couple of sexy plugins

[shaneh]

A plugin which lets you set the playcount for items in the media library. Something which was bugging me during development where I would start winamp hundreds of times and have a song rack up the hits.

+ A plugin which lets you rate an item from the playlist in winamp rather through the media library. Pretty cool, and I guess where I would normally do it.

For some reason the media library has no ability to list the current playlist with the ability to rate items etc. Or even manipulate the current song playing, without going to 'most recently played' or whatever. I guess this could be done using plugins though.

If anyone knows how to hook the 'send to' feature of the playlist, Id love to know. Or at least a way of getting all the selected items. I could probably use a hack of some kind, but im sure there must be some way of hooking the 'send to' feature in a good way. As it is, the 'rate it' plugin will only let you rate one item at a time.

Both plugins will appear on the winamp plugins page one of these days.

[edit] See update posts here and here

[shaneh]

Preview of the 'Rate It' plugin.

[inthegray]

"+ A plugin which lets you rate an item from the playlist in winamp rather through the media library. Pretty cool, and I guess where I would normally do it."

awesome! that really is sexy...

[shaneh]

PS: I am planning on adding this functionality to my 'toaster' plugin.

ie. The popup window comes up, and you click or mousewheel on the window to adjust the rating. I could optionally have the window popup halfway through the song, or just keep it as coming up through the use of the utility (ie a keypress).

I will eventually have this plugin have global hot-keys to adjust the rating up/down of the current song - but I get the feeling Nullsoft will include something like this in the next release, so im reluctant to go to too much effort.

[inthegray]

i don't normally use Toast, but if i could rate through there, everytime a song begins, while i'm working on other stuff, i'd probably always run it.

in case you missed it, btw, i mentioned Toast here sometime last month.

[shaneh]

Hey thanks for the plug. The future plan for 'toaster' is to eventually become a little mini winamp/mikro amp type thing.

The difference is, it will fade in during song changes and let you do and show pretty much anything with a few simple mouse click combinations or with some little buttons on the window (eg change the rating by clicking, or skip the song by mousewheel etc). It will also fade in on hot-key or at a configured % through the song. Once you are done and your cursor leaves the window, it fades out again.

Well thats the vision anyway. I have already done the coding, and even implemented a bit in toaster, its just a matter of piecing all the snippets together. Its not a matter of how, but 'what' and 'when' :P

[inthegray]

plug in works great for me, but i found a possible minor bug. the option to rate the items in my playlist seems to be grayed out on songs that i haven't listened to yet and haven't added to the ML (songs i just downloaded and added to the playlist). like if i download a couple of songs, and drag them into the playlist. if i listen to one of the songs, i can rate it. the rest of the unlistened songs have the option grayed out. i'm not sure if you can make a workaround for this, but just thought i should report.

[shaneh]

There are a couple fixes I want to make to it, but wont yet cause I have a few other things to do. You wont be able to rate things not in your media library, add them to the library first. This makes sense if you think about it.

I could make it automatically add to the library before rating, but I imagine most people would want to manually add songs to their library because often downloaded songs aren't in the correct location etc when first listened to, and will lose their rating if they are moved and the library updated with the new location.

You can set the library to automatically scan for new items and they will be added if thats what you want.

[shaneh]

Ive updated both plugins a bit, just bug fixes and now only 10% the size.

Ive also added 2 extra plugins to the mix:

An 'Explorer' context menu plugin, which gives you access to the 'Explorer right click menu' from within your playlist. See the properties, delete files, sent to and open with to your hearts content and more.

Also, my favourite, a 'Find in Library' plugin. Locate a song in your library that is in your playlist. You can find by Artist/Filename/Album and song title. Picture this: your listening to some random song which you think sounds good, just right click the song and you can quickly find all songs by that artist/album. Also works with internet radio - quickly check if the current song title is in your database!. uber cool.

