FoxyTunes InfoBox - 5 cool things you might have missed
We are starting a series of Blog posts about some of the less obvious new FoxyTunes 2.0 features.
This is the first post in the series.
InfoBox is a new widget in FoxyTunes 2.0 that shows song info, album art, recent history and more…
Here’s a list of 5 InfoBox features you might have missed:
- InfoBox “floating” mode
InfoBox appears when you move your mouse over the ‘note’ button and automatically disappears when you move the mouse away. But what if you want to prevent the InfoBox from disappearing, so you can always see the current album cover, perform a search or browse the recent track history? No worries - InfoBox has a “floating” mode. If you move the InfoBox or use one of its buttons, it will stay put and won’t automatically disappear.
- Recent track history
Let’s say you hear a nice song on the radio but you’re too busy to check it out. The InfoBox has a list of recently played tracks and you can always return to one of them, see its album cover or perform a search to find out more about the artist or the song.
- Track info panel
This allows you to see some extended information about the track currently displayed in the InfoBox. You can see the track location (URL or path), the time the song was played at, the media player that played the song and more…
- Album cover finder
You probably noticed that the InfoBox automatically finds and displays album covers. One nice feature you might have missed is that if the album name is missing, the InfoBox will try to find the album that contains the current song and display its cover. By the way, currently, FoxyTunes searches for the album on Amazon, and clicking on the album cover image will take you directly to the Amazon album page.
- Seek slider
When InfoBox displays the currently playing track, you’ll see the seek slider that indicates the playback position of the current track and allows seeking to a specific position within this track. This feature is currently available with many (but not all) media players.
We’d love to hear your thoughts about the new features.
July 22nd, 2006 at 11:25 pm
Foxytunes is not compatible with the firefox build in Ubuntu and Fedora, that makes me unhappy.
July 24th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Yang Ning: I believe FoxyTunes works with the official Firefox version that can be downloaded from mozilla.org. We’re looking into supporting custom Firefox builds on Fedora and Ubuntu distributions.
July 28th, 2006 at 7:50 am
One of the best extension for firefox.
The only extension with so many cool features for music lovers.
A complete application in itself.
Great tool.
Adding a auto - lyrics scroll (Similar to evil lyrics s/w) will add another 100 stars to this 1000 starred extension.
July 28th, 2006 at 6:29 pm
love the extension. one thing though: it would be nice if the info box could show the track number.
August 8th, 2006 at 5:30 pm
I really am not stupid, but I just dont get it!!!!!!One reason is that learning to use WMP is awful. All I want to do is listen to music. I don’t care about titles, length or date song came out. I even joined Napster only not to find it listed on your list. And yes, I don’t understand that program either. I do know how to insert and play a CD!!
Joanne
I don’t expect an answer, sooner or later I will figure something out. And I have a degree in Nursing! but when it comes to computer stuff I try to make things so hard when they are really simple. A friend suggested that I always read the Help Section - gee what great suggestion.
Sorry this is so long, but first time I have been able to type what an idiot I am.
I love your program and I am sure it is NOT at all difficult to use, I just have to read all the documentation.
Thank you.
August 8th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
Joanne: You can also watch the FoxyTunes demo movie that demonstrates both basic and the more advanced features: http://www.foxytunes.com/screencast/intro
Also, you can drop us a line at http://www.foxytunes.com/feedback.html with your experiences or suggestions for what we can do to make FoxyTunes more simple and useful. We are working hard to make everything as intuitive as possible and your feedback can really help!
August 10th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
The xbox feature is excellent!! I can’t wait til more features are implemented and the volume problem is fixed. Work perfectly at the first attempt. I haven’t tried to save the config file because i was recently changed and I don’t know if my version is compatible with the one saved by FoxyTunes….
August 13th, 2006 at 7:21 am
hermastum! Which is halo.
August 14th, 2006 at 6:49 pm
Foxytunes 2.0 works with flock… I’m happy !
