Now Playing List

A great idea! Looking forward to it being fully done :)

Yea it's the function I always missed in songbird. Not yet fully ready but I think it has a great future :) work on waiting for progress ^^

hello :) Sure this is the beginning of a must-have extension, so I suggest you should intrenationalize it before there are so many new strings in the interface that it should appear too boring a work to manage. That is why I added a locale support to your extension, to be grabbed here http://goofy37.perso.cegetel.net/extensions/nowplaying_locale_support_en+fr.xpi I suggest you should submit it to http://www.babelzilla.org to get more locale languages for free (currently en-US and fr-FR added, since I am French, nobody is perfect). BabelZilla is a community of volunteer translators dedicated to the translation of extensions for moz family apps. We have people from all over the world currently maintaining translations for more than 450 extensions with an online translation system. You are welcome to hop on there :) Have a nice day - jean-bernard aka Goofy BabelZilla Team

Ouch it looks like I am 3 minutes late for new version!

Ok this is the new version with locale support ;-) http://goofy37.perso.cegetel.net/extensions/nowplaying_locales_0.2.xpi

also in case you need to contact me GoofyFr[AT]gmail.com

Hi I tested your add on with the songbird 0.4pre and it works pretty fine for me, there is only one thing you have to change previously, there is no text displayed in the Play-list ;) maybe you can fix it her is a screen shot http://picasaweb.google.de/theonering1/Ffentlich/photo#5143127225333450962

Rockin' addon. The ability to save and randomize the list is really slick! The display pane support is great; I love being able to collapse/expand it when I want.

Very cool... love this one :) especially the randomize function (so I now have a good shuffle :P ) Version 0.1 isn't totally controlled by feathers any more... this results in a crazy look when not using the default feather. Maybe you can set the top and bottom of it so that they are colored automatically? for the rest... amazing job :-)

Probably my favorite add-on yet.

Whoa - This is cool!

WOHOOOOOO! That's what I was waiting for!!! big thx ;)

Grmpff!! Couldn't get it installed. Says it's not compatible with 0.4rc1 (20071217)!!! Help! :cry:

you could try to unzip the xpi change the line 0.4pre* to 0.4* zip and rename to .xpi now you should be able to install

Cool add-on. I missed that function in songbird. But there is still some room for improvement. It would be great if the applet shows the current played playlist if there isn't a custom playlist in the 'now playing'. And if you start playing with the playlist in the now playing screen, it doesn't fuck up your original playlist. Also I want that the songs that are already played in another color. (grey) Also it should be great if the playlist scrolls, so you don't see the songs that already played but one. I've already begun to change your add-on, but i'm rather noob. (So if you can do it quicker, don't wait for me)

Please update the plug-in so it works for 0.4rc1.

I don’t think version 0.1.1 works with Songbird 0.4rc2 even though it installs fine. The “Now Playing” list shows up on the right pane and I can drag and drop songs onto it, but they don’t enqueue. Songbird just keeps playing my media library in alphabetical order and totally ignores the “now playing” list. Am I using this add-on correctly or even understanding what it does correctly? I expect that if I add song to the now playing list, then after my currently playing song ends, the “now playing” list will play in order and then play whichever song would come next in my media library or current playlist. If I am mistaken about that, can I offer it as a feature suggestion for this or another add-on?

Also, it would be really nice if there was a hotkey to enqueue a song. For example, I could be scrolling through my playlist and just select a song and tap the ‘q’ key and that song would play next.

I hope this feedback helps. Thanks for making this add-on!

Thanks--it does work now!

Think the extension is great, have a couple of suggestions.

In the library’s artist, album, rating pannels it would be great if you could drag and drop one of these onto the now playing list. For example, you could drop a whole album on and that would queue up all the tracks songbird has of that album.

I feel something needs to be added to the hide option, as there is no quick way to get the pannel back if you just wanted to hide it for a moment. Could you make it so it has a minimise type option, so it just makes it very narrow with an expand button. That would make it very easy for people to turn off and on quickly.

Hope to see future versions, its looking good.

