Many people have a file in their folders titled AMG comments.txt containing information about a particular album.

I'd love to see a plugin that can read text files like the aforementioned, and display them in a panel.

Also, much like the album art panel, this plugin could be configured to read files from any source. So say if you had a folder named d:\artists_bios. You could read in a particular file using d:\artists_bios\%artist%.txt

I would say, take it one step further and display that and a picture, so you could have an artists bio conjoined with an image of the artist (aligned left perhaps, to the users discretion). But that may be too difficult.

Would anyone want to try this?

Seconded! This is a great idea. Many people also store LOG files or other statistics about a certain collection of songs. Reading embedded files would be a huge advantage for me as well.

And this could be used for displaying lyrics also.

i would like to se variant of album art panel, with list of search paths etc ...

Oooo good point, I forgot about that.

What if you expanded on this and put an HTML viewer in there? It'd use the system default browser to display, and you could put some default options for how plain text is displayed.. maybe defineable in CSS? Even better, set it up so that any pictures would get displayed in one way, and any text files would get displayed in another. So if there's an HTML file then it'll display it clean, if there's plain text then it'll display that accordingly.

Like the Winamp mini-browser?

Then you could throw in hyperlinks and finally make use of the %WWW*% tags that tag&rename throws in when you auto-tag files from amazon. Or hyperlink to other text files on your system. Like if you use a %FEATURING% tag you could hyperlink %FEATURING% to view info on that artist.

This plugin would kick ass.

a bigass bump for this thread.

review.txt panel would rock (unless it's out there and i suck at searching)

Seconded!

Hard to imagine why this plugin hasn't been written already, really.. In it's simplest form, all it would have to do is to access a .txt-file in the album-directory (similar to the albumart plugin), and put the text in a string that is post-processed by foobar depending on user-settings ("background colour", "font" etc..)

A slightly more advanced version could benefit from the following features:

• Allow the user to filter names of .txt-files to search for first (eg. %fileinfo.txt%,%log.txt%,%amg_info.txt%) This could be particularly useful if one wants to have multiple tabs with different text-files. (eg. lyrics, AMG-info, statistics..)

• Database-support. Store text and meta-information in a database. This way, the user can use tagz to finetune the output of the text for each album. (If lyrics, for instance, the user can choose to center-align the text.)

• Automatically rendering http-adresses into clickable links. (Full-scale html-support seems to be a bit over-the-top for a .txt-file-reader plugin, but it would of course be brilliant if someone took the time to implement it..)

• Image-support: This could be done in various ways. The easiest, perhaps, would be to have a tag-type system that sepearates images from regular text (ala html: <IMG src="c:\music\opeth\artist.jpg" align="left" border="1">). The user could then enter image-information directly into the text-file or in foobar, depending on user preference (and availabilty of database-support...)

• On second thought, the easiest way, would be to have the plugin search for a specific type of images to use in the output. (eg. %artist.jpg%). Again, it would be nice if the user could use a custom filter if this were to be implemented.

• Spinning on the image-support-thing, the better choice would be if the user could insert a picture in the text directly in foobar via a "browse files"-dialog. The dialog would preferably have support for setting alignment, borderthickness, bordercolour and padding.

• Support for "rich text" would be nice, but probably difficult to implement, as foobar seems to have it's own special way of formating text that's impossible for plugins to override (eg. one font - one font-style per panel/plugin)

... And probably much more!

Now, what are you waiting for all you C++ hackers out there? Go make my dreams come true!

and if you ask me i will use it for *.nfo

For you to pay us a full-time salary.

I don't think full HTML rendering is a good idea; it causes too many potential issues. I for one have no desire whatever to have a nasty kludged-in copy of IE in my nice, clean foobar.

However, I think the idea of a text file reader is an excellent one. Maybe some sort of simplified stylesheet could be applied using BB-style tags? I'm not sure how practical this would be but it should be far faster and less ugly than using an IE window, effectively.

arty

Hmm..

*checks pockets*

I can offer you a very genereous one-time payment of, ehrm, let's see.. 3 dollars! And as icing on the cake you'll get two well worn-in plecters, a keychain, and.. what the hell, I'll even throw in a non-refillable lighter with plenty of juice left! Your lungs won't thank you, but smoking makes you look cool!

One time offer!




(Haven't got much more than gratefulness to offer I'm afraid..)

I by no means am a programmer nor claim to understand the intricacies of programming, nonetheless this is my opinion:

Why go through all the trouble of making a CSS parser or partial HTML renderer -- essentially a pseudo-browser from scratch, when you can use the IE engine.

