Ideas Regarding Music

[Kriven]

In no particular order, here are my ideas for how LaunchBox could handle music going forward: LaunchBox should be able to identify whether Additional Applications are music files or playlists and play them internally (exceptions for if the music file is the primary "game" file with an emulator specified). This is more important to Big Box than to LaunchBox, as Big Box fills the entire screen and makes it difficult to access the controls of an external player. When playing playlists, some special (but limited) controls should be implement for pausing and resuming a song, skipping to the next song, and moving to the previous song. It would be nice to have a "lock music" button in Big Box which tells the program to continue playing the current song/playlist, regardless of where else in Big Box the user scrolls (until another song is selected). Big Box should feature a visualization of some sort when music is loaded as an additional application.. The typical laser-colors would probably work, but an option for viewing Fanart and Screenshots as a slideshow would also be nifty. In this mode users are able to bring up the full playlist and more accurately select individual songs. It's probably going to be easier for most people if LaunchBox/Big Box can look in a single folder for multiple music files to associate with a game, instead of asking that users create an m3u playlist. Basically I'm asking for just a small reworking of the music folder hierarchy where folders would look like: music intendo 64\donkey kong 64 All files in the Donkey Kong 64 folder would be associated with that game. This includes subfolders... so if you have: music intendo 64\donkey kong 64\dk64ost music intendo 64\donkey kong 64\dk64gamerip the files contained in both "dk64ost" and "dk64gamerip" would be associated with DK64 in LB. Going along with this, an option to allow the game music to be randomized or shuffled would be neat. If LaunchBox was able to read a song's metadata that would be cool too, but I don't think it's overly important... I can imagine it being cool if LB could pull the artwork associated with a song and associate that as fanart for the game, but other than that I can't think of a very good reason why LaunchBox would need to use audio metadata until music was to be integrated as a more full media type.

[Jason Carr]

Thanks Nathan, great ideas. I know Big Box especially needs the ability to keep a song playing, so that'll be the first focus from this list. I really like your ideas for multiple music files, too. It seems like that might be easier than I originally thought.