INTERACT FORUM

How bout using the Playing Now plug in and a skin for that, that has ratings?

Sorry man, I missed that and forgot about the other problems you were having...

My Bad....  

Quote from: JustinChase on March 25, 2004, 05:10:10 pm

As I said above, I have playing now, and it's pretty slow to respond to mouse clicks, which means the songs don't always get rated.

Aren't those issues sorted now that we found out it ws HT that was causing your problems?

Unfortunately, it didn't seem to make pn any better.  The visualizations are better, but pn is still slow to respond

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Also, it's too big

Depends on the skin you use, for example slimline is 32 pixels high.

Yes, and that would be a great choice, but I can't rate with that one, or rate the previous track, or advance to the next track from that one.  I did just notice the 'PreviousNowNext' and it's closer to what I want, but not quite.

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and it doesn't stay on top all the time.Yeah, I can make changes to the .ini file to keep it on screen longer, but I have some tracks that are over 2 1/2 hours long.  

Not a problem ... the maximum you can make it stay on screen is 24 days. By just specifing TimeToStay=0x7FFFFFF

Well, I don't have any tracks that long

Wouldn't it be easier just to hit Win+P to bring up the popup to rate the track as you need/want to?

Not really.  I use my machine about 1/3 to 1/2 of the time I'm in the office, the rest is spent shuffling papers around my desk.  I would like if I could just spin around and click a rating, advance to the next track, and get back to work.  I usually have MC minimized to the system tray, so I would have to open MC, hit win+p, rate, advance, minimize again.  I think it would just be easier for me if I could have a little skin (or pn) visible all the time in the lower part of my screen to rate and advance with.

Also, I noticed yesterday, after turning off hyperthreading that my visualizations were pausing every 3-5 seconds for just an instant, then resuming.  This suprised me, since I thought everything was much better after turning it off.  I wasn't sure what was causing it, so I turned off pn, and the pausing stopped.  I can't imagine how having pn running would cause the vis's to periodically pause, but it was happening.  To be fair, I turned pn back on later (cause I like it so much) and was not having the pausing issues again, so it seems pretty much 'hit or miss'.

I want to be clear here.  I DO like playing now.  It is a kick a** addition to MC, but it is giving me some little annoyances when I'm mainly trying to rate music.  Otherwise it's great. Like I said before, most of the time MC is minimized, so the pausing with visualizations is not really an issue when rating.  I just don't have a small skin to use with pn that allows me to rate, and advance songs.  If there was such a skin, it would almost certainly fulfill my wants for this project.

If anyone can point me in the right direction to making a skin, I might have some time this weekend to play around with it.

Anyway, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I just happened upon an old message board post you made regarding a playing now skin for rating songs.  I am doing exactly the same thing -- I sit and work at my desk and as good songs play,  I rate them.  I developed a very thin playing now skin which sits above my taskbar....it shows a tiny thumbnail of the album cover, the track name, artist, album, time/duration, and and has 5 small dots for rating.  I would be happy to send you either an image of it, or a zipped version of the folder if you are interesting. I could't figure out how to include an image this message board system.

Regards,
Lee

Hakuin, do you mind e-mailing me a copy of this too if you dont mind. Sounds good.

RichardKemp @ hotmail.com

Cheers
Rich

Unfortuantely, the file was stripped off by your server.  did anyone get a copy they can forward to me?

Thanks

Hey, can you send this skin to me as well?  I too have been looking for something like this for a while.

tril0bit @ hotmail.com

Thanks!

You could try the win32 version of NetRemote.  That will stay always on top and you can make the skin any size you like and put all the buttons you need in it.  This is the skin I use on my pocket PC (thanks to Dragyn's graphics) but it will work perfectly well on a standard windows PC or you could make you own skin.  There is a learning curve to the app when it comes to configuring your own skins but you can easily learn from other people's.  Also NR is shareware and it'll cost you $19.99.  For that you get the coolest, most user-configurable way of controlling MC.

This is OpusNr running on Windows: