Thank you Shaneh for toaster!

[toqer]

I use it at the bamboo now. Any way you could get it to display the next song instead of the current one?

[shaneh]

There are hot keys for showing the next and previous track in the playlist. There is no way to know what the next track will be when shuffle is on however. There is also a hot key for 'jumping' to the currently shown track when using the next/previous hot keys.

Perhaps in a future version I put in the option for shwoing the next track when the current track is nearly finished etc.

[toqer]

Heh, exactly what I was thinking. Like 30 seconds near the end (btw I never use shuffle mode)

Any way some $$$ would make the future come faster? Sort of like how people give me a $20 to sing next?

[shaneh]

Well it couldn't hurt :P But honestly the development certainly hasn't been as a result of donation funding, if that were the case there wouldnt be much to Toaster at all :P So features aren't really 'bought' so to speak.

And I can't gaurntee any particular feature or when/if it comes, because it depends totally on when I get time and how easy it is to implement. Ive been meaning to put that feature in since 0.5 days. Its difficult because there is no reliable way to the accurate length of a song, sometimes Winamp reports inaccurate lengths, which can throw out the calculations.

I have heaps of updates scheduled for Toaster, which also include the ability to have the time elapsed displayed and have it update every second. The code to do this would also complement keeping track of when a song is about to finish, so I will add it in then.

I also have to be careful about overloading it with configuration preferences. Its already too overloaded, and the fact that this feature wouldn't work with shuffle on would make Toaster even more confusing.

I plan on dropping all the skin stuff and have it kept in separate 'skin package' settings which will allow packaged skins which have all the color and border settings etc, as well as tiling information for future versions, and just have the formatting and display options in the GUI.

Currently however, I am devoting time I have spare to getting ActiveWinamp finished up for a new release. After that I will work on another small point release of Toaster and will see if I can work that feature in somehow.

Note that with the Toaster API, its actually possible to write a plugin that does this quite easily.

[saivert]

I did manage to include support for displaying the next song in my NxS Balloon Tip plug-in. I'm using the newly added IPC messages for getting the next and previous song (as used by DrO's JTFE plug-in) but this (as you wrote) does not work when suffle is on. I think this API is very rushed in for the JTFE plug-in only and is probably not any useful for general purpose detection of the next and previous song. But the %nextsong% ATF tag when used in my plug-in will display the next song (even if JTFE is used to enqueue another) correctly as long as shuffle is off.

DrO said he was creating a JTFE API that other plug-ins can use, but I doubt that will fix the problem with getting the next song when shuffle is on.

What do you think?

[shaneh]

What he is talking about is not just having it as a tag, but actually popping up and displaying the next song just before the current one ends.

I dont use any of the JTFE next song APIs, mainly because I dont actually have it installed. The next song stuff probably only works for the next enqueued song in JTFE? or does JTFE override the order of items played somehow? I dont really like the idea of that, or how it would need to be implemented. Frankly, I dont use shuffle. I randomize stuff before i put it in the playlist, or randomize stuff in the playlist that i want to be played radnomly.

The way I would do it is just add one to the current index. (as I already do with teh next song/previous song hot key toasts)

I guess I use the playlist as the playlist, as the ML and the library of songs. In the way that some people use JTFE as the playlist, and the playlist as the library of songs, which I dont like doing.

[saivert]

Always feel free to download and install my NxS Balloon Tip plug-in (source is included) and check out the code that handles the %nextsong% tag.

[toqer]

I tried givin it a try saivert. How would I format the title to show the next song?

Also, the popup only comes on the start bar. I have my start bar dragged over to my 2nd monitor with the karaoke stuff being displayed on the first. Any way to make it popup on the primary monitor without a start bar?

--toq

(edit) I read and found out about %nextsong%