I know it s been a long time since the last update and may be there will never be another one but i still would like to make a request since i love this plugin and always use it : would it be possible to have a transparent background?

I'd also like this.

It hasn't been updated in a while because really there wasn't much else I wanted to add or expirement with. But, that has really changed with Vista, which gives so many new toys to program with. I will be adding new Vista related features once I can get Vista running on one of my computers.. one of those will be a fully transparent window. In XP/2000, a fully transparent window poses a few problems. So I wouldn't count on getting it on either of those OSes. (I really just don't have the time or interest to work out how to do it on 2000/XP properly, they weren't really designed for it, sorry ).

I feel you, Running Vista RC2 full-time makes me happy.
I'm not sure how great are the development tools for WinFX and WGF are yet, But its nice to hear you're moving forward with this.

Is vista that cool? Being really fond of customisation, i want to be sure i can still run my favorites programs like samurize, miranda, windowblinds, objectdock. That s why i am still sticking to Xp.

A bit off topic, But i can tell you Miranda works fine
Windowblinds will release a vista version soon from what i've heard and seen, Haven't even tried samurize or objectdock yet.

You are right about the off topic. Thanks for the tips

FrozenSpoon : thanks for answering so quickly

I really prefer this to the built in "notification area icon tooltip" but... there has been a problem. After a while it stops popping up for any song... even with a restart of foobar. Upon restart of my computer it came back. The same thing happened for my roommate. I am wondering why this happens or if there is a way to avoid this? Has anyone else experienced this?

Has anyone noticed that prettypopup will cause mem usage to skyrocket? It goes to about 30 MBs to me when the window comes up, but when it goes away, it doesnt release the memory

I tested that. Mine isn't showing up even though "Automatic PrettyPopup" is checked nor does it work when I try to show it. I do however, have Ctrl+F1 globally bound to show popup. I started a song playing with foobar minimized and it was using 1-2 CPU and 1MB of memory stable for the first 30 seconds of the song. I pressed Ctrl+F1 and the memory usage went up to 7MB. I waited again about a minute and it was still at 7MB and did it again and it went up to 13MB. I waited until almost the end of the song and tried again... nothing seemed to happen so I tried it twice in quick succession and then it went to 28MB of usage. It has stayed at 28KB for the next songs.

So, it does seem to be eating memory and not releasing it... and for me it doesn't even show up but still uses the memory. But, when it works well this is a great plugin

For reference:

foo_prettypop 1.2.3
foobar 0.9.4.1
Windows XP, SP2

Thx Frozenspoon. excellent plugin. Keep up good work

thanks for this great plugin!
i just learned of it the other day and i am so in love with it.
the only thing i wish it could do was put the album art to the right of the text.
but it's not even that big of a deal.
it's a lovely plugin worth the extra RAM for me.

This is the nature of .NET, memory is not released when it is no longer needed, but when the runtime feels like releasing it AND it's no longer needed.

I've heard of the popup disappearing until restarting foobar, but not needing an entire reboot to get it back! Unfortuately, I haven't seen either of these problems (and I have left Foobar on for over a week in some cases). I would guess something is interacting poorly with the .NET windowing system... I'd fix it if I could reproduce the problem.

Memory usage has been covered ad nauseam throughout the thread. Bottom line is that it's a .NET app and memory usage will be more than a non-.NET app. Still, I'd suggest getting Process Explorer and doing a more thorough look at things. A lot of that 30MB is the .NET runtime, which is shared with all .NET processes. Actual foo_prettypop usage isn't all that much, and .NET may be lazy about releasing it's memory if you have lots of memory free anyways.

Hopefully in the future users will be able to do more fine grain layout (not skinning, but something more flexable than the current system).

Any sort of WinFX/.NET3 thing is a long ways off (I still don't have Vista running ), but I'll get there eventually

You know you can install .net3 and WPF on Windows XP, right? I'm writing some Xaml stuff using the September CTP on Win XP now, and it's working well.

I'm thinking of a PrettyPop that just provides a databinding source to all the relevant data fields, then loads a .xaml file which binds to the PrettyPop data source to produce the UI. That would rock, a lot.

Have you tried to ALT-TAB to see if the pop-up is there? I frequently run into the issue that foo_prettypop is no longer the "top" application. ALT-TABbing to in when the song changes brings it back to the "top" for a while. Losing the "top" layer seems to be a common issue for Windows apps. Back when I used Winamp, I had this issue with it in auto-hide docker mode. So it doesn't seem exclusive to prettypop.

Sonny Savage, I tried that... and there is an entry for "Now Playing" but when I try to go to it, it doesn't move to the front. So, it appears (and goes away within my time frame) but I don't know how to bring it to the front.

EDIT: I just tried that again and it worked this time. Maybe it only works at some points. Is there a way to make it always on top?

Is there a way to "prematurely" dismiss a popup on a track change?

Here's my situation: I have set the popup time to something like 5 or 10 seconds, so that I can take my time getting to and reading the popup. The problem is all too often, no matter where I place the default position of popup, it ends up getting in the way. In those situations, rather than moving the popup to yet another place on screen, or worse, waiting out the 10s, I'd like to be able to click on the popup in such instances to make it go away for this particular track change; on next track change it would behave as usual, and be up for the usual specified period, unless again I clicked on it, etc.

If you have the titlebar on, the X will hide the popup. There is also a keyboard shortcut that you can assign to hide the popup. You can also assign this keyboard shortcut to a click on the popup (select other, then type Hide PrettyPopup)... that way you just have to click anywhere on the popup and it disappears.

Hope that helps!

In the configuration panel for Pretty Popup there's a "Clicks" section. I assigned "Hide PrettyPopup" to the middle click (click the mouse wheel).

Wow, do I feel like an idiot!
It's been staring me in the face all this time. I can't believe I just didn't see this section.

Hey, didn't read all posts so sorry if this has been discussed before. If possible, I'd like to have an option for black border around the whole popup. Like this:

hey can someone explain how i can 'click' back or fwd? maybe i need a fancier mouse?

For me Backward and forward are my 4th and 5th mouse buttons

I have some 2 disc or more albums. I put the cover.jpg under the root folder
for example
c:\artist - album\CD1
c:\artist - album\CD2
c:\artist - album\cover.jpg

if I just put 'cover' in the filename it can't display the cover jpg. Then what's the filename should be ?

The songs are in the CD1 and CD2 directories? You could add ..\cover to the list and that should work.

yes, the songs are in CD1 and CD2.
It's work now. thanks!!

Did anyone notice that pretty popup simply stops working sometimes when foobar has been running for long enough? The popup does not appear, even if I select View -> Show PrettyPopup. I have to restart foobar to make it work again. I couldn't figure out what is causing this, but it happens every time if foobar2000 has been running for 15-20 hours.

Another question: Is there a way to make PrettyPopup work with PostScript fonts? I have these fonts installed the normal way, but they don't show up in the font selection drop-down. (They work with other programs).

.NET uses GDI+ to do font drawing. Unfortunately, PostScript fonts don’t draw in GDI+ without a lot of extra effort. So, that’s why you don’t see them there.
Yep, this is one of the many common problems I’ve heard about. I had begun a complete rewrite using WPF in hopes to axe many of these spooky problems. Unfortunately, even though WPF looks gorgeous, I kinda lost interest in it as it was taking a lot of time. Any future work will be trying to flesh out the WPF version instead of fixing the kooky problems left in the current version.

Hey FrozenSpoon, I'm VERY happy with your little plugin for Foobar2000. I downloaded it, used it, and suddenly there was a warm and wet feeling in my pants.

Anyways...

The one feature that this thing is missing, is the ability to show up during applications. Is there any way you could do this? If you do this, my pants would be warm and wet all the time ^^

WPF sounds interesting. I need to get into that myself.

I've been using foo_prettypop for quite a while, and just recently ran into this issue.

The issue is that the 'always on top' functionality is now non-existent. I used to be able to alt-tab to the prettypop window when 'always on top' stopped working, and it would work again for a while. I can still alt-tab to the window, but now if I change focus to another window, the prettypop window is no longer on top. In other words, the prettypop window behaves as if it was any other window when it comes to layering. Is this a known issue?

If this is not a known issue, I have installed two items recently that could possibly be causing the problem:
1) Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0
2) RocketDock 1.3.1 - http://www.punksoftware.com/rocketdock

I didn't notice this issue before installing either of these things. I know that foo_prettypop uses the .NET Framework. RocketDock also has 'always on top' functionality (that works as advertised).

Either way, FrozenSpoon is writing the plugin in WPF (.NET 3), So any bugs that exist might or might not exist in the new re-write.

