Meda library plug-in for new sony walkman

[otiasj]

I only have mp3 since I encoded most of them from cd's so I doubt that I have any copyright registered music.
(encoded with audiograbber freeware)
Well anyhow I am using sonicstage but to bad artist link is not working. After reading forums it turns out that to use artist link you have to use connect player and leave it plugged for a very long time (300 songs = 1 night) so that it can connect to internet and make the links.
Still there is tracks I can't transfer using connect player.

[sc_bond]

I noticed that you posted a link on ATRACLife to instructions on how to get MP3 File Manager and artist links to work with the NW-A# series, does that method still require you to connect for all those hours? I have 1800+ tracks and that number is still growing at a fast pace, waiting for hours on end to complete 300 songs seems pointless to me.

Anyway, I have been in touch with xipse, creator of GYM software on ATRACLife and I am closer to making the plug-in. Now knowing that the plug-in is possible and that the codes on the HDD Walkmans has been sussed, all I have to do is learn how to write information into Microsoft Visual from scratch. The same as always goes, any serious help (in other words, if you teach me) then you will be in the credits for the plug-in and I will be asking you for help on further versions.

[kmw]

sc_bond: Ill help you develop the plugin although I'm learning myself. I havn't written a plugin before but I have some experience with Delphi and C# programming. I think it would be best if we did it in Delphi since there is a Winamp SDK for Delphi here and I dont think there is one for C#. Pascal code used by Delphi is very similar to the C# of GYM so it shouldnt be to difficult to translate.

Grab yourself the freebie personal editions of Visual C# and Borland Delphi, go through some tutorials on the net and see what you think..

[sc_bond]

Thanks very much, we must hurry as I have just found out that someone on ATRACLife community forums found out about my intention to make the plug-in and he is attempting it himself, luckily he is alone and I have help. kmw, if you have a hotmail address then send it me in a private message and I will add you to msn messenger if you wish.

[kmw]

Why dont we join him and do it together?

It wouldnt let me send you a PM, you could try and send me your address.

[otiasj]

The better way of doing this pluggin is making a branch out of ml_ipod,
that way you would have all the code in winamp for sorting and displaying songs, resizing windows etc... otherwise you would have to recode everything wich is very time consuming as I found out when working on wombatshare.
what you want to do is checkout latest version of ml_ipod and apply modification only where needed.
Otherwise it will be a loooonnnng time until we can have anything working.
Personnaly I use visual studio 6 and code plugins in C.

to sc_bond: the poing of letting your device plugged with connect player is to let it scan your music to find matching artist links. But I found out that it's not very accurate and not very usefull(browsing music on the NWA1000 is slowwwwww) so for now I am sticking with sonicstage and play all function.

By the way does any of you have the full description of the network walkman folders/files/file format ?
That should be your starting point, before trying to write any plugin for winamp, just code a simple program that can write the base tree directory from console (no need for gui)

once you have that :
second point is to read available info from device, (read tree directory) again a simple program from console should be enough. (just reading and printing to output is enough, no need for data structure yet)

when you have that, you can start worrying about winamp and adding cool display functions and use the artist/album/song data structure available.

Please tell me where are you at right now and I will consider joining the team.

[sc_bond]

Myself and kmw have sdks for making media library plug-ins so most of it is a template. We need to work out how to wrap mp3 and wma as a oma file with a code name and so far the only way I can think of doing this is by following the pattern given by GYM created by xipse. I would be happy for you to join us as three is better than two and will hopefully make the plug-in better in the future.

[kmw]

Thanks for the advice otiasj but unfortunatly I do not know C or C++ and I think that a lot of the code in ml_ipod will be highly specialised, however I will try to take a look at it before I go any further. If it turns out to be better that way I could maybe learn C as I go along. Is it a lot different from C# or Pascal?

Im currently in the very early, 'just figuring things out' stage.
I've used the sample media library plugin from the Delphi SDK as a base, this gives me the media library views and skinning code. From there I have written a procedure to detect which drive the walkman is on and I am currently trying to figure out the structure of the walkmans database to import the list of songs which are on the walkman into winamp. I am doing this by inspecting the GYM source and by trial and error. However GYM seems to extract the list of songs in a very complex way so it is proving difficult.

If you could help out that would be great.

[otiasj]

Ok,
I have not used pascal for a long time but from what I can remember you could not use pointer or classes.
c# is not bad, actually it's not very different from c++ with a lot of simplifications that make it easier to use.
I would choose c#.(that is assuming we can use it to code plugin for winamp, I have never see a sample in c# for winamp)
Does the sdk you are referring to contain a media library pluggin with artist/album view? because of course a simple skinned list is the basic.
the sdk you are talking about is the delphi sdk?
because last time I checked the winamp sdk had only a simple view sample in it.

[bnuk013]

So is this plugin going to work for the flash based players as well? I got my wife a NW-E307 and I would really love to be able to dump songs on it w/ winamp. I think I would even pay for it. I have 10K songs and so sonic stage brings my entire computer to its knees, even though winamp has no problem with it. I wish I had some hardcore programing experience so I could help out with this project, but if you need any sort of testing or file structure info for the NW-E307 let me know.

[kmw]

The Delphi SDK sample does only have a simple media view.
There is the start of a C# SDK here but there is no media library sample in it yet.

I think GYM and therefore this plugin (eventually) should work with the flash players.

[otiasj]

Ok so basically we would have to recode the artist/genre view all over again (as well as multiple device plugged etc...):-(
That's why I think we should make a branch of ml_ipod and modify it.
Since the sdk does not have artist/genre, I don't really see the point in using pascal...
Because recoding the gui for winamp takes so much time, you have to do everything manually(displaying 3 list instead of 1, adding separators, resize events, building the 3 lists by sorting the data, adding selection events etc...) All this as to be done manually as there is at this point no api for this.
I have done it once so I still have some code for it but it's still bugged and I don't think we should be wasting time on recoding this.
That is why I think we should concentrate on decoding the dir tree and then make a port of ml_ipod.

I have started looking at gym code and it's very well commented so this should not take to long to understand.


I will keep you posted,

[kmw]

Ok, thats fine by me otiasj, it just means that I'm gonna have to learn a new language at the same time. I tend to pick things up pretty quickly though so I'll cope.

[otiasj]

:-/
I have started to read through gym and ported to C the util.cs file (not much done heh)

From what I understood from the Gym source code, he build is song list by reading the mp3 tags directly from the file, and not by reading the sony descriptor files. Maybe I am wrong, I will check more carefully tomorrow.
But if this is the case it means that we do not have the sony library format and building them to send mp3 will be a bit tricky I think.

[SaV]

Hi there, I've been following this thread for a while and was just wondering if any progress has been made since the last post?

I found this link talking about the Sony Network Walkman NW-S23 MP3 File Storage method if it helps at all?

http://www.livejournal.com/users/waider/415461.html

It may be similar to the NW - A####?