Hi folks,

I loved columns UI quite a lot, thought it was most functionally efficient approach for foobar, or any music player with the way I organize my music. Back when I was still using it, i made my fcs and it served me well. But now that I have seen how much more asthetically pleasing panels UI counterparts can be, I wanted to make a switch. As we speak, I lack experience or knowledge to build my pui from the scratch, so I decided to modify what someone else already made, namely elegance by jclim00. Here is what I have so far:



First off, some of the Kanji characters from the song currently being played (the bottom one) are displayed as square boxes. Apparantly there is nothing wrong with the tags as evidenced in the song properties window. In previous versions of foobar, I was able to do this by altering some option about unicode display. That options seems to be gone, or hard to find in this version for some reason.

Another thing... Since I use the playlist switcher exclusively for navigating between different playlists (I tend to have many of them, like 50+) I hoped I could keep it visible and spacious at all times. To my knowledge, however, the playlist switcher does not allow for transparency (which would be ideal) or background coloring as far as the panels_UI variant goes. (Hope I am wrong) If so, is there some alternative I could use keeping the functionality of the original switcher?

A few other things of my interest at this point is
1) Being able to stretch the background image
2) Adding the seekbar somewhere there
3) Finding a lyrics plugin that supports timestamps (Lyrics DB one doesnt, they dont have any of my songs anyway)

On a related note, how long do you guys thing 0.9.5 is going to take to become fully mature and supercede 0.9.4.5


Thanks in advance!

The problem with the kanji not appearing properly are likely due to you using a font that does not support that particular character. Try using Tahoma or MS Gothic/MS ゴシック and see if the character is rendered properly. If not, check your windows display settings to see what font windows is using as default, I believe that is what foobar is using for the properties dialog and that obviously is capable of handling the character. When choosing a font try to find ones that have japanese listed as a supported script type. Windows automatically tries to remap characters not listed in your current font but as you can see it often does not work.

As for stretching the background image, it has been awhile since I have used PanelsUI but if I remember correctly there was an option "nokeepaspect" for the image code that you can use to stretch the image to fit the given coordinates.

You can use $panel(title,Seekbar,x,y,width,height,) to add a seekbar anywhere in your layout, however it does look rather ugly. For a more attractive solution you may want to try foo_uie_powerpanels.

For timed lyrics I prefer to use MiniLyrics to download and a foo_uie_lyrics panel (note: not foo_uie_lyrics_panel) to display them.

I try not to speculate too much about software before it is released however if previous releases are any indicator than it is likely that 0.9.5 will supercede 0.9.4.5 shortly after it is released as I do not believe there is any lost functionality between the versions and therefore there is no real reason to stick to the older version.

Thank you for your reply. I had some modifications made to the pui and uploaded a screenshot to the gallery thread. You were right about the fonts, I am using Meiryo instead of calibri it came with. I found a way to "stretch" the image (not exactly, but oh well) with keeping the aspect ratio constant, which is what I am using now. Last but not least, it took me a while to figure out "// PerSecond" wasnt really supposed to be mere a commented line... Now I have a functional seekbar and all. I think I will just use this for my lyrics need. foo_uie_lyrics looks really good though, Maybe I will use that for the sake of filling up the bottom left corner

I am slowly picking up how things work in Panels UI... Is there a good tutorial site I could follow?
Thanks!