I am not the developer, but your suggestion is already a part of Songbird… If you click the so-called “grippy” in the middle of the resizer, it will collapse to the side of the screen. If you click the grippy again, it will resize to its previous state. Unfortunately the grippy seems to be invisible, but it is there.

Hi,

I created a german translation for the now playing extension.
I translated description.properties, nowplaying.dtd, nowplaying.properties.

However, I still see the english labels.
Can you tell me how I can activate the translations.

Cheers,

Tom

Unfortunately this add-on doesn’t seem to work on my Bird along with the Bird’s french language pack. At every start-up an error message shows up telling me this :

[JavaScript Error: “undefined entity” {file: “chrome://jcm-nowplaying/content/xul/nowplaying.xul” line: 18 column: 1 source: “”&jcm.nowplaying.extensionname;""}]

When I restart the Bird with the English language pack everything works fine …

Quite annoying isn’t it ?

perfect! the playlist feature (with the drag and drop capability) was the one thing that i found lacking in songbird. It was the one thing that kept me from enjoying it fully and using it as my default player. Now i can!

I couldnt get this to work on the previous version, the overlay always failed on loading, i have no idea why. It works now, dont know what you have fixed but thanks!

After uninstalling Songbird and deleting my profile everything works fine. Thanks a lot for updating the French translation !

Hi there moshy,
I just want to congratulate you for this nice add-on but I don’t really have a use for it with the current set of features, that’s why I’m posting this here.

I come from Winamp and there’s a lot of features there that I think are wonderful and should be implemented in this add-on:

1) When you double-click a song in the library, all the songs you see at that time in the library, should be added (automatically) to the list. So, if you filtered by genre and double clicked a song in the library to play it, all songs in the library (the ones filtered by the genre selected) should be added to the list.

2) Another feature I really like in Winamp is how you can press the ‘j’ key while in the playling list and jump to a selected song. You just press the ‘j’ key or any other (even a button) and then all songs in the now playing list are displayed in a dialog (which you can filter by typing your search terms) and double-clicking a song will not change the current now playing list but will stop the current song and start the one you selected.

3) And to finish, another feature I like from Winamp is queues. I don’t think I need to elaborate much on that, but you simply select a song in the now playing list and press a key/button (‘q’ in Winamp) and that song is going to a queue of the next songs to be played, no matter what, that song is next. If nothing is in the queue, then it should play accordingly the other settings.

These are my suggestions and it’s something I’m really missing from SongBird and can’t really use SongBird as my main player without some important features like these (at least for me).

Hope to hear from you soon, commenting my ideas and I hope you like them so you can accomplish them :)

1) I can deal with an option, as long as I can choose my own default way for the Now playing list to work, I’m ok with that :)

2) You’re right, I didn’t know that, thanks. Kinda slow though, in fact, the whole SongBird library is kinda slow searching/filtering. But will be probably get improved over time.

3) Yes, but I don’t want to drag-and-drop but I think you understood what I said. And I also understand the problem you’re having, I would help you if I knew anything about SongBird extensions developing, but I don’t. Hope you can find a way though, sometime… :)

Hello, I am using Windows XP and Songbird 0.4 (20071226)

I have 0.1.2 of your addon, but there is no “Now Playing” List under Playlists…

what do I have to do to get this added?

Thanks,
Terrence

moshy, actually I cannot access it that way. These 3 screen shots show my Songbird:

This shows I have the latest version of your plugin:
http://tmp.livingcosmos.org/screendumps/songbird/addons-pic.bmp

This shows my version number on Windows XP Songbird:
http://tmp.livingcosmos.org/screendumps/songbird/about-pic.bmp

And this shows that there is no “Now Playing” pane to select for the right side–
http://tmp.livingcosmos.org/screendumps/songbird/whole-songbird.bmp

Great add-on! I’ve been waiting for this functionality for awhile, even contemplated building it myself… but way too busy.
Anyway, I have some minor suggestions. The panel is a bit cumbersome. Lots of wasted real estate. For example, I moved the whole panel to the bottom pane so that I can add more columns such as artist, album, etc. So:
1) It would be nice to be able to hide the big black space that says “Custom Playlist, 11 items”.
2) Also, the bar at the bottom that says “Drag items here…” should maybe squeeze onto one line instead of three if there is enough space.
All in all, a much needed addition to this great player. I could never use iTunes because it lacked this feature.