Thank you so much for this extension. InfoBox, Album Cover, mini floating tab,
c o m p l e t e
August 20th, 2006 at 7:46 am
I absolutely love this, a complete functioning application that does everything I need from Itunes. One thing though: On some of my tracks, foxytunes can’t find the artwork online, even though I have the artwork on my itunes. Is it possible to search wider, or even just copy it from the same place itunes does?
Keep up the good work. Love it!
August 23rd, 2006 at 1:16 am
It would be nice if Foxytunes could download custom album art (folder.jpg) from Xbox Media Centre instead of just using Amazon.
I have 99% of my album art on my xbox, and a lot of the time Amazon doesn’t have it.
Great app though
August 23rd, 2006 at 10:56 am
@Jason - adding this to the list. In the next version, FoxyTunes will try to find local album covers (folder.jpg files). Adding this for XBMC will require some more work - we’ll see what we can do
August 23rd, 2006 at 11:26 am
I’d rather you made the info box button an click event rather than mouse-over.
It gets annoying when I move the mouse to the taskbar and the window pops up when I don’t want it.
September 11th, 2006 at 11:53 am
It would be great if the scrolling was supported with media monkey =)
September 15th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
All my .mp3’s are tagged with the album art already - there’s no folder.jpg file - it’s just part of the .mp3. Most media players (esp. the most popular) look to the .mp3 tag first for the album cover. Why doesn’t Foxy? It would be EXCELLENT if you’d make this offline cover source work with FoxyTunes 2. Thanks!
September 16th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
FoxyTunes is fucking awesome, man. There are many good FF extension, but this shit kicks ass. Visit your site to find out 2 interesting things:
1. You are only one guy. Amazing talent, I am sincerely wowed!
2. There is a version 2.0 coming that is even greater. Wow!
Stay excellent, brother.
September 18th, 2006 at 8:36 pm
I echo what Clark said. I’d like to pop-up info box to be either a click or some other event rather than a mouse over. Alternately, I’d like to be able to configure what pops up.
Frequently I’m interested in what track is playing but not all the other info. Is there a way we can get the old behavior (just the track number and name) in the mouse hover? Interestingly, this is what you show on the main page of the site. The new info box is shown a few items down on the page.
September 22nd, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Absolutely fantastic! This just makes Firefox even better! Add to this all the amazing add-ons for the new Google personalised home page (www.google.com/ig) and I’ve got everything I need to keep me enetertained while i work and browse!
thanks so much.
September 24th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
@Clark - we improved the InfoBox behavior a bit in the latest (2.0) release - it’s still appears on hover, but not if you incidently hover over it.
@James - currently, there old appearance isn’t supported. we’ll consider making this configurable, though.
September 25th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
nevermind that link doesn’t work. please help me how to remove the search button,its got the function like Quick Searches. Its messing the space
October 1st, 2006 at 8:13 am
This is a great progam, but would be better if it would automatically copy missing information from the info box to itunes. that would save me hours.
October 24th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
I absolutely love foxxytunes but there is one problem with it and that is the choice of skins. i can only imagine how hard it would be to make the skins but is there any possibility of making one to match the phoentiy modern theme for Firefox, providing that you can. The other skin i would like is a skin for the new firefox 2.o that has recently been released as i feel that the old one doesn’t really suit it anymore. One i am sure that you may consider due to it being based on the standard theme.
Other than those very small problems, great job.
October 26th, 2006 at 8:45 am
Many of us have spent a lot of time embedding Album Art into our files using iTunes. It would be nice if your program first checked to see if the track has an image embedded into it, using it instead of looking it up on Amazon. I have a lot of Independent artists that are not on Amazon, but I have the art embedded into the file.
October 31st, 2006 at 5:00 pm
I agree with Alex. This is the only thing that remotely bothers me about this app. Otherwise, keep up the good work!
November 4th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
sure I really got a surprises from this event, Thanks
January 1st, 2007 at 12:35 am
support for Napster would be nice