WMP & VB Question

[danmnz]

Been a few years since I've been on this forum, glad to have it still around for help. I'm now getting back into coding and want to make a media player with my now 12 year old son. I have many of the basics we want in my head already on paper, however I'm stuck when it comes to this more advanced option. Reminder, this is an option that we want 100% to happen, and the main reason to even make this program happen. I hope it's possible.

Q: We use WMP (yes I know about others that may be better, but we like this one) and enjoy it's simple features. However, we'd like a feature that would allow us to use the WMP control in VB 6 and somehow give the user the option to select custom playlists. (Assuming all tags are correct of course) For example; If I wanted to hear only country songs that are rated 5 & 4 stars, or only hip hop songs that came out in 1996.

We're thinking about using pre made options that you can toggle. So basically we will have options for the genres, ratings, artist, etc, basically everything we already have tagged in WMP. When the user toggles the options, the playlist updates when the user clicks OK.

We know we can do this feature inside WMP by simply selecting fields or sorting and creating lists, but we get new music all the time and want to also have our own custom player.

So is this even possible? To pull tag information from WMP or maybe from the source files themselves and utilize it as an option in VB6? Perhaps someone knows a great place to find advanced tutorials on the WMP VB6 stuff. I googled for a bit, but we're spending a lot of time sorting through junk.

- Thank you
DanMnz

[Max187Boucher]

I found a quick link... haven't tested it (it's only for mp3 files)
http://www.a1vbcode.com/vbtip-32.asp

I was reading on the wav format and you can not add artist/genre information. Well you can but you have to add it manually, which could cause programs not to read/play file properly.

You could try and open your wav file in notepad for example and see if there is information in them, if there is where is it? Simply read the section your information is stored in, for example in mp3 it's in the header, for wave files it could be at the end...

[LaVolpe]

Not familiar enough to know if wmp is tagging these files themselves or keeping its own database in the registry or on disk. My initial guess is that the mp3 tags are updated. If WMP is tagging the files, then Google for mp3 and/or wma tag editors using vb6. They were all the rage quite some time back & plenty of them out there, including source code.

[Elroy]

Hey danmnz,

Do yourself a HUGE favor and look into MPlayer with the SMPlayer GUI wrapper. The MPlayer team prides themselves on being able to play any movie/sound format that's out there. It's also pretty much totally cross-platform as well (but that probably doesn't matter for VB coders).

Also, there's a totally portable version for SMPlayer (MPlayer is virtually ALWAYS portable). Don't download it from places like SourceForge. Go straight to their Open Source site:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html

This thing is fantastic in that the SMPlayer GUI is totally customizable to look exactly like you want, no adds (ever), and it just absolutely runs (with fast forward, slowmo, backwards, just anything you want).

In my primary application, I have a portable version wrapped up in the .RES resource file so it gets tacked onto the VB6 .EXE I make. I just unpack it and set it in a sub-folder anytime I need to use it.

If you get your head around MPlayer/SMPlayer, you'll use it forever and never again look back at WMP.

Elroy

EDIT: I sort of implied it above, but this thing is also totally Open Source and free for you to use.

EDIT2: After looking a bit, I guess you do need to go to SourceForge for the SMPlayer GUI wrapper. There are several alternatives for GUI wrappers, but I've used SMPlayer for years and found it to be VERY nice, totally customizable in every way imaginable.