New Developer - need help for some starting points.

[Ewano]

Hi people, I've had a look through the winamp2 plugin lists for a specific type of plugin and so far I have drawn a blank. I've decided to write the plugin myself, but I have a few questions before I begin - so:

The idea:

I currently use winamp running on a dedicated box as a jukebox in my house. The house is shared and I want to give other people in the house the ability to request songs to be played next.

The idea is to leave the playlist intact so that when there are no queued items winamp will play randomly from the playlist, but when there are items in a separate queue winamp will play them in order - until there are no more queued items when it will resume random play from the playlist.

Questions:

1) Is there already a plugin out there that I have missed in my searching - if so I'll try that out first.

2) Are there any guides on how to start developing a plugin.

I've searched on the forum and in the developer area and although there are resources there are no guides on how to start developing a non visualisation plugin. Even some feedback here on how others have started out developing a plugin. I'm not after code examples - rather info on the type of compiler to use, if it's usuall to develop a plugin for both WA2 and WA3, pointers to development resources on the net etc..

Any help is much appreciated.
Ewano

[henryt]

1) You can use the BrowseAmp plug-in!
You can access the dedicated Winamp server with your webbrowser and control playback and manage the playlist. User management with password protection is also included. More information on the BrowseAmp website. I think that's what you need.

2) start developing from a sample plug-in. It's a part of the plug-in API.