[arkryal]

Last Updated: 5/24/2010

Note to the mods. This is a continuation of the old music visualization mod thread started by dfmos. This while based on his mod, is significantly different. The old thread has a lot of broken links and I'm unable to update the front page, so I thought a new thread may help people find this. If you think it unwarranted or too redundant, you can feel free to merge them back.

Screen Shots


Description:
Well, the screen shots are pretty self explanatory. It shows the fanart for the band playing in the background when the visualization is off. Provides reviews of the album on the bottom right, Weather and Time/Date are large in the top corners for easy viewing from across the room. RSS feed scrolls at top. Time Elapsed and duration are laid over the album art with a progress bar and the Next track preview text in the bottom left corner. Albums after 1985 will show an animated CD, tracks before that date display a spinning vinyl record.

Install:
Extract (use winrar, 7zip etc) the images to //xbmc/skins/confluence
When it asks to overwrite, say yes. Don't forget to make a backup of your skin directory if you want to revert it back.

Download:
MusicVis_Enhanced 5-24-10.rar

To Do:
Some albums have no description text, and I'd like to display something there if that data doesn't exist. I can't see a way to toggle visibility based on the existance of a value in MusicPlayer.Property(Album_Description). If anyone has any ideas, it's starting at line 326 of MuisicVisualization.xml in the 720p folder. Tips, ideas and suggestions are welcome.

Credits:
dfmos for the original mod
DannyBres for sharing his customization
pkellum & spec_8472 for sharing the vinyl artwork

Edit: Fonts need changing in latest SVN

[ffingers]

Okay a couple of things....

could you make an adjustment or a mod more along the lines of the one you did here...
http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=478...stcount=44

obviously you can ditch the mini vis as it seems like you said it didn't work well...

but i liked the weather and clock not have the boxes...plus on the latest svn builds....formatting is a little wonky with fonts and boxes, but i see you noted that above....

also i am not a huge fan of all the text...i liked the cleaner look like the one in the link above....the text being over the cd art i feel takes away from the cover art and was much nicer on the right....

finally...i noticed i had issues with the vis running on the new svn....it wouldn't run no matter what until i exited out to say the home screen then went back to music vis page...then it would show.....and when i tried to use the project mayhem vis....my atv crashed....

either way...thanks for taking this up...i don't have the time to teach myself skinning so i rely on wonderful people like you to save me.... thanks again!

[joebrady]

Love it. Does this also support locally saved CdArt?

Now I just have to find the time port this over to Alaska...

[mudstuff]

Looks good, hope it comes to Alaska too

[arkryal]

Sorry I haven't updated recently, waiting until the dust settles a bit on the nightlies. As ffingers said, the formatting gets a bit weird as different versions use different font.xml settings, and it's a pain to keep revising it every time a change is made. I should have time next Wednesday to throw at this, I want to get it back to a functional state out-of-the-box, with no tweaking needed on the user's end. Will update soon.

Edit: I have a new file that will work in the meantime, but I'll have to package and upload because pasting the code exceeds the character limit on posts (stupid policy...)

I'm also getting crashes with the default music visualizations in the newer builds. Anyone else having this issue? It's making it hard to test my changes, but even with a clean default install, it crashes (windows install running the nightlies).

[joebrady]

Yea, I tried this with a new SVN a couple days ago, and it gave me all kind of problems on the vis screen. Didn't gather any de-bug info though....

[YOUNG13]

This is my favorite music visualization, thanks. I'm trying to do a little mod to it but I'm stuck.

Is there a way to have the record player arm move over the rotating album so it's position is relative to the track number playing? For instance if current track is track 1 rotate image 3 degrees from 0, if track 2 rotate image 6 degrees from 0, if track 3 rotate image 9 degrees from 0, and so on.

Any help is appreciated.

[YOUNG13]

Also, I'm having no problems running the repack version from 1/13 that I've modified for the Night skin under a Dharma branch SVN.

[arkryal]

This is my favorite music visualization, thanks. I'm trying to do a little mod to it but I'm stuck.

Is there a way to have the record player arm move over the rotating album so it's position is relative to the track number playing? For instance if current track is track 1 rotate image 3 degrees from 0, if track 2 rotate image 6 degrees from 0, if track 3 rotate image 9 degrees from 0, and so on.

Any help is appreciated.

I don't believe it can be done purely through the skin files. I may be wrong on this, but I think the track # is returned as a string, so no direct number comparison could be done. If I am wrong (and I may well be), I still see no method setting variables or preforming math that would convert the number (3 of 10 for example) into a percentage that could then be turned into degrees within a range of -120° to -180°.

You could however nest a second rotation animation in it to move the arm down the record as the current track plays, then return to the top with the next song.

@joebrady
Thanks for the feedback. I'll have to check the bug tracker to see if it's already been submitted. If not I'll start logging it and submit a new ticket.