it is generated before the menu is generated. The same goes on activation of a menu item, so keyboard activation won't screw anything up either (since the menu may not have actually been generated yet. The joy of dynamic menus ) It will also refresh the list upon saving a new config.

Anyhoo, grab it at the normal place and beware that I'm not sure what will happen in the menu (shortcuts at least) if a new config shows up - i'm not sure how foobar saves them, by index or by title. eh, well.

Hmm... Still the same.

1. Add some shortcut for "load next tagz" (I have alt+right arrow)
2. Close and restart foobar.
3. Don't touch anything else, only press your shortcut keys ("alt+right arrow")

-> crash.

Yup. Didn't do bounds checking on the next/prev functions, only the direct selection. Duh (me, not you).

Apprently Peter didnt intergrate toolbars into components and you cant do it yet. He did say he woudl consider it, which would be great. Maybe ask some dev's if they know how to edit colors directly, or recommend it as a feature to Peter.

-diskreet-

I have two formatting strings (one for album and one for single mode) and now, with b45's tabbed interface we have the ability to easily switch between two playlists with hotkeys, so I came up with this idea: "hey, I'll bind "alt+page up" for next playlist and next formatting string." I loaded the two playlists, one sorted by albums (as default) and the other by %artist% - %title% (as secondary playlist) and had my album based formatting as the current formatting. Well, I pressed alt+page up and what did I notice? It worked! It loaded my formatting for single mode and the secondary playlist. Then I pressed alt+page up again to get back to the album-playlist... foobar changed the playlist as it was supposed, but foo_syfm gave this error:



What I think causes this, is that foobar's own "next playlist" changes two (or any amount) playlists like this: A -> B -> A -> B etc. So it goes "round" all avaliable playlists.
foo_syfm seems to do it like this: A -> B and then tries to get formatting string C, even if I don't have it.

So my request would be to get the next formatting string (and previous also) to do it like foobar does it, go "round" the avaliable strings.

And yes, I could do it like "alt+pg up for next playlist and formatting and alt+pg down for previous playlist and formatting", but it isn't that nice to use like that. I actually tried it and constantly pressed next or previous two times so foo_syfm screwed up

[edit]
It'd also work if foobar had hotkeys for each playlist like foo_syfm has for formatting strings. I could assign alt+pg up to album playlist and -formatting and alt+pg down for single playlist and -formatting.
Well, I guess I'll just have to have them binded with album and single formatting and sort by title and sort by... It works like that also, but it's quite slow like that.

As usual, you can chalk that up to my mad programming skillz (aka just-enough-rope-to-hang-oneself-with syndrome - you should see me try to fix my car). I made it wrap around going to the *next* string, but not the previous. And only wrapped going to the next when it ends up past the end by two spaces. Push the keys again once it errors and it should work right that time.

Eh, well, it's fixed now. Usual place.

Thanks! Works perfectly now

Lovely. Thanks billcow

Now I don't have to try put all interesting metadata in one line.

I just have a few formatings (default with abbreviated artist/album/titles, one with full titles only, one with comments, one with technical info and one with replaygain info) and thanks to your plugin I can easily switch from one to another, to see all interesting stuff immediately

thank you!
cheers, Melonane

I looked at the config file again, and this time I think I have it figured out. partly. the important parts anyway.

It seems that each "value" is stored as a 4-item structure. 4 bytes for the length of the var name, a string (presumably UTF-8) of that length, another 4 byte length for the actual value, and then a string of bytes for the value. String values are UTF-8, integers are 4-bytes, and anything else is, well, something else.

The only thing I haven't figured out is the header - but since colors are constant length, it's doubtful that it matters for them. Same goes for the seperation of public versus private vars. I'm guessing that they're pretty much the same as seperating values (DWORD length of plugin, plugin name (UTF-8), DWORD length of plugin's variables, and then the plugin's vars). That, and I'm not sure how private versus public vars are differentiated. Okay, I guess that's three things.

In other words, at this point I could probably get the plugin to change stuff, but it wouldn't take effect until foobar restarted, and would probably get overwritten anyway. That, and I don't feel right about going behind foobar's back to get stuff done.

Maybe you could ask peter for some cooperation in the code, maybe adding some sort of config_reloading command or something. couldent be that hard. It would be nice if you could directly address the colors through the SDK. We'll see what the 0.8 betas bring

Oookay. I somehow managed to screw up the saving code, so I've uploaded a new version that fixes it.

You shouldn't have your plugin modify the config file directly. Ask Peter to add the ability to change those values to the SDK. Modifying the config file directly will almost certainly get your plugin banned for using hacks.

Yeah, that's pretty much the problem.

I don't however, feel bad *reading* the config file, perhaps to add font and color indicators to the fb2k file. That way, even if it can't be *set* automatically, at least you don't have to hand-copy the numbers to an info field.

Apparently this is my 100th post, so I'll make it nice and long (j/k).

As you may have noticed, the Foobar2000 Format Strings page now has direct downloads of foo_syfm files. It works quite nicely.

Anyhoo, as a 100th anniversary spectacular, I'm putting out a call for feature requests. Nothing about fonts & colors though (sorry. out of my hands). At some point fairly soon, I'll decide which ones I think are best and implement them. I'll also implement the worst one that's feasible too, just for the hell of it.

I want fonts and colors!!!!

(haha, just messing.)

Uh-oh. You'd better watch out, diskreet. Not only are you royally pissing me off, but you're also only 4 posts ahead of me. Don't make me spam some topic of yours to get ahead...

j/k of course. well, except about the spamming thing.

okay, that too.

For now, the only feature i think of is adding a button named "delete selected config".
I leave you the choice of the action this one could perform, hehehe.

thx for this essential plugin...errrm...plugin? still?

edit,
Another playlist management suggestion: the possibility to sort the config files in the "select config set" window, so the "Previous/Next TAGZ" shortcuts would change configs in a chosen order.

i would like toolbar with listedit to change the config

Don't touch config file, you won't be able to save it anyway (unless you bruteforce-crack checksum protection scheme, and I will eat you alive then implement stronger one if you do so).
If you think you need public config_vars for something, start a new thread about them in the dev forum instead. Some other variables might be problematic here because they're per-UI.

Peter, is there anyway that perhaps in a future version, or even right before the 0.7 final release you could incorperate color and font access in the SDK? We could all love you and quite possibly send you a dollar.

Feature request:
I would like to save quite a few configs, but it makes it less efficient to use my Next TAGZ string shortcut key. Any chance you could add a feature similar to the one used for DSP items in foobar? Dividing configs into two groups? At least one of the groups should support Next TAGZ string, but one key for each group would be the best.
I don't mind entering preferences to switch to one of the configs I use only occasionally though, so I could live with only one cyclable group...

I guess a feature like this could be quite useful to "disable" configs that doesn't work well with the current color and font too.

Anyway, thanks for making this useful plugin

hmm, can't get download page for foo_syfm : just a blank page.

trying to get di.fm to display now playing info in aluminum skin and playlist.

thanks.
jk

same here - http://billcow.cjb.net/foo_syfm.dll seems to be dead

b