To my knowledge you will not solve your request until you are able to get the number of jpg files while playing a song. You can add a tag to your songs including these numbers, or you include the number in the path name.

Thanks for the response which has given me a good idea on how to solve my problem. Is anyone aware of any software that can copy a series of files from a given folder and paste them into a subfolder named with a number representing the total number of files that were pasted into the subfolder. This way I could use the subfolder name as the maximum number for the $rand() function.

Great component!

I have just one feature request: Could you add a user-defined amount of flexibility to the "Maintain aspect ratio" option? I would like my almost-square art to fill the panel but my clearly rectangular art to be left alone. Seems simple enough - you could get a numeric value for how far an image strays from being square by just calculating
Though you would want to switch width and height if the image were higher than it was long, just to be consistent.

Thanks!

You can use Active Perl.
This software offers all you need to generate folders named e.g. x_count and to move specific files into this subfolder. You just have to build a script.

Can anybody tell me what source code to put in to get all the images in the path folder i.e front , back and disc to be displayed one after the other after x secs?
Im using the default source settings but only get one picture up .How do i get it to scroll through all the pictures ?
I have searched hi and low and cannot find what im looking for.

This foobar is a great application but its a very steep learning curve for me, a lot of the links , info ive read so far has just flown right over my head, so any help would be appreciated.

cheers

You can try this one:



If you have pictures that do not match the patterns, you have to add some patterns like:

If the pattern matches two or more files, only the first one is shown (no cycling inside the pattern).

I have foobar2000 v0.9.2 beta 5. This is the error I'm getting:



Sorry if the answer is obvious, but how do I fix it? Or that version of the player is indeed not supported?

thanks for that will try tommorrow

Thanks again, but I was hoping for a bit of a simplier cookie cutter approach. I sure if I really worked at it, I could learn enough to hack together a script, but my program skills and time limitations are a bit constrained. Do you know of any prepackaged solution?

It's possible, but I'm not going to be adding it. I'm trying to keep the preferences as light as possible, and I just don't see a good reason to add those two options. Why would you want to shrink an image in only one direction?


I'll think about it, but see my above comment about keeping preferences light.


If you're on Windows 2000, make sure you get Gdiplus.dll.


As an aside/reminder, "match:" is unnecessary and ignored since version 0.160. "match:$replace(%_path%,%_filename_ext%,)*" is treated exactly the same as "$replace(%_path%,%_filename_ext%,)*".

gfngfgf,

Actually, I'm using Windows XP x64. I tried copying the dll you mentioned to both system folders (SysWOW64 and system32) and restarted foobar. Same error.

Well, you shouldn't need to install gdiplus if you have any version of Windows XP. Honestly, I don't have the capability to test on XP64, so I really can't help. Maybe if someone is using XP64 and Album Art Panel, he/she can help.

Maybe a "prepackaged solution" exist, but imo it's unlikely, since your task is very special. I needed to program a Perl script in a similar situation. Although my prgramming skills are limited, after 3 to 4 hours I got a script (about 20 lines).
You will find easy to understand tutorials in the web.
The advantage of a script is that (once created) you can use it again and again.

gfngfgf,

about that new resizing option - maybe one to proportionally enlarge / shrink the image so that there would be no space left (taking padding into account). i have my album art panel sized for 1:1 covers, though quite often the cover image is not sqare (either by a small disproportion, or almost 1:2 or 2:1 when there's "open cover" shot).

from aesthetical point of view, i wouldn't mind not seeing the whole image - in exchange of filling the whole space.

Hey Guys,

I just noticed that album art plugin eats 30-40% of CPU on my machine. What's wrong with it? Does it really require that many processor power to show the image?

That sounds pretty good to me. Basically, it would maintain the aspect ratio, but zoom until the area is filled. This would be very handy, as I have some cassette only stuff, and cassette covers are definetaly not square and certainly don't look good stretched out. Not a critical request, but would certainly add to the appeal of the plugin.

