tterb/playmusic

:musical_note: A Rainmeter skin for Google Play Music

This Rainmeter skin provides Google Play Music users the ability to access their active media tastefully on their desktop. Featuring three variants, this skin displays the Album Artwork accompanied by the Title, Artist, and Album of the song being played, as well as the status of both the shuffle and repeat features. Additionally, this skin also includes a variety of supplementary features including a customizable visualizer, scalability, as well as volume control and minimization functionalities.

In Progress:

• Add requested support for Spotify as well as other media players
• Improve accent color adaptability for all album artwork
• Add performance settings and further customization to visualizer
  
  

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PlayMusic features square, round, and landscape variants, which in conjunction with its
added scalability settings, guarantee its ability to compliment any desktop layout.

In order to facilitate easy customization, PlayMusic includes a highly intuitive settings menu,
making configuration and modification a breeze. This menu will be launched upon installation,
though it can also be accessed at any time by pressing the    on any of the skin variants.

The addition of selectable accent colors allows users to add a splash of color to their skin,
while also allowing PlayMusic to tastefully adapt to any theme, layout, or wallpaper.

In addition to providing added functionality to the skin, the recent adoption of a highly
customizable visualizer also allows one more way of making this skin your own.

This skin also features the ability to easily adjust your computers volume by simply
scrolling up or down on the mouse-wheel with your cursor over the skin.

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This skin requires you have Google Play Music Desktop Player installed to function properly. After installation, you must also enable Playback API in GPMDP's Desktop Settings, shown in the image below, as this allows GPMDP to interface with external applications.

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• License
• Changelog
• Contributing
• Credits

playmusic's Issues

Few things that could be "improved"

I appreciate all of the feedback and taking the time to provide example images, so I'm going to do my best to address each of these points and make sure that we get these issues cleared up.
I'll check them off here as they are resolved within the repository, though changes won't be present in the .rmskin package until the new release is published.

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Circle

• As you can see on the right side there's a lot of padding, which can be annoying to those people who leave Snap to Edges on in Rainmeter. - Fixed with commit eeb512a

  • The padding that is present on the right side is due to the difference in width of the each of the variants and allows the icon to remain in the same place when the skin is in a minimized state (when GPMDP is closed) - A solution to this may be to have a setting to set the alignment of the skin to left or right(current) depending on which side of the screen the user chooses to place it on.

• You can also see that the right side and at the bottom is slightly cut off when someone isn't hovering over the skin.

  • I am unsure what could be causing the bottom to be cut off, so I will do some further investigating there.

Square

• Again with the padding with the people who use Snap to Edges - Fixed with commit eeb512a

  • Same as above

• Also when you have a long Album, Artist or Track name that it comes off - Fixed with commit 99767e6

  • This should be a quick fix, so I'll make sure to check the clipping and available text width on the square variant.

Land Scape

• The Visualizer is also a tad bit too low and clips onto the Progress bar - Fixed with commit 99767e6

  • This is also pretty easy to fix, so I'll make sure to make these adjustments

Overall

• When you just refresh it you seem to get (at least for me) a 20 and a White bar somewhere. (This might be possible to explain)

  • The bar and the "20" you are seeing is intended to be your current volume. If you hover your cursor over the skin and the move it, it should go away.

• The Shuffle Seemed to show up when I refresh the skin, however disappears after about a second.

  • If I understand correctly, this is the expected behavior when the Shuffle feature isn't enabled in GPMDP, and its brief presence is presumably the result of the script collecting the data from the application. Though, I will do some further testing to see if there is a way to improve on this process.

• The Scroll feature didn't seem to work. (Again another one of these cool features and must have been hard to make - Fixed with commit 0392147

  • I've done a bit of experimenting and found that Rainmeter doesn't always recognize scrolling via a trackpad. Though, if you are using a mouse and scroll the scroll-wheel up or down while your cursor over the skin, you should see the aforementioned bar and number appear and increase or decrease depending on the direction you scroll. If this is not the case, let me know and I will investigate further into whether its an issue with a plugin or my implementations.

