[Windows Mobile Development and Hacking General] thundershadow14:
Ok everyone, finally, something to at least sink your teeth into. Again, I'd just like to stress to everyone, the fact that this release is a PRE release to 0.8. I don't usually do this, but I think you all deserve something for waiting so long between 0.7 and 0.8. Plus, if I made this 0.8 by itself, I'd be shortening my hopes for stability by 1.0. This pre version, simply has the scrolling routine for you to test. You cannot select an album, or play any song from the scroller itself, this pre release is just to make sure it finds your album art, and you can scroll through it. 0.8 will open full usability and ofcourse, it will be switched to LANDSCAPE mode.

Main differences in 0.8:

ID3 ALBUM ART EXTRACTION!!!!! Melody now has the ability to extract the album cover data out of the "APIC" or "PIC" frame of your mp3 file, and push it right into the the flash album scroller. When you launch 0.8pre, you will be asked to select your mp3 folder, and choose a scrolling method, once you've done this, and you hit select, melody will create a playlist, and then read each mp3 (sub-directory supported for this too) and extract it's album art data. These jpegs are then saved in the album art folder, as the ALBUM NAME. This is also an important feature, since by saving as the album name, you wont have several files with the same album cover in them.

Now, all of that sounds grand I bet, but it does come with a price tag. Because id3v2 is such a horrible monster to work with! (ID3v1 was so easy), I wasn't able to write my own id3v2 parser, to extract the album cover from the mp3s. However, I did find some very useful python scripts which I employed to do the job for me. Hence, you'll have to install pythonce. It's just one setup file to install and forget, much like the compact framework. Here's the download link:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/py...219-setup.exe?modtime=1166570322&big_mirror=0

In this pre release, when the python script is working, the python debugging windows will pop up, showing you the names of the album covers it finds, as it scans your collection. Don't worry, in 0.8 this will be hidden and replaced by a proper (possibly a nice flash animation) until it's finished scanning your entire collection.

Don't know how many of you noticed, but melody has been picking up a lengthy startup time. This is so because it checks and indexes new mp3s on startup. From 0.8, an "update library" button will be added to melody, to offset some of the work from the LOAD function of the first form. In other words, it will operate more like media player where updating the your music library is concerned ;).

Please make sure you install python before running melody, unless you like really nasty looking errors. Ofcourse, in 0.8 if you don't want album scrolling, the scroll feature will be automatically disabled if python is not found.

So, basically do the same as before, melody will automatically, find all the covers and do what it has to do with them. Take a look at the youtube video on the main post again, if you'd like to see how you scroll through your album covers, and FLIP THEM! :D.

Enjoy.