What speed/type of processor? I am aware that the CPU usage spikes fairly high when fading between sources, but I'm not aware of any other major slowdowns. Try lowering the resizing quality, as that can contribute to CPU usage as well.

Yeah, I'll try to do that. The processor is Intel Pentium 4 - 3.2GHz.
By the way does it really matter for album art plugin if I have FB2K minimized?

Thanks.

<<nevermind>>

Hmm, you shouldn't have that high usage just from album art. Are you absolutely certain it's album art panel's fault (that is, have you tried uninstalling album art and seeing if you still have the high cpu usage)? What OS?

What do mean "does it really matter" if fb2k is minimized? If you're still talking about the CPU usage, I'm not too sure. If my theory is correct and the image-drawing code is what's causing the high CPU usage, then minimizing foobar2000 should help.

gfngfgf, ive found the source of my problems...

The default search string was looking in my music folder for album art.

On another note... some of my music has characters that windows wont allow to be in the filename (Ex. AC/DC - Highway to hell). How would i be able to name my files without the characters windows wont allow and still have the album art show?

My current format for sources is:
C:\art\%artist%-%album%.*
-C:\art\default.*

I'm glad you were able to solve your problem.


The current behavior is that each restricted character is replaced by the wildcard '?', which matches a single character. Thus, for your example, you could name your file "AC_DC - Highway to hell" (the underscore could be any character...as long as there's something in place of the slash).

Stuart60611: There is another solution to your problem, but it may be a bit "unfair" (some photos will be rarely selected) if the possible number of photos may vary much.

Draft of the idea:
Let's say the max number of photos per artist is 10, but for this particular artist you have 5 photos.
First rule matches with random(10). If you're lucky, it's a hit. If you're unlucky (for example try to get photo #8), next rule is tried. And next rule is... random(9). Sooner or later, you'll get a match, because last rule selects photo #1.
If max number of photos you have is much bigger than 10 (let's say 100), it may be not a good idea to have 100 rules. Then you can have random(100), random(90), etc. But this way, "last" photos may be hard to pick, I guess.

2 questions

- how can I get album covers from INSIDE Foobar with foo_run and which .exe and which dedicated scripts ?

- is it possible to display random pics from external folder, alternatively with album cover ? script ?

Thanks a lot for help

Hi Foobarians!

A little question :

I got some covers like :

akfgcdcover40.jpg
akfgcdcover41.jpg
akfgcdcover43.jpg
akfgcdcover45.jpg
akfgcdcover49.jpg

etc...

how the hell can I make for that albumart match all and cicle between them ?

Thanks and sorry the crapy english

It isn't possible to access the images that Album Art Panel displays or their locations from another plugin (e.g., foo_run). Perhaps if you described what your ultimate goal is, we could offer some suggestions.


Try this as your sources list:




Right now, there's no nice way, other than to have one line in your source list for each image. There was a version a while back that would allow you to cycle through all the images that matched a wildcard. For instance, if you specified "akfgcdcover*.jpg", the panel would cycle between all the "akfgcdcover40.jpg", "akfgcdcover41.jpg", etc. I'll see if I can add that feature back into my version.

alright, so say i have a track that currently has no album art. i download the pic of the cover off of the web... what do i do to "paste" it to the track info (make it so when i play that track, it can find the art)?

If you're using the default settings, just rename it to folder.jpg and place it in the same folder as your tracks.

so how come all my tracks that currently have album art have no image files in the folder they are in?

Chances are you played one or more of the files with WMP which automatically downloaded the album art into the folder with the music. Navigate to the folder, go to Tools>Folder Options, click on the "View" tab and uncheck "Hide protected operating system files"

You'll see the hidden images in the folder after that

First I apologize if this has been asked before. I did run a search and didnt find this asked asked but we're at 20 pages now so I might have overlooked something.

Is it possible (and if it is not would you consider adding support) to use an URL as an albumart source? Can I for example add the line http://image.weather.com/images/sat/region...sat_720x486.jpg to the bottom of my sources list to display my local weather map instead of a "no image" picture? I played around a bit with it but could not get it to work.

