Winamp integration with Homeseer

["Paul Gordon" <paul_gordon@xxxxxxx>]

Deep Joy!

I've been squirelling away for the last few days trying to get some nice
tight integration between Homeseer & Winamp, seeing as Homeseer only
directly integrates with Windows media player.... (I didn't want to switch
to using WMP as my player of choice for my Jukebox)

I'm happy to report that after a few days of plagiarism, hair pulling, and
trial & error, I've written a small, fast .EXE that uses the COM
interfaces
of both programs to provide a communication channel between them, that
triggers a Homeseer Event whenever certain actions occur in Winamp...

The winamp actions that trigger the event are:
Play,
Pause,
Stop,
Prev,
Next,
Playlist advancing,

All regardless of how these winamp actions are caused. - basically anything
that causes a change in the status of the currently playing track triggers
the Homeseer event...

Currently I have it set up to do the following:

Whenever a track starts playing in winamp, A virtual device (W1), is set to
display the player transport status, artist name, and track name. The
player
transport status can be one of "Playing" "Paused", or
"Stopped", and
whenever it changes, the virtual device status is updated instantly.

Whenever any of the above occurs, a line is written to the HS log, showing
the date/time, artist & track names, player status, track number in the
playlist, and total number of tracks in the playlist.

Whenever the track name changes in Winamp, Homeseer announces it by TTS.
So,
as I play through a playlist, each track is announced just as it begins
playing. (couple this with one of the various plug-ins that automatically
insert a small delay between tracks, and it doesn't even have to speak over
the top of the music)...

Homeseer is obviously therefore always aware of what Winamp is doing, and
can use this in it's logic for other events/scripts etc. - EG it can pause
the player to make the "there is someone at the front door"
announcement,
and resume playing once it has announced....

It's a bit rough & ready at the moment, but I've been running it on
three of
my machines here for a couple of days now, and it is working pretty much
flawlessly...

If anyone wants it, I'm happy to send a copy of either (or both) the .EXE
and the source code... - I'm sure some of you guys who are programmers by
trade (I'm not) would be able to make a far better job of it than I have so
far....

Paul G.


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