While I'm all for wetting people's pants, I'm not completely sure what you mean here... are you referring to the more and more broken always-on-top problem?

Yep, this keeps showing up for people. When I release another version I'll try tackling it again.

Unfortunately, while the WPF prototype I had was looking pretty hot, ultimately I just don't have the interest to invest time in this plugin at the moment Maybe in the future... sorry about that

Can pretty popup read embedded album art?

Nope. I don't think the SDK provides for that yet.

A cool feature to see would be to have a setting that allowed the user to see the popup on demand via a mouse hover over the fb2k tray icon, or in the fb2k tray icon right-click menu, or maybe even a keyboard hotkey. This way a user would not have to stop/start or pause/unpause in order to check the currently playing song data.

It would also be cool to have these settings seperate from the fade-in/out settings. Usually when I want to check what song is playing, I like to see the song data instantly, and as soon as I'm done checking, I like the window to disappear instantly when I move the mouse so I can get back to what I'm doing without waiting for a fade out.

I like how you can format each line, very nice. Would it be possible to be able to set the number of lines and to automatically exclude empty lines?

One of these days I'm gonna get into programming and try and contribute here. Your plugin is by far the best for displaying album art and song data in a single small package. If only "on demand" were an option But regardless, congrats to you man, very nice work.

P.S. I have done mIRC scripting for over 4 years now (similar to C according to what I have heard), and I do a lot of Access 2003 stuff (mostly using the functions). Does that sound like a reasonable start to get into this loop, or am I way off (and needing some serious practice time behind a compiler with the right tutorials)?

Scripting is vastly different from programming, Although in certain environments and languages you get off the hook more easily. .NET and C# are easier to handle, You need to worry less about all sorts of things.

Start off with simpler programming projects and move on from there. Best advice i can give you? Learn the theory behind the code first. Procedural programming, Object oriented Programming, And so on. When you understand those, Learning a little about designing software won't hurt. From there.. You just build up experience

You can use hotkey to bring up prettypop window by binding any key (or key combination) to View/Show PrettyPopup command in foobar Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcut. You can make the shortcut keys global too.

You can assign your own keyboard shortcut to make the popup appear under "Preferences -> General -> Keyboard Shortcuts". Look for "Main -> View -> Show PrettyPopup".

Awesome plugin, however, I seem to be having a problem with the setup menu... For some reason, the Window cramps the text so I can't see all the options, most importantly, I can't disable the titlebar!

This is what I see;



Any suggestions?

Yes. Try to disable visual styles in your windows system configuration and see if the problem persists. If not, you're probably using a window theme which makes your window controls larger than the standard size. Fix this by choosing a different theme.

Yeah this is breaking because for whatever reason the amount Foobar scales its window doesn't match the amount .NET wants to scale the controls. I think this is due to some GDI/GDI+ mismatch but I really don't know.

This problem was fixed for simple cases of large DPIs and what not. As already suggested, just use a different (standard) theme to setup the options... maybe your theme is doing something funky.

I've learned my lesson about stuffing too many controls in one window

Thanks for the reply. I just tried all that, disabling visual styles in the system configuration, and before that I tried changing styles and text sizes around... Nothing has worked, and I am not sure why.

Hi!Can I hide titlebar in this updated version?Help me,please!Thanks!!!

Why don't you test for yourself? Is it that hard? Again, RTFFP!
I think: "Configurable background color for popup, as well as option for hiding the titlebar." answers your question.

Well, I can't think of any other solutions. Maybe you should disable visual styles and delete the component. Next time you start foobar2000, it will ask you if you want to keep its settings. Choose no, reinstall the plugin and see. If this can't help you, maybe a fresh install of foobar can fix the issue. Just two suggestions, I can't imagine why a different window theme doesn't work for you. Could you provide a screenshot of what your preferences dialog looks like when you have visual styles disabled?

any chance of getting .ico support?
i keep a "folder.ico" in each folder so when i see album art instead of folders in windows explorer.

Just found this component. I'm ok with it except for the fact I can't disable it. I only want the pop-up to show when I trigger it via a keyboard shortcut. Is this possible? I tried that with Foobar's native show playing function but that balloon is huge and stays around forever. Any help would be much appreciated.

Try unchecking "Automatic PrettyPopup" under the "View" main menu.