-----
Version 0.2.0 (June 13, 2006)
Plugin homepage

NOTE: All your Album Art Panel settings WILL be lost when upgrading from an earlier version of Album Art Panel to the current version.

Download
Change log
Source

Known bugs and planned features:

• Read images from within archives
  
• User-adjustable threshold for maintaining aspect ratio (fuzzy resizing)
  
• Cycle through all wildcard matches
  
• CTRL+drag to copy image

-----

The big change with this version is that multiple panels is now supported. Unfortunately, this means that your settings will be lost (including your sources list). Make sure you save your favorite sources list somewhere before your install the new version. I think your Columns UI layout should be saved, though (at least it was for me when I tried just now). Also note that the "Album Art Panel" page in Preferences is now gone. Much like the Track Info Panel, the preferences page is now only accessible either by right-clicking the panel, or by clicking the "Configure..." button on the Columns UI Layout page. (PS, big, BIG thanks to G-Lite...the trackinfo source code answered a lot of questions I had about multiple instances)

Another new change is that you can prefix a source with "--" (two hyphens) to indicate that it is a "no cover" image. The panel will then (optionally) skip those "no cover" arts while automatically cycling.

One last note: I enabled XP Themes on the Preferences pages in this latest version. I tried to maintain compatibility with Windows 2000, but I'm not sure if I did it correctly. Please, if you're using Windows 2000, let me know if you can or can't access the Preferences page.


Right now, I don't think it's possible. I'll look into adding that, though. I have a hunch that it's going to be similar to reading from archives in terms of implementing within the code.

Great Stuff Would it at all be possible to have 2 pictures in the one frame.. Say 1 Covering the whole frame & 1 on top, say 1/2 the size ??

Cheers

Thank you for the update, I installed the latest version and everything seems to be working fine. In fact better than fine.. I used to get some unhandled exception errors when exiting foobar and hadnt gotten around to tracking down the source. This update has eliminated those error and my foobar now exits cleanly. Keep up the good work!

As for my previous request for URL support, thank you for the consideration and also keep in mind this sort of a feature could be used in conjunction with meta tags to dynamically pull covers from online album databases. This would significantly boost the value of this component IMO and eliminate the need for local storage of album covers if a good online database could be found.

Thanks for the update, gfngfgf, but I think I found a bug.
If I have 'Follow cursor' enabled and select a song that has no album art, the album art panel will display the album art of the previously marked song until I click another song which has album art. Same happens with playing song.

I also tried to set the option 'On track change, revert to first source:' to 'Always'. Didn't help.

It's just like the panel wouldn't get "cleaned up" when I change either selected/playing song.

You can use the filesystem API to read from HTTP addresses as well, but I would suggest to move the whole image searching and reading into a worker thread, if you have not done this already.

It appears I may have found a bug.

If the "Behavior" preference for "Cycle sources during playback" and "Skip no-cover images while cycling" are both selected, and the playlist moves from a file which has an albumart pic to a file which doesnt.. the pic for no-cover is not displayed and the image from the previous song remains.

I would suspect that the plugin is trying to cycle non-existant images and skipping the no-cover image per the preferences even on songs which have no albumart. I tried changing "On track change, revert to first source" to "Always" thinking that might trigger things to reset when it changes tracks but it does not.

I disabled the option for "Cycle sources during playback" and images are displayed normally as with previous versions of this component. I'm satisfied not to use this feature but would like to report the potential bug. Or am I simply misconfiguring it?

Edit: This bug may be the same one reported a few posts up by Anas, however I do not use the option "Album cover art follows cursor even when playing"

Edit: In the interest of debugging, I enabled "Cycle sources during playback" but disabled "Skip no-cover images while cycling" and the component functions normally. The bug appears to be specific to the "Skip no-cover images while cycling" option being applied to playlist items that have no cover. This does make logical sense and if it's intentional then so be it. But atleast IMO the expected behavior would be for the entire "Cycle sources during playback" would not apply to items that had no source (though I guess the no-cover counts as a source).. you may want to consider a bit of code and/or an additional sub-option to compensate for this behavior.

