Striptuner Gadget
The Striptuner Windows Sidebar Gadget is a favorite pet project of mine.
I often listen to internet radio while I work in my home office or elsewhere in the house and prefer the open-air stereo over head phones or ear buds.
Before there was Roku, Spotify and other popular streaming devices or online services there were handheld mp3 players and old laptop "media computers" connected to stereos.
I had just this type of stereo-connected
Winamp® music computer and wanted the ability to easily manage it from wherever I was working.I started with an excellent skinnable Sidebar Gadget sample from CodeProject.com and enhanced it to communicate with the music computer using a couple of popular Winamp® plugins called BrowseAmp and Active Winamp. BrowseAmp provides music queueing and playback control of Winamp® running on a remote host computer and Active Winamp provides advanced playback control of local instances of Winamp®.
I later added support for the http interface to VideoLAN VLC® for local\remote control of their excellent media player. A new play list fly-out was also added that shows the the current playlist and media library and supports double-click track playback. The combination of these four excellent utilities provides sophisticated control of local and remote media players from a single gadget on the Windows desktop.
Feature Summary:
- Switching control between local or remote instances of Winamp® or VideoLan VLC® takes just a few clicks.
- Start, stop, or pause playback of the current track.
- Raise or lower the playback volume.
- Skip forward or backward within the currently playing track.
- Move forward or backward between tracks in the current playlist.
- See scrolling track information.
- Playlist fly-out shows the current playlist and media library contents. Double-click to play a track.
- Select from several custom gadget skins.