I am wondering if there are plans for a media player module? I'd love to be able to create a skin for a module that controlled my media player (QCD in my case )

Well, there are already built-in Internal Comands for dealing with WinAmp. I'm pretty sure adding some more for dealing with Media Player won't be too dificult.

However, I never really understood why people want these kind of stuff. Why not just control WMP from WMP itself, or WinAmp from WinAmp itself?

Now that Xtreme allows for the use of PNG files I could make a small 'skin' for QCD that doesn't have hard edges. That's the appeal for me

QCD plays MP3s, converts file formats, rips CDs and more. But 99% of the time I just want it to open songs and play them So if I can make a small module that does that (which matches everything else on my desktop using PNG files) I'll be a much happier man

Isn't QCD skinnable (seriously, I have no idea!)?

Yes it is. But currently it doesn't allow for the use of PNG files. And thanks to software like WinStep Xtreme and WindowBlinds (which my system isn't ready for ) I am no longer happy with anything other than non-pixelated skins now

Ahahaha, we're spoiling you!

Exactly!

I've never tried it, but I believe foobar is very a popular media player also. Although it's not skinnable. With a cool WinStep Xtreme module, it could be (and with sexy soft corners, shadows and transparencies ). Think how popular you'd be then!

My thought exactly...

I, too, wondered why not control the app from the app itself. But then I made a SysMetrix skin that incorporated media player controls. It displays the song info, volume, and has all the play, stop, etc. buttons, and fits right in with my WorkShelf modules. Yes, QCD is skinnable, but it's a lot more difficult to skin than WorkShelf (or SysMetrix), using a kind of color-coded map in the same shape as the background to tell QCD what parts of the background are what. It's a lot more difficult to get everything right where you want it, because you have to edit multiple bitmaps, rather than changing x and y coordinates in a settings dialog.

I think something like this is only worth implementing if there actually is some way for the user to choose which Player is controled by the module (everybody uses different players and the most stupid thing ever would be a different module for each of the players out there ).

I haven't looked into this yet, but, judging by something I read some time ago, there seems to be a 'common' API for all the different player programs. We'll see.

I know nothing about programming so excuse me if the following is laughable

Would it be easy to create basic controls for all media players in the same manner that media keyboards do? My keyboard has programmable buttons for play, pause, stop, next, previous, mute and volume up/down. They work no matter what media player I have open.

I absolutely wouldn't expect this sort of module to be created if it was a player specific one. But for the reasons vectornut gave, I'd much rather create audio controls while I'm making an Xtreme theme.