Rabid-MP3 is an MP3 player.
It will search local folders and then perform a sophisticated Google Images query for artwork related to the current song. A lot of the time this is the album cover, but it's not 100%. Success depends on what you listen to (band names like "The Police" or "Tool" can return unrelated images for example) and how well tagged your MP3 files are. The search is highly configurable. More so than it needs to be, really - you can hide and forget that whole panel if you like, but you can also play around, seeing what images different queries return.
The artwork is diplayed in a resizable (from any corner) panel, and a music-visualization is then projected onto it. It's a pretty cool effect.
There's a playlist panel, where you can import, edit, and export playlists.
Rabid-MP3 is controllable from extended keyboards with Media Player keys (if you have them, you'll know what I mean).
Rabid-MP3 unfortunately locks-up briefly while it looks for an image. There is a slight possibility this could be remedied by using an asynchronous http request, instead of the synchronous method I use. But a couple things keep me from implementing that. One, I went to quite a bit of effort to get the http requests running in a "separated thread" which according to the DX documentation should prevent these pauses of functionality. It doesn't though, so I am wary of (Two) completely restructuring the search algorithm when there's a good chance it wouldn't solve the issue either (in my testing, asynchronous lookups, as I had them coded, did not prevent DX from locking up).
Speaking of the search algorithm, it, like the rest of this project, is released to the public domain. I retain rights only to the "Rabid-MP3" name, the "rabidrobot" handle, and the lit match logo. Otherwise, if anyone wants to skin it, reverse engineer it, raid the scripts, etc., go right ahead. The search algorithm in particular is modular - it is a standalone vbscript Class which could be used by any project that uses vbscript and can provide it with Artist, Album, and Song Title information.
OK then. Please visit my site,
Link to see some of my other projects.
Comment #1 Tuesday, July 18, 2006 4:43 PM