Southern Lights v3.0 preview

[Jakey]

Just letting everyone know that there will be a Southern Lights v3.0 released in the next week or so. It will be completely rewritten, and will be oriented differently with a few more features.

Adding support for VLC and Foobar.
Fixing Support for Windows Media Player
Adding more variables for iTunes.

Revamping the entire Winamp Information grabbing. (It will now get info from Winamp, the MPEG meta data from the mp3 file, and read the id3 tag.) Resulting in the following:

%ARTISTSONG% - (Artist - Songname)
%ARTIST% - Artist
%SONGNAME% - Song Name
%BITRATE% - (0-320kbps)
%CHANNELS% - (1,2..)
%CHANNELMODE% - (Stereo, Mono)
%FREQUENCY% - Frequency/Samplerate (41000HZ)
%PLYLSTLEN% - Total # of songs on playlist
%PLYLSTPOS% - Position on Playlist
%SONGLEN% - Song Length (4:00)
%SONGPOS% - Current Position (1:25)
%SONGREMAIN% - Remaining time (2:75)
%FILESIZE% - Size of mp3 file (4.32MB)
%ALBUM% - Album Name
%YEAR% - Year of song/album
%GENRE% - Genre
%TRACKNUM% - Track Number (as on cd)


album, year, genre, and track number are Dependant on the id3 tag, so if it's not found, it will be displayed as "Unknown" or "Unknown Album"


WMP support will have almost all of the avaliable variables on Winamp.
iTunes will have limited support.

VLC and foobar and yet to be determined.


Also, you will be able to send the display to WinMX, Robomx, rabbit, and WPCC rooms.


As for the color patterns, they will be more customizable, with a visible preview of what will be displayed.

Also, you will be able to select if you wan't to change the color of each letter.  (#c4#L#c5#e#c6#t#c7#t#c8#e#c9#r), or you can have it be every 2 letters. (#c4#Le#c5#tt#c6#er) And so on up to around 5 letter skipping.

You will also be able to color any message you have in the display.

Ex:

If your display is "Is Currently listening to - %ARTISTSONG% #c8#(%BITRATE%#c8#)", and you wan't to color perhaps the bitrate, and the word "listening", you will be able to do this.

"Is Currently [c]listening[/c] to - %ARTISTSONG% #c8#([c]%BITRATE%[/c]#c8#)"


If you wan't to use just a temporary pattern that you don't want to save, you can create one in the display format.

"Is currently [c,4,5,51,74]listening[/c] to - %ARTISTSONG% #c8#([c,1,2,3,4]%BITRATE%#c8#)"


If you have any questions or feature requests please let me know

[tig]

This sounds like great work... keep it up Jakey

[Josh]

Just another update, I have finished the new color pattern parser script. You can essentially have up to 65535 different colors per pattern, but I think limiting to 100 would be good enough for everyone lol.

Same kind of format I explained in the other post. You can have ondemand color patterns in your actual display box, or you can create a pattern that will get saved, which you can set as the default pattern.

[d][/d] = Default Pattern (You select this in the box of patterns you have saved)
[c,Skip#,color1,color2,color3] and so on. skip# is how many characters it will skip before applying a new color.

Heres a screenshot.

[tig]

Great work  nice and bright.

Thanks for the update

[Josh]

More news lol (I'M bored)

I have successfully added support for:

Rabbit
Ouka
RoboMX
Metis

WPCC... - This might/might not be possible, for some reason it won't accept the enter key message. But I can get the text in the textbox.. so we will just have to wait and see.

[Daniel]

I bet this new version of Southern lights is going to be amazing, seeing that it took two whole years to create it.

[Josh]

No, I just started on it like a week or two ago. But I can say that the list of supported clients that I have posted on here, just double that number.

[Trestor]

For those of us who don't know, could you give a description of what the main function of Southern Lights is, please? I gather from the first post it has something to do with interfacing with various audio player programs, but I still don't understand, and Google isn't much help. Thanks.

[Josh]

Well if you haven't used the other 10 versions or so, it's a song display for winmx. It displays what you're listening to in the chat rooms you're in. But this new version supports over 10 different chat clients for displaying your song information, and southern lights allows you to pattern your display message too. More so in this next version. But don't worry, the GUI is very simple and easier to use than the old one. And I will write up a help page for the new version.

[tig]

It looks good as GUI is in process i have a glance at it the other day

[Trestor]

No, I haven't used the ten other versions. If it is a chat-room program, I now understand why I am not familiar with it. Cheers.

[tig]

hi Trestor

Southern lights is a simple little program that can display the songs you are listen too. For example trestor sings loud to Yellow Submarine (only a something that came to my head quickly) and will display in the chat room.

It is a quick and easy program for this purpose.

[FM Refugee]

...ok, so this thread is over a year old.  But I have been using this program and I have two issues with it:

1. As mentioned in the initial post, the program depends on ID3 tags to display information (specifically ID3v1).  Therefore it cannot properly display information from non-MP3 (i. e. FLAC) files.

2. It appears to have a limit on how many characters it can display, so it has an annoying habit of cutting off titles beyond a certain length.  Other programs of this type (such as MHAmp) do not appear to have this character limit.  Was there a reason for this or was it an oversight?

I like the program and the flexibility it offers, but I'd like to see something done at least about the character limitation...

Thanx...

[Max™]

Hiya Refugee,
the newest version of southern lights is 3.1 incase you are using version 3.0
as you mentioned MetalHead Amp is a good choice, also alot of people like the popular CX2MX displayer, hard to find, but i have it Click Here

[Sl-user]

You can email the creator to see if he will update it for you.

Edit: Email removed by tig

Pretty sure he will.

[Stevi]

The length problem you are talking about is WinMX related. WinMX limits the amount of text sent at one time in the room. I have noticed this when typing long messages in the chat room, and with long outputs on bot commands. The only way to get around this is to split up the message into two parts. Maybe another feature that should be added?

[FM Refugee]

...thanx, everyone, for the replies.  I have indeed updated to 3.0.1 and it doesn't appear to have the cut-off problem of its predecessor...