NISRP

Introduction

The Non-Intrusive Song Rating Plugin is here to help you rate your songs, without the big distraction of switching applications.

It works with Winamp and iTunes.

Requirements

You must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 runtime installed (this includes the C++ and MFC runtime libraries/DLLs). The NISRP installer offers the option by default of downloading it from Microsoft and installing it for you. If you don't have it installed (if you're not a developer, you probably don't) or are not sure, and would like to do it manually, you can download it from here.

Operation

When a song that has not been rated starts playing, the translucent NISRP window will appear and follow your mouse.

If you do not act, then it will disappear again after a moment.

If you wish to rate the song, click the stars/dots to select your rating.

If the song is a duplicate, then click Dupe (you will not be asked to rate this song again).

The rating is applied to the host application's music library.

If you wish to remove the rating, the click on the text to the immediate right of the rightmost star (where the number of stars is printed as text - this will say '0 stars').

The NISRP window is always positioned slightly to the right of your mouse cursor. Therefore you need to make a sudden movement to the right to prevent it from tracking (this will probably be no more sudden than one's average mouse movements though).

Keyboard focus is not taken away when NISRP appears, so you can continue typing as normal.

Extra Features

• If you set the input focus to the NISRP window (by clicking in it) then you can use your mouse's scroll wheel to seek/jog forward and backward in the song. If you seek back to the beginning of the current song, and then a little more, then the previous song will play. Scrolling to the end of the current song will cause the player to start the next song in your playlist.
• If you hold Ctrl or Shift during a song transition (when one ends and the next begins) it will force NISRP to display, regardless of whether the next song has already been rated/set as a duplicate. This is an alternative to the shortcut below for manually displaying the NISRP window.
• Those songs marked as duplicates are stores in a list (in a text file) named dupes.txt, which resides in the Winamp plugin directory or the same directory as the iTunes XML library (depending on which player you use).
• After clicking on the NISRP window, pressing F1 will open this page.

Shortcuts

• Shift + Left-click when rating current song: Store rating and immediately move to the next song (skip playing the rest of the current one).
• Right-click: Hide the NISRP window
• Middle-click: Bring player (host application) to the foreground.
• Shift + Right-click: Play the previous track
• Ctrl + Right-click: Play the next track
• Ctrl + Shift + Windows + Z (the four keys in the bottom left of your keyboard): Show NISRP if it is hidden (e.g. if you want to change the rating, or cancel the Dupe flag)

Installer

I have posted the NullSoft Install System (NSIS) NISRP Installer Script to help other installer writers.