Pyroblogg

Like I mentioned earlier, this is definitely a learning experience for me.  Two days ago I finally got a “blank” component to compile and ‘run’ in Foobar2000 without crashing anything.  Yesterday I had FooSnarl catching events (play, pause, stop) in Foobar2000 and sending Snarl static messages “Track Paused”, etc.  As of today I now have the component to the point where it will send snarl a Titleformatted string to Snarl.  The string can be defined in the preferences.  Now I need to refine things more and work on an actual configuration scheme so that people would be able to specify what events they want to catch, what they want the title to read, icon, etc.  I also need to see if I can get Foobar2000 to respond to clicks on the Snarl messages; bringing up the foobar window if right-clicked for example.

I’ve been borrowing heavily from the one component tutorial and alot of digging in the SDK.  Other than that I’ve had little source code to go off of.  And I haven’t even been able to get on the developement forum on Hydrogen audio (still one day left of their 5 day “you can’t do anything” registration scheme).  I now think I can essentially  finish what I initially planned, but may end up seeking furthur advice when it gets too GUI intensive.

Foobar2000 is a music player for windows that is fairly extensible.  Snarl is a notification system for Windows based off of Growl for the Mac.

I recently found Snarl via Lifehacker and straight away got it working with Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, and mIRC.  These are four programs that I frequently use and which create a decent amount of notifications that are nice to see as long as they aren’t being too obtrusive, which is exactly what Snarl provides.  I also wanted to get Snarl to play nicely with Foobar2k, so that notices would pop up with the track information as each new song plays.

Yesterday I started looking around to see if there was already a solution, it looks like some people have worked out roundabout ways to get it to work. Like having Fb2k send the track info to mIRC which would then send a notification to Snarl.  This sounded way to cumbersome, and I didn’t want to have my music notifications dependant on having another 3rd program open.   So I then began looking into what it would take to make a component for Fb2k to interface it with Snarl, and after pouring over the SDK, forums, and some tutorials, it looks like its something I can tackle.  This is definitely a new experience for me, I believe this is the first application I’ve worked on for Windows.  I’m generally used to working on code for microcontrollers or unix command line applications.

I’m just setting off on this adveture, but I’ll keep my progress logged here, also on my new Projects page.

Also, I just came across this thread on sourceforge, it looks like others more prepared are working toward the same goal, but I’m still taking this on even as nothing more than as a learning experience.