The built in IE browser for Winamp works flawlessly and is great at outputting local text files and plugin generated html as well. I've never heard of any security issues with it, other than issues IE has in itself. However, using the built in browser to venture anywhere other than the localhost is always at the users discretion.

bump

This would be awesome

why not just make entire gui that is html based? (one could borrow the core code from mozzila i imagine, with some tweaks to the fb2k licence...)

I'd love to see a simple text reading panel.

I want to set up FB to play music at parties and it would be cool too have the info about the song/album/artist for guests to see.

The HTML idea would probably work well, be flexible and dynamic-- just associate the urls with the tracks and albums -- but I certainly don't need it and, like many, I'd rather have as little to do with IE as possible. Besides, I prefer to make my own text files for Lyrics, so I would probably do the same for info files.

I can't create it, of course, but I'd be grateful enough to render some sort of small reward.

I'd love to see such a feature as soon as possible.
IMHO I would rather say an IE Explorer window is disproportionate. A plugin that simply reads out txt files in a specific or the album directory would be great.
Maybe, if the programmer wants, it would be really a good idea to add a HTML like syntax for pictures, but I think any more would be too much work for less use.

Instead of IE Explorer window, the plugin could use http://www.offbyone.com/
Or in a more heavier class, the Gecko engine.

Because the IE engine is a bloated peice of shit that should never be included in any program, ever.

Just have a text file thing, so you can see .nfos and stuff

Oh, and if the IE core is loaded, so are any spyware BHOs, dlls, and any other crap you don't want. Not to mention the memory/CPU

TXT ftw.

I would really like to see this plugin.

I have tons of live stuff that all have tracklist.txt in the folders. It would be great to be able to see the lists from a foobar panel

I'm not sure if this is what would fit the bill but I'm using multiple instances of the Track Info Panel to display Album Info or Artist Bios.

Not thats not really what we were looking for, cuz as far as i can see the artist bios are not stored in your music folders but in the file tags.
And we were looking for a panel that auto-searches any textfiles (or specific) in the album or artists folder and displays them.

Any type of HTML rendering would be great instead of solely a plugin that outputs text files -- that would merely be the tip of the iceberg.

The level of customization with html/css would be limitless. That after all seems to be one of FB2K's strong points -- it's level of customization. The current track info panel and album art plugin, althought good, are very limited in how you can visually present data.

The winamp media library uses the IE engine and it seems pretty light weight to me. There aren't any browser buttons, or tool bars, nothing bloated.

A nice panel to display text files in the same directory as an album would be great. Especially for those live show collectors who have loads of .txt and .nfo files. Would also probably be quite simple to write, but I have no clue. I hope someone can/will do it.

wow, that looks really nice, would be a great thing to have something like this in foobar.
I hop someone who can write such a plugin is interested in doing it, if I could I would do, but I can't...

i'm unsure but i think it's related to this request.

i have in every album folder a "artistwebsite.url" file. it would be very nice if i can load this link into the track info panel.

example:
Artist: jack
Track: song
Link: http://artistwebsite.com

and if i could click this link it would be just perfect


greets

Not related, would be handy though. Better post it into the Track Info Panel thread for then it'll be related

k sry. i post it there again.

lyrics panel can read external txt files in panel - this is not perfect solution cause it breaks words but better this then nothing... and for simple info this is absolutely enough

editing txt files in foobar panel and a bit more styling with kinda css could be great...

While we're at it, why not add a mail reader?

Just displaying a text would already be very nice -with rules like album art panel-, because a big comment on an album is easier to maintain when it's stored in one place, instead of being duplicated in each the tags of each songs of the album (which could then be displayed by track info panel)

This is a great idea, and the HTML one would be even better, just let you point to an url with variables would be okay I think, and maybe some conditions, so I could do that :
If <path>\Lyrics.txt exists, open localhost/lyrics-parser.php?file=<path>/lyrics.txt
Else www.google.com/search?q="Lyrics <artist> <album>"

you get the idea..
Many thanks to whoever wanna start this.

The HTML plugin would be great I agree, but I doubt it will happen. Foobar coders seem to despise the IE engine.

Is it really impossible to use Gecko or something else.. ? I think I read something about that being possible on K-Meleon's forum but I don't know much about that stuff, and as it would not be used on unknown websites I really don't care wheter it's IE or not, but that's probably wont happen as you said, so I'll stick to foo_openwith for now.

Such plugins exist for Total Commander (which is a file manager) :
Gecko (Mozilla) based
Internet Explorer based
Installation is quite simple, and sources seem to be available for the ie-based one.
(Note: totalcmd.net is not the official Total Commander site.)