[shaneh]

Note for the 'find in library' plugin, it will use your first item under 'Local Media' so rearrange it if you want to default to something else.

However, if the library window is already open, it will use whatever is currently selected, allowing you to search 'recent items' and whatnot.

[lukeprog]

Anyone thought of doing a Winamp plugin that allows you to rate items (in Playlist or Media Library) with the press of a key instead of going through a right-click menu? Like, just press a number 0-5 to instantly rate the song (0 for no rating)?

[torsius]

i'm sure global hotkeys could be tossed into the mix, like ctrl-alt-1 through 5 or something

[Dextro]

I think this might be a bug but when you open the rate menu in the playlist it doesn't show the current rating like it does in the media library :S

[shaneh]

"doesn't show the current rating"

Does for me... Make sure the song is actually in your library first.

[ilyag]

Thanks, playlist rating is great! Plsfind and explorer's context menu are wonderful!

ml_plscount, however, crashes winamp....

[ilyag]

Thanks, playlist rating is great! Plsfind and explorer's context menu are wonderful!

ml_plscount, however, crashes winamp....

[SlowwHand]

What is the thought behind rating your own song files?

[electricmime]

it shows up in the menu.. and it even shows the current rating, but it wont actually let me rate(when i click the rating i want to give a song, it does nothing) and yes, it IS in my library, and if i rate a song in the library, it shows the current rating... but for some reason, clicking the rating i want doesnt do anything

[Carno]

Oh, man. I've been wanting something like explorer context menu for a long time. Thanks a million.

[WanderingKnight]

Running WA 5.03 and WinME here, and the rate-from-playlist plugin just...flat out doesn't show up.

No change on the right-click menu for the playlist, and it doesn't show up in the plug-ins preference menu either.

Does it need to go somewhere special because its a media library plugin?

[shaneh]

@ilyag: Do you have ml_gusb installed? Or any other ml plugins installed? Ive experienced a crash too, but it seems to be because ml_gusb doesnt handle multiple ml send to plugins. Im not sure if this is because of ml_gusb or ml_plscount, but I can say the crash is genereated in ml_gusb so it is likely to be because of gusb being faulty. ml_gusb wont cause a crash if its disabled or plscount (or probably other send to plugins) are disabled.

@electricmime/@WanderingKnight: not sure what your problem is, it works fine for me in 5.02 and 5.03. Make sure you set the media library to start up automatically by default as well as have allow play tracking enabled. ie- if you have all the default options for the media library it should work ok, unless you have some other conflicting plugin. Try removing all other plugins and see if it works, if it does, add them back in one by one and see which one is causing the problem. Or you could just be unlucky :P it seems to work ok for me so shouldnt be a problem with the plugin itself.

[Dextro]

Originally posted by shaneh
"doesn't show the current rating"

Does for me... Make sure the song is actually in your library first.

Not only am I sure they are in the library I have it on automaticly add played songs to the playlist and still doesn't show :S

EDIT: noticed it only shows if you rate it first in the Media Library. :S

Details:
winamp 5.03
classic skin
ml_generic v0.1
ml_www c0.41a
Wombat Share v0.72
LyricSys
AMIP v2.47
Pontis Winamp Plugin v0.4.308
DrO's Time restore and autoplay Plugin v1.71 Electron Edition
DrO's Playlist File Remover v1.4
DrO's One Click Show and Hide v1.1
Viralsound.com client v0.90
Amarok Plugin v1.2
+default plugs

[shaneh]

thats quite a few plugins, any of which could be causing grief. You shouldn't have to rate it first in the media library, perhaps by having 'automatically add songs to library' is causing the item to be reset somehow. It sounds like youve changed the configuration of winamp quite a bit, it works fine with a standard setup. Try what I descibed above about removing the plugins, if not, youll just have to live without it.

[ilyag]

@shaneh: Yes, I have gUSB and ml_www. Disabling gUSB saves the day. I, however, may end up disabling playcount instead. ;( I don't see why I would need it that much...

