Big Screen Blog

Its really good to see a few new MCML addins starting to emerge over the past few weeks from the enthusiast community. Many are still in early beta/alpha versions – but worth a look,  and the authors would all appreciate any testing/feedback (and most can be seen frequenting Media Center Sandbox forums).

Some of the ones I’ve caught recently are :

Audiophile (Steven Hattinger) – an album playlist addin for Vista media Center. This addin hooks into the ‘More with This’ function in My Music – and provides extended information on Albums such as viewing large artwork and other provided metadata not normally shown in Media Center.

This program also allows for some basic actions to be performed such as removing the album from WMP library and copying it into another directory.   Please see the information page for download link and more details/screenshots. 

(Audiophile screenshots below)

Squirrel Stash (Avaxa) : taken from the website.  "Password protect your private media files and view them seamlessly in Vista Media Center. Fully functional version allows you to securely protect your pictures, videos and audio files in a seamless Vista Media Center experience. Media files are stored in a reliable and highly-secure encrypted stash and can only be accessed if a valid password is entered.".

This program is still a work in progess (although I think they might be looking for testers) – and it’s looking very Z’ish right now. The free version will allow up to 1gb of storage – and the full version of the software (AUD$34.97) will provide unlimited storage.

(Squirrel Stash screenshots below)

MoreWithMyMusic 0.2.0 (Steven Harding) – an updated version of this addin with a couple of  ‘Library Processing’ features for listening to music – such as Normalize/Denormalize feature and Ultrastar Karaoke support. See Steven Hardings post on Sandbox about this or download the installer.

VMCMusicListener (Gordon Moore) : A description from the author :  "VMCMusicArtistLister is a Vista Media Center (VMC) foreground addin application that allows you to display in a list every music artist in your [WMP] library.  You can press OK on the remote for any artist and get a list of all the songs for that artist. You can then use the right arrow button and select a song. If you press OK it will give you two option: 1) Play the currently selected song. 2) Add all the listed songs to a playlist that will be labelled VMC-Artistname. The entry is also recorded in a wpl file in your Usename|Music|Playlists folder. Please remember that to remove a playlist you should do it from the library of WMP. if you simply delete the file, the entries remain in the Library. If you repeat the operation for the same artist the original playlist will be replaced."     You can download the app installer from www.gfmapps.co.uk

Go check them out…