Terres­trial has upda­ted his track info mod com­po­nent to allow quick and easy image rota­tions, upon my request and within an hour of making that request which is quite asto­nishing. Any­way, these new found super powers ena­ble us to create sexy image reflec­tions which fade out using a sim­ple trans­pa­rent to black (or wha­te­ver colour) PNG overlay.

My latest design efforts see a sca­la­ble ver­sion of this with top left artist ima­ges. The art­work itself acts as a Play or Pause but­ton, unless the cover art does not exist, in such a case the but­ton action calls up a Cus­tom Run script Cover Down­loa­der which uses Ama­zon to find album art ima­ges and save them to the audio file direc­tory. Simi­larly, when artist ima­ges do not exist a cus­tom run GetAr­tis­tImg script that I crea­ted down­loads the image and saves it as %artist%.jpg etc.

I’m always adding func­tions and twea­king it so it’s not quite done yet, but here are some screenshots:

Terres­trial has made another great update to his sin­gle column play­list module for Foobar2000 v0.9. This latest change adds the follo­wing functionality:

+ some tweaks to mul­ti­ple win­dow / mul­ti­ple play­lists
+ added “Pla­ying” play­list selec­tion
+ $filee­xists()
+ added NOKEEPASPECT option for ima­ges
+ added wild­card sup­port for ima­ges
+ added align­ment options for ima­ges VALIGN-T (ver­ti­cal align-TOP), VALIGN-B, HALIGN-L, HALIGN-R

I have high­ligh­ted the key impro­ve­ments that I am now making use of. With these new addi­tions ima­ges can be stretched to fit a give frame, for example:

$imageabs2(100,100„,100,100,5„$replace(%path%,%filename_ext%,*.jpg),NOKEEPASPECT)

This will dis­play an image (finds any .jpg in the song’s direc­tory thanks to the new wild­card func­tion — * is the wild­card) and stretch it to fit a 100x100 frame. Expan­ding upon this using the new filee­xists function:

$if($fileexists($replace(%path%,%filename_ext%,*.jpg)),
$puts(albumMarg,110)
$puts(datax,160)
$imageabs2(100,100„,100,100,5„$replace(%path%,%filename_ext%,*.jpg),NOKEEPASPECT)
$imageabs(5„images/artoverlay-1.png ‚)
$drawrect(5,0,100,100,brushcolor-null pencolor-0–0-0)
$drawrect(6,1,98,98,brushcolor-null pencolor-150–150-150)
,
$puts(albumMarg,10)
$puts(datax,60))

This checks that the ima­ges is there, if it is it defi­nes a spe­ci­fic mar­gin for later use in posi­tio­ning of artist, album and trac­kinfo. It then draws the image, a PNG over­lay and some surroun­ding bor­ders. If the image doesn’t exist it defi­nes a dif­fe­rent mar­gin so that the song data does not surround an empty space and ins­tead is clo­ser to the left, for example:

So I have spent some time wor­king with the latest trackinfo_mod beta panel that is avai­la­ble for the latest ver­sion of foobar2000 (0.9.3.1). It has the great abi­lity to sup­port PNGs which can be abso­lu­tely posi­tio­ned. I deci­ded to opt for a clear and non-invasive design that can be read at a dis­tance (I hate having to get up from bed to see what song is pla­ying). So I made the artist and title large, the album name a little big­ger and then of course a huge album art cover. Of course this makes brow­sing for songs to play a little dif­fi­cult so under the browse tab at the bot­tom there is an auto-hide columns UI play­list and album list panel, as shown in the handy (yet minia­tu­ri­sed for this blog) GIF. To see a full ver­sion of my setup click this link: Screenshot