Couple of suggestions, though:

• The menu option plscount creates is in a really wierd place (Why would it be in Send To?). If it's hard to insert it elsewhere, you should at least document its location in the "configure" dialog box.
• The plscount dialog should mention what the count was before. Perhaps, that should be the default value of the textbox, but it should probably be visible after you overwrite the text... Also, maybe a "spinner" would work better than a textbox?

[shaneh]

@ilyag:
Yeah I thought about those things. The reason its in 'Send To' because thats the standard and easy place to put items which recieve a list of items. ie more than one file. Putting it anywhere else would mean only being able to process one file at a time, unless I use an ugly hack which may not even be possible. It is documented in the .txt with the install - its just meant to be a quick hack-no-frills tool for those 'emergency' situations.

This is also related to the reason why I dont show the original value, because it could be different for many files. Plus it would take a bit more effort to pull this value out, and I figure people only want to change the play count when they see that the count is too high and want to manually set it, so the original value is irrelevant and they would already know it.

I would also prefer to have gusb over plscount, but its easy to swap over if I ever need to change a songs count which isnt too often. It would be nice if the gusb author fixed the bug in his plugin though, as it will probably crash with other 'send to' plugins too. Something to keep in mind if it crashes again with another plugin.

[ilyag]

Makes sense. Still, I did not find any .txt with the install - the .zip I downloaded was just 4 dll-s. I do not think many people would read a README even if there was one... So, I mantain that you should add some documentation to Preferences->General Plugins->Configure.

About showing original count in the dialog - it shouldn't be too hard to count the number of files you are given, is it? Then, if there is only one file, you can show it's count. Ideally, if there are less than 10, you could show them all. Or, you could do it like it is done in explorer - if they all have the same playcount, show it, otherwise don't. Yet another idea: show the range (these files were played minimux a and maxinmum b times...)

On yet another hand, maybe you should keep this plugin simple and do something more exciting Is it, maybe, possible to add rating shortcuts to the Global Hotkeys? Oh, can you then add the rating plugin to "Send To", too?

Thanks again, great plugins, use playlist ratings all the time now!

[shaneh]

The install files will be put on winamps page, I just put the dlls here to save space and I figured if your going to download from the developer forum, you should know what to do with them. The installation opens the readme after installation, and if no-one wants to read it, thats their problem, but dont come to me asking how to use it if your're not going to read that

Im just going to keep this simple. I have added ratings support to 'Toaster' - it will show the ratings in the notificaiton when a song is played. Plus I will add hot key support, plus 'scroll wheel' support to adjust the rating up and down - plus a couple other things. I decided to put it in toaster 'cause I wanted a way to provide feedback on what the old/new rating is, and toaster has a neat way of allowing me to do that. I will get it packaged together once I iron out a few bugs.

[electricmime]

im really looking foward to the new toaster, and to the hotkeys...

and i finally got it to work.. but it doesnt always work... its like it randomly decides to work >.> and i think the song HAS to play for it to work...

but it does work... sometimes

[XanDaMan]

Finally got around to registering...

Anyway, toast is GREAT, its always in use, however, since I installed WinBar, Toast had decided to pop in the top right of my screen - As opposed to bottom right where it was before.

I think there should be a setting for us to be able to set where the toast apears on the screen.

Also, A way to rate songs with a keyboard combo would be handy as well.

Just a few thoughs by me.

[Dextro]

Ok hope this helps: got sorted out the problem with the rating menu and it was the "automaticly add played files to library" option. Disabling it did the trick (tested after a clean install).

On the Toaster plugin just noticed one thing: when using the Winamp Classic skin (the default classic one) the pop up apears white and not skinned, I recon this is not the expected behaviour.

