Glissando is a remote front-end for Media Jukebox. It talks XML over a network with a drastically modified Web Remote plugin to display track information, playlists, cover art, etc. and allows real-time control over transport, playback position, volume and such. It was created in Macromedia's Flash authoring environment which uses vector-based graphics and has a complete scripting language built in. The same interface can (and will) be rearranged to work on smaller wireless devices such as a PocketPC of some sort. Imagine sitting on your couch and having a web pad with Glissando controlling Media Jukebox on your HTPC, letting you create playlists or skip tracks, for example, and giving you very complete information about the current track, including lyrics. Or imagine running Glissando on the HTPC itself, it being fully controlled by a remote and Girder. Not
all of this is reality at the moment, but it's all in the works.
Release 0.2a finally includes album cover art retrieval and display. With this release Glissando can be used full-time to play back media using Media Jukebox, displaying all information properly (except for accented characters).
There are still issues to be dealt with, most significantly addressing the crashing of Media Jukebox when Glissando requests a very large playlist. I've tried this on a couple of machines here: one crashes MJ, the other does not. As a test I requested my entire MP3 collection - 5577 files. On the non-crashing machine the whole list was retrieved. Of course, the Flash player had a bit of trouble swallowing that much data: it grabbed over 100 megabytes of memory and still couldn't display all of the song titles. But it worked.
I would appreciate others trying this out and letting me know the results so we can narrow down why this is happening. Also, let me know how this release works for you.
You can download 0.2a
here.
Thanks!