Hey Moshy! Hope you still read these!

If you go look at the attachments to this bug:
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5746

There’s some sample code for adding extra context menu items to the playlist, there—and people are really asking for “Enqueue to Now Playing” menuitem.

:)

Very nice add-on, it’s really worth using :)

Win!
Havent been able to get this addon to work for ages, but the 0.3 update has fixed whatever wasnt working for me. Glad to have this back!

Using 0.5 RC2 btw

this looks like almost the kind of an extension i would need for songbird.
i have used winamp since i can remember and i love it. it’s just that i can’t get winamp for mac. so far this seems like the best alternative to the crappy itunes.
the thing i love most about winamp is the jump to file extra plug-in that comes with it. it’s so effortless enqueueing tracks with it and when it has played the tracks i’ve put into the queue, it continues to play the list normally. i love it and i hope that some day this extension for songbird would offer the same kind of effortless functionality. easy enqueueing, managing the queue and most importantly doing it within the playlist, so it doesn’t need to show a separate playlist for the files enqueued.
Also i want to say that i think it’s really cool that people develop these extensions. I would try to add functions i want too but i have no idea how to program anything.

Also what I’m wondering about is, why does it empty the list if you restart or shut the program or press stop (if you’ve installed the play/stop/pause buttons)? I spent a while putting some tunes there and now they’re all gone as i pressed stop. Same thing happened last night as I installed some extension and had to restart.
It would be very nice if you could make a choice so that it doesn’t clear the list unless you specifically clear it.

gotta install the new version then. cheers for fixing the bug. :)

about the queuing:
have you thought about adding an option to have a number on the playlist for the tracks that are queued? like on winamp it puts a small number on the track queued on the playlist, indicating what position it has in the queue. that would be a nice little addition IMO.
managing the queue on your extension is really easy though. i really like that.
overall i really like songbird and with the aid of your extension i’m sure i’ll stop missing winamp at some point. =D

Running SongBird .5 (Mac OS X) and version 0.3.1 of playlist. Everytime I play a song these errors come up:

Error: [Exception… “’JavaScript component does not have a method named: "onBeforeTrackChange”’ when calling method: [sbIPlaylistPlaybackListener::onBeforeTrackChange]" nsresult: “0x80570030 (NSERRORXPCJSOBJECTHASNOFUNCTION_NAMED)” location: “JS frame :: file:///Applications/Songbird.app/Contents/Resources/components/sbPlaylistPlayback.js :: anonymous :: line 967” data: no]
Source File: file:///Applications/Songbird.app/Contents/Resources/components/sbPlaylistPlayback.js
Line: 970

Error: [Exception… “Component returned failure code: 0x8000ffff (NSERRORUNEXPECTED) [nsIPrefBranch.getBoolPref]” nsresult: “0x8000ffff (NSERRORUNEXPECTED)” location: “JS frame :: file:///Users/momo/Library/Application%20Support/Songbird1/Profiles/cc6zv2ty.default/extensions/albumartmanager@songbirdnest.com/components/sbAlbumArtService.js :: anonymous :: line 427” data: no]
Source File: file:///Applications/Songbird.app/Contents/Resources/components/sbPlaylistPlayback.js
Line: 991

it still clears the now playing queue for me even though i installed the new version. first it worked, but not anymore. dunno what’s wrong as i haven’t made any changes anywhere or installed any other extensions.