I don't think so. I'd like to keep it to one image per panel for now.


What's your sources list? I can't reproduce this with my list (which is admittedly pretty simple).

edit: see my response to Yotsuya below. I'll try and fix this for the next version.


Thanks for confirming my hunch, and for the suggestion. I can see how a worker thread would be helpful when reading from HTTP addresses.


Thanks for the detailed report. That is indeed a bug. It appears that I don't properly handle the case where none of the sources match. I bet this is what Anas is seeing, too. I'll definitely deal with it before the next version.

I think i may have also noticed a bug with the newest version.
When the Album Art Prefrences window is open, and you switch to another window (Ex. Firefox) by clicking the window name on the taskbar and then try switching back to foobar the same way, foobar will not come up, you have to minimise all other windows. Also, when you rightclick on the foobar taskbar icon, no menu comes up.

Since the no-cover image is handled differently than other sources and this component is adding features that treat this special source differently (as evident by the above mentioned bug), I would like to suggest that perhaps the "no-cover" image be moved to a separate part of the configuration instead of simply being the last entry on the sources list. I should think this would make features like the transitioning effect easier to code without worrying about the no-cover image being thrown in the mix. "if any exist in list 1, random entry from list 1, else no-cover" this would also open the door for adding more options to no-cover such as searching online albumart databases or switching to a vis plugin or whatever we can come up with.

Just a suggestion, dont want to get the bloat police called out or anything.

You know, I noticed this while testing, but I thought it was just a side-effect from the preferences dialog being modal. It wasn't until just now that I checked trackinfo's preferences dialog, and it doesn't exhibit the same behavior. I'll take a look at it.

edit: actually, after playing with it for a little bit, I made the following observations: right-clicking the tray icon does bring up a menu, and it will switch back to foobar2000. Still, I'm doing something wrong when I open the preferences dialog.

what strings should i use to make th panel always display folder.jpg as the first source, then cycle thru any other image files in the tracks directory?

Right clicking the tray icon may but right clicking the taskbar does not. Nor are you able to bring the window to the front.

Edit: I think I might have noticed another bug. If you have 'Album cover art follows cursor even when playing' enabled and click the random button and it selects a track that has cover art the cover shows, but if you click it again and it selects a track that doesnt have art the art from the previously selected track stays.

I come with some good news, probably...

gfngfgf, I am currently using Windows 2000, foobar v0.9.2, and Album Art Panel v0.2.0 and have no problems accessing the Prefrences menu.

Nice job and keep up the good work. d(^_^)b

Is there a way to have it display any image with front somewhere in the filename (so I don't have to rename them all to folder.jpg)?

just try to add *front*.* into the sources list. it should work

Thanks a lot for the update gfngfgf. Multiple panels ROCK!

Thanks, I'll give that a try. Actually, I'll try *front*.jpg, to make sure it doesn't try loading a music file.

That is definitely good news. Thanks for letting me know


I know, huh? I didn't really think multiple panels would be that great (and I really don't have room in my layout), but when I was testing, and I had one panel set to show the playing track, and another to follow cursor, I thought that was pretty neat.

On a personal note, I'm moving in a week or two, so development might be a little slow. I'll try to get a version 0.2.1 out within the next week to address the preferences/taskbar issue and the old album art stays when selecting a track with no album art, but don't expect anything new for a while after that.

Just an idea, but how about providing an interface for other components to retrieve the 'now playing' and 'follow cursor' bitmaps, perhaps as a Gdiplus::Bitmap or HBITMAP, so that they don't have to worry about url retrieval or archives.

This way, other components that require albumart, such as foo_prettypop and maybe someday columns_ui (If a WMP11-like albumart-in-playlist feature is implmeneted), can all use the same images, and 3 different sources lists won't have to be configured.