LCD Manager for AlbumPlayer
Last updated on 2011-10
Current version : 0.64
LCD Manager is designed to display on SoundGraph devices (LCD and VFD models) information about music played by
AlbumPlayer. It's a fully independent background application. You just have to start and forget it for example at Windows starting (manually or via autorun or other ...).
When Album will be launched, LCDM will wake up and each event occurring in AlbumPlayer will be catched and displayed on display device.
LCD Manager is able to display a lot of different track related information :
| Album artist |
Track artist |
Album name |
Track name |
| Track number |
Track length |
Elapsed time |
Genre |
| Comment |
BitRate |
Filename |
Audio codec |
Other fields can be added on request if needed.
After years without progress, SoundGraph finally published a public API allowing to directly manage SoundGraph devices. It stills a beta
version so we can expect improvements in future versions. Only a small subset of functionalities is proposed. Through proprietary
interface, it's possible to change a lot of things. I hope API will be enriched to give access to all this funny stuff.
In particular, I'd like to have access to :
- Scroll management (right/left, on/off, speed selection, ...)
- Possibility to send graphics to dot matrix
- Offer a font selection (police, size, style ...)
- Light control (intensity/contrast)
- Possibility to display or hide progress bars (2 bars are not useful)
- . . .
LCD Manager has been tested with LCD and VFD model.
SoudGraph LCD product is fully shown on this page. Here is briefly device layout :
SoudGraph VFD product is a text only device with a 2 lines of 16 characters enriched by a volume control. Full specifications can be seen on this page.
LCD Manager should now be able to control these two kinds of devices. All commands relative to LCD icons are simply ignored in case of VFD models.
Furthermore, since VFD models don't manage automatic text scrolling, the first 16 characters are displayed on first line and the rest is on the secoond line. Extra charaters are lost.
I'm very interested by your feed back. You can send me remarks, bug reports and suggestions
at eric026[at]sfr.fr or via
AlbumPlayer forum. For bugs, please join log files generated on exit (*.trc).
I am in particular interested to know : your precise OS, device used (VFD/LCD)...
Following items are managed by LCD Manager:
- Disk symbol is animated depending on AlbumPlayer state (rotating when playing, fixed on pause and cleared on stop)
- Progress bars above and bellow text zone follow elapsed time in track
- Text zone is filled with music information depending on mask set by user. Text is automatically scrolled if it's larger than screen capacity
- Volume icon is briefly lit when volume change
- Non managed icons (video related items, speakers ...) can be set now via a fully graphical configuration screen
- Disk symbol can be fully customized to choose witch segment are ON and OFF, if a thickness is lit or not
- Codec symbol is lit depending on the file currently played : MP3, WAV, OGG or WMA (but based on file extension only)
- LCD can be shared with another program since LCDM can be set to release it at the end of first text scroll. Other software can then display it's own datas. LCDM will take it again briefly at next track change.
LCD Manager needs you to have the very last version of SoundGraph dynamic library installed. It's a beta version named '7.91.0929'
(please see this post). If LCD Manager does
not found this version or newer, a warning message will be displayed and software will probably not work properly.
To use LCD Manager, you just have to download :
- LCD Manager (Binary file + INI file)
- iMONDisplay.dll (provided by SoundGraph)
These 3 files have to be together anywhere on your hard disk. INI file will be created if it doesn't exist but it's far better to start
with the one proposed. This one contains a lot of comments to help you to setup by yourself your preferences if you prefer to do so. Some
settings can be chosen via main windows or via configuration screen. All settings are saved in a INI file with a lot of comments in it to
make analisys / modification easily.
You should take care if you manually edit INI file. A lot of tests are done to protect LCD Manager against bad settings but
some errors can occurs anyway.