Brilliant plugin, this is definitely staying in my standard installed set of plugins. One thing though, this isn’t the type of thing that I would use all the time, but more when I’ve got some friends over and we’re hanging out and we want to throw a playlist together. Only problem is, it’s not very user-friendly to bring the Now Playing list up. It’s pretty unintuitive to go to View→Right Sidebar→Now Playing. It would be great if there were options to automatically bring up the Now Playling list in the pane of your choice whenever you click on any of the following within Songbird: 1) The ‘Playlist’ link on the in the Service-pane. 2) When right-clicking Playlist→New Playlist or just clicking the New Playlist button. 3) Right-clicking on a song and selecting Add to playlist→Now playing or Add to playlist→New playlist. This seems to me would make the interface of toggling the Now Playing pane much more user-friendly, since the hide button is quite easy to find already. Thanks for the great plugin.

FORGET THIS POST, this is not the good place and don't find how to suppress it

hello,

it was working ok till i install the now playing list add-on.
i think the two of us may not be compatible.

now, i only have the cover with the songbird logo, and not the cover of the playing song

bye,

there is a bug:

try adding a track number column and clicking the header to sort tracks. The sort order of tracks will change but not the order of track numbers.

Would be nice:

to be able to drag artists and albums onto the Now Playing pane

I second that suggestion.

Great plugin! I always wanted to have a “now playing”-playlist that I can mess around with while listening to music

Just a couple of suggestions:
I would like to see a playlist-node in the menu on the left side. That way you don’t always have to have the “now playing” sidebar open but still have access to the list.

Additionally, I would like to see two other “queue…”-options in the rightclick menu: One that says “queue at the end of list” and a second one that says “queue after playing song”.

And lastly an optional behaviour on doubleclicks (I don’t know if extensions can intercept doubleclicks): Songbird should then dump the current playlist and add the current view (when browsing the library) to the playlist and start playing.

Think i might have found a bug, using 0.6rc2 on windows. When i have shuffle enabled and a song finishes playing another song is not started.

@moshy
See bug 10021 at bugzilla.songbirdnest.com.
This addon needs better clean up code for uninstallation

Good stuff.
I just noticed that if I add more than one track to the queue at once, the ‘Play’ icon stays a song ahead of what’s actually playing.
The “Add to Queue” button also takes up a lot of screen real estate which looks bad if you add a bottom panel. I don’t have any clever suggestions about where to put it though. Maybe make it optional in the prefs so you can only use the context menu to add?

In fact, now playing list is most usable in the “library” of Songbird, so why do we have it when we are on a web site? Can you do the same system like in Mashtape, a tool where you can chose if you just want “now playing” in library, or in others webpages.. ‘Cause, on my own, “now playing” uses much more space on songbird when surfin’ the web, and almost I do not use it when I’m (for example) on my mail page or somethin’..
kiss!

Is there an easy and quick way to add an album to the now playing list?

@moshy
I really like this plugin. I use it all the time.
Can you add an option for playback to stop when it gets to the end of the queued tracks?
I find that I often toss a few albums (+1 on the add-by-album feature req too) into the queue and go about my business… and I only know it has reached the end because it starts playing something I don’t recognize.
And since I’m voting, my screen geometry and usage habits make me want to see the queue all the time not just when I’m on a library view. I understand others may have other habits but I personally like the visibility rules just as they are.
Thanks again for writing this plugin.

Gonzo colors!

Can you set the max version to 0.8.0pre? Your version 0.5 has the max version set as 0.8pre, but to work with the nightlies the max version needs to be 0.8.0pre.

This extension is awesome... but is there a way to have it in the left sidebar (when viewing the library) like other music players have? It's not terribly practical for my uses to have it always open on the left panel.

I think this add-on is absolutely essential in songbird, so I have to thank you for al the work you've done.

Precisely because it's so essential (at least for me), I think there are a few things that should be improved. It's possible that some of them have already been mentioned above, but here are my suggestions anyway:

- The way I see it, every track I start to play from the library should immediately be added to the Now Playing List, just like the following ones. From that point on, the control of the playlist should be done from within the Now Playing List (changing the order of tracks, eliminating some of them, adding others) without affecting the library.

- It should also be possible to right click a song and choose "Play Now" (starting immediately, no matter if there's another track being played - this option would start a new playlist, erasing the prior), "Play Next" (scheduled to play after the current song) or "Play Last" (adds the song to the end of the current Now Playing List). these last two options would add new tracks to the Now Playing List, without erasing the current one.