• Colors can also easily be broken from changing to quickly - Fixed with commit affb81e

• The Skin only seems to auto Refresh from changing settings when changing colours... this would be nice to change when you change all settings. - The auto-update processes have been addressed across multiple commits

  • I believe both of these are issues are a result of the way the settings are currently being handled and maintained across all three variants, as well as the settings-menu. I will try to experiment more with ways to allow changing the settings to be more responsive.

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Please let me know if I misunderstood or you need clarification on any of these points, so we can get them resolved.

Transparency

I absolutely love this player! However, if it all possible, I would love to have a transparency option. That way I can choose how the album artwork can blend in with whatever wallpaper I have. I would also like an option to maybe grey scale the album artwork. I am not sure if that is possible, but that would be amazing. Thank you for your hard work on this!

Album Artwork not showing

Due to an unknown external change to one of the project's dependencies, the skin is currently unable to display the album artwork of the current media.

Inconsistencies in displayed shuffle & repeat statuses

While the shuffle and repeat media controls are performing correctly, the icons being displayed are not always representative of the current status.

Unable to disable volume control functionality on some variants

When 'Enable volume control' is disabled in the Settings-menu, the functionality isn't being fully disabled in the Square and Round skin variants.

Can't see the player

I have google play music desktop player, I have api checked. I have two other rainmeters working (translucent task bar and Space Hud).
The album image from the song I am playing shows up in the downloadfile folder under documents.
But nothing shows up on my desktop. I tried all the settings in rainmeter. Like coordinates, position, transparency.
Sorry, just not sure what I am missing for this to show up. Any ideas would be appreciated. The images on Deviant art look great.
Thanks.

Skin preserves unusual aspect ratios of album artwork

The skin is preserving the aspect ratio of non-square album artwork, causing the image to interfere with the text or composition of the skin.

Spotify Media Control Issues

The skin runs into various crashing/hanging issues when using the media controls while the skins source is set as Spotify.
The source of these issues are currently unknown but will be investigated over the next few days.

Remove auth skin

I didn't know you had updated your skin to use my plugin. Just so you know as of GPMDP Plugin 1.3 the authentication and settings changes are now automatic so you should no longer have to handle that. Also I don't see what version of the plugin you are using in your skin but the latest version is 1.3.2 and fixes a handful of potential issues.

Minor issue caused by GPMDP updates

I'm aware that the minimizing effects of the skin and the collection of the album artwork are not currently functioning correctly due to recent updates to GPMDP. I'll be working to resolve this over the next week.

Various issues when using Spotify source

When configured to use Spotify as the media player:

• The visualizer and volume control remain active when Spotify isn't open - commit 20fc098
• The update rates become inconsistent - commit 1bb0e29

Other:

• Source states are unintentionally changing when refreshing skin - commit 3a51735

A few bugs in 1.2.0

Hi, at first: Thanks for this awesome Update. The Visualizer is great!!

But it seems like a few bugs got into the Release (I only tested the Landscape Variant):

1. The Overflow Button opening the Settings is gone.
2. Shuffle & Repeat Buttons are gone.
3. When opening the Settings Menu via Rainmeter it's missing its Background.
4. While the Google Play Music Player is closed the Skin completely disappears instead of showing the Icon. This might be due to a Setting but I can't access the Settings Menu and I really don't want to wade through the whole source to find this specific setting (if it even exists).

Maybe I'm missing a new way to access all of these but I don't think so.

Again: Thanks for your great work! :)

Edit: If you want to I'll create separate issues for the 4 points but I didn't want to spam you with issues.

Skin isn't always recognizing that GPMDP has been closed

Once GPMDP has been opened, the skin sometimes will not realize when GPMDP is closed.

Are you still maintainning this depository? I have a question.

1. How do you remove the text that is displayed all over the player " Enable" "Playback API in GPMDP's Desktop Settings?

Mouse hover volume control

Is there any way to modify the volume control to change the volume in GPM and not the master volume for my computer? Besides that, this is an awesome skin. Thanks!

Fixed C Drive

Styles.inc is using a fixed C: drive

Replace with

AppPath="%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%...
PlaybackPath="%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%...
DesktopSettingsPath="%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%...

2bit-text are garbled.

Texts Japanese or other 2bit texts are full of garble.
Maybe component file's encode problem?