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Is Your Simplifymedia For Winamp Broken On A 64 Bit Windows 7? Here's How To Fix It

Artem Russakovskii — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:18:16 +0000

SimplifyMedia is an extremely useful program, which allows super easy song and playlist sharing via streaming between multiple computers. It also works as a Winamp plugin, so the shared songs simply show up inside Winamp's own media library – each computer sharing music appears under the special "Shared" tab. And the beauty is – there is no need to muck around with network settings, open ports, or even touch your router.

Here's a screenshot of how it's supposed to work:

The Problem

Since I recently installed Windows 7 64bit on my laptop, I wanted to set up SimplifyMedia on it and listen to some tracks in my favorite music player Winamp. However, after I downloaded and installed it and restarted Winamp, the Shared tab did not show up. The SimplifyMedia installer did tell me that a 64 bit version of Windows isn't explicitly supported but mentioned it should still work fine.

The Solution

After reinstalling, analyzing, and comparing with my other computers, I found that the SimplifyMedia installer didn't copy the needed Winamp plugin files, namely ml_simplify.dll and ml_simplifyexp.dll. After I copied them over into the Winamp/Plugins directory and restarted Winamp, the Shared tab showed up like a charm.

If you are having the same problem, just copy the mentioned files from a known working SimplifyMedia installation or download them from here:

ml_simplify.dll

ml_simplifyexp.dll

Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More

Artem Russakovskii — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:14:36 +0000

Recently I read an article on the Six Revisions blog that discussed 10 seemingly simple improvements to the twitter interface. They included such things as nick autocomplete, mentions, groups, and more.

You could only dream about such twitter improvements… that is until you use the Troys Twitter script. Just perform the following steps and you will have the features I describe in this article. Here we go:

Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
Install the Troys Twitter script

Greasemonkey is the most versatile extension available for Firefox, as it’s essentially a whole framework for scripts that can manipulate any aspect of any page. Head over to userscripts.org and take a look at the myriads of scripts written and submitted by other Greasemonkey users.

Once you are done with the above steps, head over to twitter.com (there’s no need to restart Firefox). You will then be able to enjoy the following enhancements, which I ordered here in terms of usefulness to me:

Autocomplete

Do you have a few friends with names so complicated, you can’t type them out by hand? Troys script autocompletes your friends’ names – just type @ and a few letters of their name. This is my favorite feature.

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Search Bar And Favorite Searches Saved

A search box is added to the sidebar. You can make a number of favorite searches, which then also remain sticky on the sidebar above the search box. When you click on a search term, the current page is updated without reloading the whole thing. Note that the favorite search terms are saved locally in your browser and won’t show up on your other computers.

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Auto Expander Of Shortened URLs

Automatically expands url shorteners, so instead of seeing a load of tinyurls and bit.lys, you see proper urls and their native page titles (neat!).

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Auto URL Shortener

Updated: The URL shortener auto shortens urls as you type them but only if they will overflow the 140 character limit, otherwise they stay as they are (it now works flawlessly).

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Auto Pagination

As you reach the bottom of the page, more earlier updates are automatically loaded after a few seconds. This means you don’t need to click or leave the page in order to see earlier updates. It could get a bit annoying, so I requested an ability to turn off certain script features. Update: you can now turn off every feature of the script individually.

Auto Media Embed Expander

Pictures and videos are automatically embedded.

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(Uhmm, I don’t know why I highlighted “sack” but I don’t feel like retaking the screenshot… Yeah…)

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Retweet (RT) Button

Adds the missing RT button to each update.

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Autopopulate Bios on User Listings

Updated: This function will save you hundreds of clicks – when viewing someone's followers, rather than just seeing their names, the script adds their bios.

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Hyperlinked Hash Tags

Hash tags are now hyperlinked to the twitter search page. Seriously, twitter can’t do that by default?

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User’s Local Time

The script adds a user’s local time. See the example below using the profile of a lovely Kamikazekitty. This feature seems unpublished and I found it by accident.

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Nested Replies

This is a great feature – it gives context to @ replies. For example, @ev’s reply to kevin is boring and out of context until you see what they’re talking about, all without looking up @kevin’s updates.

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Mutual Friends Marked

Updated: This is a new feature. People who you follow and who also follow you back (mutual friendship) are marked with a little smiley face.

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Auto @fxxxmylife Expansion

Updated: Woot! Following the infamous @fxxxmylife is no longer annoying: all posts get auto-expanded. Brilliant. For those who don't know, FML is a site collecting short stories that all start with "Today," and end with "FML". Here are the top FMLs to get you started [hooked].

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That’s it for now in the current script version (6.5) but what a world of difference, isn’t it? Tweet this post if you like it and let your friends know about this great twitter web tool.

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Quick Perl Snippet: Finding If A File Has A Media Extension Using Regex

Artem Russakovskii — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:11:34 +0000

Sometimes in my line of work, I need to figure out if a url or filename point to a media file by checking for the file extension. If it's a url, however, it may be followed by various parameters. Not to overcomplicate things, I came up with the following Perl code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $name = "some_file.flv"; # or http://example.com/file.mp4?foo=bar
my $is_media_type = ($name =~ /\.(wmv|avi|flv|mov|mkv|mp..?|swf|ra.?|rm|as.|m4[av]|smi.?)\b/i);
if($is_media_type){
  print "media extension found\n";
}
else{
  print "not a media file\n";
}

This gets the job done without triggering any false positives (at least for the files/urls I've been dealing with so far). Am I missing any obvious types? Do you have a better way to accomplish the same thing? If so, please share in the comments.