MusicBee

IF YOU DONT CARE ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED AND JUST WANT THE PLUGIN CLICK HERE So i have recently switched over to the wonderful musicBee ( www.getmusicbee.com ), phenomenal application, nearly amarok for windows :) Some of the features i like:

Quick search (type in the search bar, library adjusts by searching all available fields intelligently)
Notifications across MSN and Last.fm and the like
Fantastic tagging per track and per album
Downloading of art and lyrics
Looks good :P

One of the features i have always used in my previous media players has been the now-playing-plugin for mIRC which i use on this machine.

Unfortunately i could not find any for musicBee, so yesterday i took a few hours to figure out how to make one.Let me preface this section by saying the last time i coded C++ was around 5 years ago at university, so i could be horribly wrong for some of this, but i’m just saying what i saw - also if the code is horrid, well, atleast it works :)

mIRC and DLLs

Essentially mIRC communicates with dll's by calling the DLL ( which you specify ), the function within the DLL and some data that is sent from mIRC as per the documentation (mIRC help) the function looks as follows:

The routine in the DLL being called must be of the form: int __stdcall procname(HWND mWnd, HWND aWnd, char *data, char *parms, BOOL show, BOOL nopause)

*my function was showSong

All DLLs also require a sort of reference file that tells mIRC exactly what functions are available like so:

LIBRARY "musicBeePlugin" EXPORTS showSong @ 1 * showSong is the function i created

Essentially i followed this guide to get setup, fantastic little how-to setup a mIRC plugin in VC++: http://purplespore.com/main/?p=46 and for just the guide: http://purplespore.com/main/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/mytutorial3.html

MusicBee and Songs

So after doing that i noticed that musicBee displays the current artist and song within the window title ie:

Code

So now i just had to write some simply code to go through all the currently available windows and then find the one that matches "MusicBee". Sure i could have used regular expressions, but i didnt wanna push my very limited C++ skills to get this done by overcomplicating something. None the less the code looks like this:

#include <windows.h> #include <string> using namespace std; string finaldata = "";BOOL CALLBACK MyEnumProc(HWND hWnd, LPARAM lParam) { char buff[255]; if (!hWnd) { return TRUE; // Not a window } if (!::IsWindowVisible(hWnd)) { return TRUE; // Not Visible? } GetWindowText(hWnd, buff, 255); string windowTitle = buff; string windowToFind = "- MusicBee"; basic_string <char>::size_type titlePos; titlePos = windowTitle.find(windowToFind); if(titlePos != string::npos) { finaldata += windowTitle.substr(0,titlePos); } return TRUE; }int __stdcall showSong(HWND mWnd,HWND aWnd, char *data, char *parms, BOOL show, BOOL nopause) { EnumWindows(MyEnumProc, 0); strcpy(data,finaldata.c_str()); return 3; }

Some of the things that had me stuck:

SWITCH YOUR APP TO MULTIBYTE SUPPORT or you cannot use the char within GetWindowText – to do this: