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Stream-Friendly Music Ticker

(copy-pasted from SFMT.ahk)

Description

This script is intended to make it possible to share the currently playing song from your media player through a streaming program. It works by scraping the title of your media player's window, outputting the part you want to a file, and reading the file through a streaming program.

Supported Media Players?

Winamp, foobar2000, Spotify, YouTube (via web browser), MusicBee, MediaMonkey, VLC, WMP, iTunes, and any other media player that can display the currently playing song in the title of its window.

Supported Streaming Programs?

OBS, XSplit, FFsplit, and any other streaming program that can read text from a file.

Pros and Cons?

    • No dependency on any specific media player
    • Supports Unicode characters
    • Easy to trim junk off the beginning and end of a window title
    • Fix for padding out scrolling text in OBS
    • Multi-platform (untested, but use IronAHK instead of AutoHotkey_L)
    • Open-source, well-documented, and easy-to-edit
    • No GUI for configuration (yet)

Instructions

  1. Download and install AutoHotkey_L from http://www.autohotkey.com (should be the default one).
  2. Save/Extract the SFMT.ahk file to your computer (ZIP button in the top left of GitHub).
  3. Run this file by double-clicking on it to generate the output file, which is where your now playing song will be later. By default, it's "nowplaying.txt" and refreshes every 3 seconds.
  4. Open your media player of choice and begin playing music.
  5. Using your streaming program, add a text source for the output file.
  6. Right-click the .ahk file, click Edit Script, and edit the CONFIGURE ME section for your media player/streaming program (see example below for help).
  7. While configuring the file, you should perform the following workflow: edit the file, save the file, right-click the H icon in the system tray, click Reload This Script, and finally open the output file/preview the stream to see if it looks the way you want.

Example Configuration

First get the title of your media player's window. You can do this by hovering over the program in the taskbar or system tray and waiting a bit for text to appear. If you're having trouble with this or you can't find it, you can still figure it out by looking at the contents of the output file after you do this next step. This is an example title I see when playing a song in Winamp: "16. Carly Rae Jepsen - Call Me Maybe - Winamp".

Now you need to pick a part of the window title that will always be there while playing songs, which can usually be the program's name itself. In this example, "Winamp" will always be in the window's title so I can use that. Note that any other window with "Winamp" in it could interfere and be grabbed instead. Finally, place this value by the spot marked PART 1 in the CONFIGURE ME section. You can now perform Step 7 above to test if this part works for you.

Now you need to trim off the parts that you don't want to share on the stream, like the playlist number on the left and the media player's name on the right in this example. To trim the left side, identify the block of text closest to the left side of the untrimmed text that does not change from song to song. In this example, you could use " " (a space), or ". " (a period then space). Now, working from left-to-right, check if this block of text won't occur before you want; otherwise, it will trim from there instead. For example, if the title began with "Curiosity - 16. " and I was using " ", then it would trim off "Curiosity " when I wanted to trim off all of it. Using ". " instead would fix this problem. Many media players give you near full control over the look and ordering of the title elements so keep this in mind if you can't get what you want. To trim the right side, repeat this procedure working from right-to-left instead. In this example, I want to trim " - Winamp" so I can't use " ", but I can use " -" or even " - Winamp". Finally, place these values by the two spots marked PART 2 in the CONFIGURE ME section.

If you're using OBS to stream and scrolling the text, then you may want to edit PART 3 to make it look nicer. Other than that, you should be good to go and comfortable editing other things in the CONFIGURE ME section at the very least.