Biography view

A new component from the PSS/ELPlaylist/Library Tree developer
http://foo2k.chottu.net/



It searches informations (biography, artist picture, cover) about the playing file from your local last.fm server.

I'd like to see something like that doing it with wikipedia, though
But its a good starting point

It looks very good, and I concur that Wiki would be nice. It misses a scroll function for longer text though:



Well it's still a young plug in, so thank you very much, developer.

Best would be an option to choose the server the infos should come from.

don't want to request too much only happy to see this kind of component being developed



you can even choose custom language

I like it

Yet another great plugin from this developer - thankyou

I realise it's still young but I would like to see;
1) Scroll bars
2) A list of album and a list of artist sources. Selection would be from top to bottom. If no match then move to next source etc.
3) If used as an album art only - could we have the usual scaling\fit options

That's it for now - thanks again.

Interesting idea!
+1 for scrolling.
Anyway, great component!

Why?
Most of the last.fm biographies are sourced from wikipedia:



I also would like to see scroll bars and some sort of option to set a limit size to images or scaling\fit options.

this component seems to work well with the default UI + foo_dockable panels. Many thanks, this is a great component!

That's right. But I may like to see the whole biography not only a few lines of it
And with all artists i now tried with this plugin enabled i only got a short "prologue"

unclick "short description" and you'll get full biography, but then you'll need really large panel as you can't scroll

Ah, thanks.
Haven't seen this option

hi,

wow... great component! thank you very much for this.

greets

i'm really enjoying this component: album mode also fetches album descriptions!

btw i think i found a bug:
- when the bios/descriptions are big the end of the last sentence gets cut-off by a few words...

A well developed but simple plugin +1 also for the scrolling. Great plugin so far.

Yes, it is better than i thought.
I played around some time now and i love it!

I'm not sure it needs scrollbars, just for aesthetical reasons. Everyone is always asking if they can hide them, and now all of a sudden they want them! Maybe a link to the last.fm page (e.g. 'read more...') would work? I think this is the reason it can give a briefer description...

This is a great component though, thanks very much to the developer.

No not a scroll bar but scrolling option with the mouse wheel at least!
It works in ELPlaylist so it should also be possible in Biography view

EDIT:
I noticed that it doesn't remembers the opacity value...

This is a fantastic component, great work from the developer.

Then what we who have trackball ?
Good plugin, in use atm

Biography view 0.2 with scroll function (mouse-wheel)
Yes, that's it!
Unfortunately it still doesn't remembers the opacity value...

yay!

1. Would be great if you were able to store specified info in tags once they were downloaded.

2. Would be even greater if it were able to get the tags-cloud and do same as (1) with it

Biography view 0.2.1
(very busy today )
(translated with Live Search Translator)

For me its perfect now

Works beautifully. The mouse scroll works better than the scrollbar, didn't come to mind when I thought of that.

mouse scroll doesn't work with foo_dockable_panels...

For me it works with foo_dockable_panels.

you're able to scroll text with foo_dockable_panels?
strange, it's not working for me...

Yes.

Feature request: since sometimes biographies for certain artists are not present in my language, a fallback to english would be useful

Something is different with font size in this plug-in. For instance, Tahoma with a font size of 8 does not match the size of Tahoma-8 throughout the rest of foobar. The font size is output a bit smaller in this plug-in.



Top portion is Tahoma-8 output by the biography plugin. Bottom portion is Tahoma-8 output by foo_uie_lylrics, which is consistent with the rest of foobar.

Edit: Ability to enable/disable custom border around artist/album image would be cool.

Thanks for yet another quality component! I added this to a tab stack under PSS and it is working well under wine. Scroll is working fine for me, just put the mouse over the panel and use the scroll wheel.

weird, it's not working for me...
what's your foo_dockable_panels version?
mine is Dockable Panels 1.0.7b [Mar 28 2007 - 09:18:48] (running with default UI) with fb2k 0.9.6.4.

I didn't tried it with Default UI first, but even with Default UI it is working. I used the same versions as you, both Dockable Panels and fb2k.

Get a trackball mouse with a scrollwheel, I couldn't live without it!

Or check your options regarding trackball. It has been many years, but memory says you can define a button action / ball movement to mimic scroll.

terry

are you also using XP sp3?
i have no ideia why scrolling doesn't work for me.
i'll guess i have to get used to resize the dockable panel when the text is too long...

btw the bug that caused the last sentence to be cut-off by a few words seems to have been fixed!
thanks

Another yes.

Nice Component. One problem: when using it in album mode, it sometimes gets the album info and sometimes doesn't (on the same album, which does have info on last.fm). Also there is no option for album info text caching (only image) in preferences like there is for artist info.

+1


Great plugin. Takes foobar one step closer to perfection

Feature request:
A function to change the edge style (None, sunken, grey) of the panel would be very useful.

I love this plugin! I've used it to get some album art (folder.jpg), which it is really great at, and it's already replaced my album art viewer! I've noticed how it doesn't handle album names if they have illegal characters (For instance "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" - 0kB file truncated as "The Chronicles of Narnia"). Otherwise - thanks, I love it!

illegal characters may fix use
E:\COVERS\Artists\$replace(%artist%,'/','-','\','-',':','-','*','-','?','-','"','-','<','-','>','-','|','-')
and
E:\COVERS\Album\$replace(%album%,'/','-','\','-',':','-','*','-','?','-','"','-','<','-','>','-','|','-')

Something amusing: for songs that lack tags (hence "?" is sent), the panel reads "Mysterious lo-fi punk from Hungary. They use toy instruments and substandard guitars of the communist era. The name of the band is pronounced in Hungarian as ‘Kérdőjel’ which means question mark in English. " with a funny image of a guy with a sock on his head. My music is tagged properly of course, so this only happens with new pre-library songs

Great component by the way, thanks to the dev!

Put
$if3(%artist%,)
instead of %artist% into the artist field in server settings

Biography View v2.2 out


(translated with google)

Full changelog:

How does one scroll with trackball where middle-click is not available ? :I

That's a good point. I wonder if it would be possible to have clicking and dragging on the text as another way to scroll? I think I'd like that, even though I have a scroll wheel. I guess we have to hope the dev sees this and adds it.

I know, but if I'd like to see a workaround implemented. $replace(%tag%,'/','-','\','-',':','-','*','-','?','-','"','-','<','-','>','-','|','-') is cumbersome.

Version 0.2.3 out