For the toaster plugin I have a few sugestions:
1 - Give an option to skin or not the pop up, it could come in handy.
2 - Give a way to control more accuratly the size and timings of the pop up. A simple box next to the sliders with sizes in pxl and times in ms.
3 - Don't know about this but if there was someway to check if the current skin has anounce our not and enable/disable the plugin regarding such could be an advantage to the plugin but I don't know anything about this so I'm just speculating.

Nice plugs, just this 2 bugs fixed and you've got yourself a sure winner

[electricmime]

another thing that would be cool for toaster is to allow it to use a hotkey to flash the toaster box, so if miss it, or just want to see it again(for whatever my reasons) i can hit the hotkey, and it will pop up again >.>

[shaneh]

@dextro:"the pop up apears white and not skinned" This is expected behaviour. The skin requires a 'gen.bmp' support (ie the same thing that skins the media library). Without it, it defaults to the grey skin you see. You can change it by making a 'gen.bmp' in the skin folder, or a 'toast.bmp', with the same format. I dont have any other way to skin the pop-up, there is nothing else which is suitable. I am thinking of adding support to create your own static graphic to use as a background, including transparency support etc, so that it can be anything/shape you like, but thats still just on the todo list.

@electricmime: I have included a tool with toaster which when run will invoke the pop-up (wanotify.exe). You can then bind this to a hot key (create a shortcut with a hotkey, or bind it to a button on a multimedia keyboard) However the next version will have inbuilt hot keys, including rating keys.

[Dextro]

shaneh still I think that it's quite a flaw not having the classic skin skinned, but it's just my opinion.

You could do what I said and place an option to skin or not the pop up and place the classic skin in the plugin, I think it wouldn't be that hard and would make the plugin near perfect but again it's just my opinion.

[electricmime]

dextro

what did you do to fix the problem with it not rating?

it sometimes works for me, and yet other times it doesnt

and also it doesnt seem to be saving my ratings(i dont know if this is because of the plugin or a bug in winamp.. i posted it in the tech support, but no one replied)

[Dextro]

I disabled the "automaticly add played files to library" option, I use alot this option but it seams I'll have to start making timed scans in orther to use this plug I wanted since the release

[electricmime]

hmm thats what i thought... i did that too, and it still didnt work over half the time

im going to do a clean install and see if it works then

edit:

clean install fixed it(havent checked the saving of ratings yet though)

edit 2: okay, ive installed my usual plugins, and it stopped working again... and then i uninstalled them one by one...

it started working after uninstalling lyrix... i dont know if its all lyrics plugins(your lyricsys may have caused it, unless you already installed it and it still works >.>)

anyway, that seemed to be the problem with me, and now i have to decide if want lyrix or playlist rating more

[shaneh]

@people have problems with plsrate: try this update, it syncs the media library after an update and may fix some problems.

Ive also updated toaster now with rating support. You can rate items by ctrl-clicking, or by hot keys to rate the current song up/down or with a specific rating. It also supports the 'sync with db' as an option if it helps. It will get re-published in the next few days I s'pose.

@dextro: It also skins to the default classic skin if it cant find gen.bmp or toast.bmp. Makes it a bit smaller and looks a little better IMHO. Is pretty much what i originally wanted to do, but I didnt realise how at the time.

[Dextro]

well seams like it works THANK YOU VERY MUCH, YOU'RE A LIFE SAVIOUR!

[DJ Egg]

Added to Most Requested Features/Plugins sticky

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....55680#sexplugs
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread....=155680#rating

[shaneh]

I noticed there was a need for 'ratings accellerator' keys in the wishlist too. These have been included in Toaster. (sexplugs was just some random name chosen for the zip, based on the title of the thread. maybe i should have chosen buttplugs or something).

Also, these have all been put up on winamps site, but need to be updated to the newer version. I will update them then try get them rushed through the queue once I get another plugin packed. Its just a simple plugin which makes the 'play' key act like a 'play/pause' key with state. Useful for use with keyboards with only the one play/pause key.