- It is also my opinion that these options should be available directly from within the file directory: "Play Now on Songbird", "Play Next on Songbird" and "Play Last on Songbird".

- The Now Playing List should also keep the tracks already heard (for example changing its color), not only the one playing and the ones who follow. Currently it eliminates the songs already played, which prevents the user to go and check which tracks he heard.

- To finish this list, I think the tracks chosen for the Now Playing List in one songbird session should be there on the following. I mean that if I have to close songbird I would like to keep listening to my selection of tracks the next time I open it.

This is it. My suggestions have been made. I suppose there can be other points of view concerning these matters, but that's not a problem as long as the user has the ability to configure different options.

Thanks for paying attention and keep up the good work!

First of all, thanks for you job. This is a really good add-on.
However, there're some things that I don't like and those can be summarized saying that it's not really intuitive.

There is not such "ability to drag and drop" songs into the queue. The way I want this to work is: I play an album and I want to play another one at the end (or mix them with shuffle). I chose one album and drag another into the right pane and then, while this list is playing, maybe I want to add one song to the queue or add more songs to this list. This is how it works on WMP for example, and here is extremely difficult to do. Users have to make several roundabouts to get what they want.

Great addon!

One question: I'm currently making my first feathers and I want to change the color of the Now-Playing Icon (the arrow). Is this possible? Can I somehow replace the icon through feathers?

Thanks

setuju bos!
but i am thinking... queue list should be standard feature for songbird

Please, please consider fixing this. This is a perfect addon, but I wish that this option would be possible. http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/play_queue_troubles

This isnt a must have add-on for songbird!

This is a must have feature on the final release of thunderbird, i love to drag and drop musics on my playlist.

Since it's still a work in progress, i would suggest (if its possible) to make the now playing list available in the side menu, above the library. I noticed theres a play queue, but i cant drag and drop there o.o

If you could work together with the songbird team, that would really make a great contribution to the project.

nice add-on but I don't understand why are songs removed from the playing queue when i change the playing music...

Hi,

I have a few suggestions which would increase for me the usability of Songbird dramatically.

1) Currently you have 3 playlists available - Custom Playlist, Media Library and Play Queue. I would add a dropdown box where I could select these predefined playlists and also add new ones. Of course the content of these playlists must be remembered between sessions.

2) If you doubleclick on a track in Media Library, now it has 2 different behaviors. Clicking on filter panel does nothing, doubleclick on a track starts playing it immediately. Insted of this I would like to see the track or whole genre/artist/album added at the end of current or default (based on user's choice) playlist. Also on right click menu should be 3 options - add to end (the same as doubleclick), add next (insert after currently playing track) and start playing now (insert after currently playing track and start playing it).

3) In the playlist you should be able to queue songs. I prefer to have this functionality on middle button (wheel) click. These tracks should be marked with a number displaying their position in queue.

4) If a song starts playing, the playlist should scroll down to the track and highlight it. If a song is highlighted by cursor (single click) it should start playing after the current one finishes. This functionality is in foobar2000 and it is called "cursor follows playback" and "playback follows cursor".

5) It is only a graphical suggestion. But I would like to see grouping by albums. I think Amarok 2 does this nicely, see this demo. Also EL Playlist (component for foobar2000) does i nice, see here or here.

I already posted these suggestion in this topic. But I was told to repost it here too, so I'm doing it. ;-)

Thanks for attention. If you have any questions or unclear points, please let me know. Also if you don't understand the concept behind this or if you don't know what would it be good for, I'll be glad to explain it.

i would like to have the mode-button disappeared, because my screen resolution is not so high and i need the space. the mode could be set in the settings menu.

an other good feature would be to add with a double-click in the library the song to the playlist and not to play this song immediately.

There is a weird issue in "Play Queue" mode with the little speaker icon. Kindly check
Bug 12465

http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=12465

Confirmed by Songbird QA

Another feature suggestion:
http://bugzilla.songbirdnest.com/show_bug.cgi?id=12487