2 more feature requests

[pickle]

1) The option to have Xion not be on top of all windows, all the time
2) Display album artwork - just like any other layer - so we can put drop shadows & other effects on top of the artwork.

[Cliff Cawley]

The option to have Xion not be on top of all windows, all the time

Sure, I can add this into the options screen for the next release

Display album artwork - just like any other layer - so we can put drop shadows & other effects on top of the artwork.

This was something I have been thinking about adding. When you talk about Album art, where do you usually load it from/where is it stored?

1) from a file on disk in the same directory as your songs
3) from the meta data stored within an id3tagv2
2) from the Internet

Each of the above options have certain time involved/overhead for implementing, hence the reason I ask.

Cliff

[pickle]

I personally load the album artwork from the ID3 tags. This would, I think, be the easiest to implement as well as filenames could get corrupted, and web based artwork services can go away/not respond.

[Cliff Cawley]

Ok cool, that option sounds like the best idea.

Now I will just have to look into supporting Album art from tags so that I can use it in the skins.

Cliff

[Cliff Cawley]

Display album artwork - just like any other layer - so we can put drop shadows & other effects on top of the artwork.

Is there a player out there that supports this? I'm going to need a way to create/view artwork in files and the best way to do this is to see what things change in the file format.

Cliff

[skryingbreath]

Is there a player out there that supports this?

You can achive the effect of this in Winamp Modern skinning, yes.

[Martijn]

Registered just to say something about this.
I myself use winamp a lot but plan on switching to Xion.
I'd really like to keep the album art, but when I'm ripping one of my CDs they don't get the art into the ID3.
So, I'd like to see Xion having a backup - like some online database - to fallback when there is no album art at the ID3 tags.

I do agree that it shouldn't refer to a file in the folder.
Some people call those files art, others album, other cover etc.
There's no solidproof way of including such a file.

I know there should be atleast one of those album databases.
Maybe I'll do a search, if no one else gets to it first.

Greetings,
Martijn

[Cliff Cawley]

Hi Martijn,

Thanks for the feedback and welcome to the Community!

Yes, there are definately online databases around, some require license fees, others are free. (Amazon.com has an SDK)

The reason for the choice initially is so that I can add something that will be used immediately. I don't plan to ignore all of the other options after choosing just one, its just since I work on this in my spare time I have to be careful how much work I do before each new release, otherwise it might be a long time before a new release is ready.

If you find any good sites that are free and have been around for a while, please let me know and I will look at supporting it in the future. Initially I will support reading it from tags in the files themselves, but I do tend to add automatic downloading as well.

Cliff

[Cliff Cawley]

1) The option to have Xion not be on top of all windows, all the time

Done and ready for the next release.

Cliff

[pickle]

Good to hear.

Do you have a ballpark ETA on the next release?

[SLoB]

already asked that one pickle and Cliff responded in the usual developer way
the laws of coding in spare time is it will get done when its done
now if there was large sums of money involved then that might be a different story
but even then you still really only have the triangle of development process to have a successful output, the following diagram sums it up