Yet another FireFly Client (SilverPlay)

[Anonymous]

Hi

As I wanted to learn a little Silverlight I decided to do so by writing my own FireFly Client.
May be some of you might be interested in using it as well.

Currently it contains the following features:
– Browse/Search Library
— Search by: Artist/Title/Genre/Album or All
– Play Queue
– Manage Smart Playlist (create/edit/delete), including wizard.
— NOTE: The wizard does NOT include all fields yet. Comming very very soon.
– Cover Art (http://www.last.FM)
– Mesh Bar
— Artist Info from http://www.last.FM
— Lyrics from http://lyricwiki.org
– Last.fm Scrobbler support, including Rating support (Love Song)
– Themes Support

Currently under developement:
– Smart Playlist (Support all fields)
– Static Playlist management
– Drag & Drop for static playlists

Suggestions on how to improve the player are very welcome.

You can get V0.1 Beta on:
http://www.nystedberry.info/silverplay/SilverPlay.zip

Please read the Readme in the ZIP on how to successfully install it.
Should be simple, but there are some steps which are important.
Specially the part about the ClientAccessPolicy.xml file.

As I’m not very good at graphics I’m still looking for a nice Application Image.
If you wanna contribute with that I would be happy to include that 😀

Some Screenshots:

Overview:
[attachment=1:sjh401vu]SilverPlayV01Overview.PNG[/attachment:sjh401vu]

Smart Playlist Editor:
[attachment=0:sjh401vu]SilverPlayV01SmartPlaylist.PNG[/attachment:sjh401vu]

[Anonymous]

I’ve just set it up, an I’ll try to give it a spin the next couple of days. Hit a couple of snags setting it up (due to user errors 😉 ), but they’re all sorted now, and everything seems to work fine. My first impression is that it actually works better than Fireplay. The search is much better, the implementation of lyrics and artist info is a cool feature and the queue is nice.

I agree that a slicker gui would be nice, but all the different skins currently available works fine, although it looks a little crammed on my 1280×800 laptop screen.

All in all, really nice work!

-anders

[Anonymous]

Tx for the response AnSiv.

I decided to first concentrate on the main functionality I wanted to build in.
After I have finished the static playlist editor and some other features I have in mind I will hopefully have some time to polish up the
UI and make it look nicer.
If anyone is good at XAML any help would be appreciated.
Same goes for graphics/images 🙂

Just to let you know.
There is a nasty bug in this release which jumps over songs when a the current song finishes playing.
Basically it jumps to the last song in the list after playing the selected song.
I already fixed that an will publish this fix asap. Probably by tomorrow, Jan 7th.
It will also include a better Smart playlist editor (Not a popup but an own tab in the main area)

[Anonymous]

Would be really nice if the player remembered skin settings and other UI-alterations made from one session to the next. Another feature I’d like to see is the ability to publish track and artist info to the status field in Windows Live Messenger. Finally I’d like to see the scroll wheel on my mouse work 😉

-anders

[Anonymous]

Thanks AnSiv

I have now Put together V0.1 which includes your feature request about persisting the applied themes.

You can get the latest version on the usual place: http://www.nystedberry.info/silverplay/SilverPlay.zip

Also V0.1 Fixes:
– The mentioned issue in my prev. post about not playing the songs in the order they are in the table (Queue included)
– Smart Playlist Wizard includes now all supported fields. (date-time operators still missing)

I have to investigate a little about the “Windows Live Messenger” posting.
If you know a good source with the protocol description it would be a great help.

The scrolling in the lists/tables is really anoying but this is unfortunately not supported in silverlight.
I did try some tricks to get it running but I ran in a lot of issues. Will try it further 🙂

[wwarren]

I get the main page structure, but then an error pops up. Any idea what this error means? “[Async_ExceptionOccurred] Debugging resource strings are unavailable. Often the key and arguments provide sufficient”.
[attachment=0:1em5jn4n]2009-01-08_232707.png[/attachment:1em5jn4n]
The suggestion from the readme to check connectivity using http://yourserver:3689/server-info?output=xml yields positive results.

[Anonymous]

Hi

In the case that you have access to http://yourserver:3689/server-info?output=xml it most probably means that
the client cannot find the file ClientAccessPolicy.xml included in the package in the root of your firefly server.
Is that file in the root of your webserver where firefly is installed?

What does the following http request give you:
http://yourserver:3689/ClientAccessPolicy.xml

I have to work a little more with the exception message…..

[wwarren]

@manfredberry wrote:

What does the following http request give you:
http://yourserver:3689/ClientAccessPolicy.xml

?



?



?







?

Presumably, since it returned something, that means its in the right place. Its in /admin-root, while the rest of the files are in /admin-root/silverplay. Thanks for helping me work this out.

