Asking for help: beginner in developing Winamp plugin

[colonello_XVer]

Hello, I'm new here in Winamp forums. Hope you'll help me with my problem.

I will be working on a Winamp plugin that must do the following:
1. Winamp can receive a list of recommended songs from a particular website.
2. Winamp then can automatically display this list of songs to its playlist area (located at the right side).
3. In return, I can also keep track or record the songs I have played by sending certain data (e.g. increment the number
of how many times a song is played) to the said website.

Actually this is my first time developing a Winamp plugin. I just want some tips on how could I do it. But if there are existing plugins that meet some of the functionality indicated above...hope you can inform me about it so that I could have an idea or guide on how to program it.

[garetjax]

In General I would do the following:
1. Build an XML Playlist (list)
2. Each xml item would have to retrieve a remote URL where the music is stored (or have a distribution list of all the songs you want to show on the recommended list) - this is the most important part.
3. Serve each playlist item through a handler (xml_link_handler.ashx) - this would track and increment the item played, length, ip of remote user, etc.


Make sure all of this works, then get into creating a Winamp plugin. Heck, event building the above like a web-service would be a great thing. Then, you can do social sharing of the favorite items in the playlist and share to another user; the only problem is the licensing of the music to remotely play if on your own server. Otherwise, will have to be connected to last.fm or something.

[colonello_XVer]

Thanks for the suggestions...I'll consider them for future reference....currently I am still studying how to program in Visual C++.