[Anonymous]

Hi wwarren

sorry for not responding earlier but I couldn’t access the portal anymore for quite some time.
Suppose was not only me though:-)

Anyway.
As you say the ClientAccessPolicy.xml file seems right 🙂

I did upload a new version V0.1.1 which has not the possibility to do some more detailed logging if things go wrong.
You can download that here: http://www.nystedberry.info/silverplay/SilverPlay.zip (Always the newest version)
If you donwload that you really only have to upgrade the file ClientBinSilverPlay.xap from the package (The readme and 3rdpary file chagne a little but are not really needed)

Then in the SilverPlay.html file add debug=true to the init parameters.
Example:

Then, if you start up the app in debug mode, the MeshTab will be replaced with a log text box which should give some more details on where it fails.
If nothing usefull is displayed there you could send me a private message with this log so I could help you out.

Let me know how that works 🙂

[wwarren]

After some private messaging with the author, we found the problems and have them fixed. Other users may be interested in case they run into problems too.

The first thing users need to be aware of is that unlike the FirePlay client, part of this runs locally wherever you’re listening. Thus if you plan on listening at a machine other than where FireFly is running, one of the files needs to be modified to the specific IP of the server, rather than being left as localhost. There’s a line in SilverPlay.html that needs to be changed.

Remove “localhost” and insert either the server/host IP address or its domain. In my case I use myid.dyndns.org. Also, if you run FireFly on a non-standard port, change the port number.

Linux users need to make another change due to linux treating filenames as case sensitive. ClientAccessPolicy.xml in the web root folder should be changed to all lower case. The author indicated he will fix that in upcoming distributions so this step won’t be necessary.

After making those changes, I have access from both inside my local network and outside on the web.

As for first impressions: I have however experienced some hiccups in playback even after a song is fully buffered. Not sure if that’s in Silverlight, or a glitch in this implementation of it. In comparison to FirePlay, SilverPlay is prettier, but has an inherent disadvantage in that it requires the Silverlight program be installed on the machine where you’re listening. You won’t be able to sit down at a friend’s computer and start playing music right away like you can with FirePlay.

[Anonymous]

Hi Warren

Tx for posting this. This might be very helpful to other users as well.
-> I have added some checks to the next version which should give a better explanation why it cannot connect 🙂

Regarding the last part of your message about silverlight having to be installed that is correct.
Like Flash, Silverlight is a Browser Plugin which has to be installed to use silverlight applications.
But the same is true for FirePlay. In case of FirePlay it is the Flash runtime environment.

You probably had flash already installed from before as it is used on quite many websites.

[Anonymous]

This is awesome. I’m currently using the FirePlay client to serve up a large collection of foreign language songs for educational use. The addition of a lyrics pane in SilverPlay is something I had done in a Rails app (albeit badly) I was working on for the same purpose before finding FirePlay and settling for simple playback. I had looked into lyricwiki.org as a solution too, but it wasn’t quite as mature then as it is now apparently. A good deal of my songs, even some rather obscure ones, show lyrics.

I am, however, getting some jumps in playback like the previous user experienced. These seem to decrease as the song progresses, so maybe the buffer is just getting gummed up a bit somewhere. Not sure, but other than that it’s wonderful.

Is this at a point where custom skins could be written for it?

[Anonymous]

I also just now noticed that (in Mac Firefox at least) the next song in the list won’t play unless the tab that SilverPlay is in is active. When I click the tab SilverPlay is playing in the playback resumes at the next song.

[Anonymous]

Hi spyralout

About the selection of the next song. There was a problem with V 0.1 which should have been fixed with V0.1.1.
Let me know if that is still the case that the next song is not selected correct with this version and I will fix that asap.

About the skins. It is possible to develop your own skin. The player is compatible with the IMS Themes from the silverlight Toolkit on
Silverlight Toolkit Theming
However right now the theme has to be included in the dll itself.
but if you really want to write such a theme let me know and I will implement an implicite loading of themes so you can put the themefile in any folder on the webserver where you host SilverPlay. Or I could add the theme to releas directly 🙂

The MediaElement with silverlight, which is used for playing the music, has some hickups with the buffering.
I tried to program around that with downloading at least 5 sec of the song before playing.
I can try to make this configurable so it could be increased to fit the download speed 🙂
Can I ask what for an outgoing speed you have with your Internet connection?

[Anonymous]

I just tried it in both Safari and Firefox (latest versions) on a Mac and it does still have problems playing the next song if the tab it is in is not active. As soon as I tab back to SilverPlay it starts playing.

My outgoing network speed shouldn’t be a problem. The Firefly server that I’m streaming from is on a high speed university server. I am offsite, with Silverplay installed locally to my machine. I’ll try installing the client on a machine that is on the same network tomorrow and see if it has any effect.

The Silverlight platform is pretty new, so it doesn’t surprise me that there are hiccups, but what I’ve seen I like so far.

[Author]

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