Registering Plugins with Capability of UI-Interaction

I had this idea of loading previously synced tracks from LXC into Denon Prime units. So basically, you prepare your music as usual, sync it to a stick/SD-Card/SSD, and star playing. During the session, you use the “find mixable track” feature to smartly select a track. But then the arduous task before you is to open the search functionality, find the track, and load it in on the prime hardware. lemongrab_unacceptable.mp4

The prime devices allow you to connect a bluetooth keyboard. You can open the search functionality from anywhere with strg+f, and then search any track, and also load it using the keyboard. There also exist python libraries that allow your PC/MAC to act as a bluetooth keyboard. So the general idea would be

  1. Register a plugin with LXC that allows me to add a right-click context icon(or hotkeys) for a file
  2. If I click that, LXC sends out a trigger in a as of yet undefined manner, somehow passing the song metadata to an external script/plugin
  3. The plugin reads artist and title and generates a series of keystrokes that opens the search bar and searches for the title (and possible loads deck 1-4 depending on command, undecided what works better from a workflow perspective)

Tadaa - song loading from Lexicon. I could see Lexicon not wanting to implement the notoriously nefarious bluetooth stack for such a specialized use case, so that would be a neat little project for a plugin. Any ideas welcome.

This is a very cool idea! Definitely great for a plugin and not really something I’d add to LXC myself anyway.

I think adding UI elements for plugins is a bit too far at the moment, I don’t have plans for that at all yet and I’m afraid that it would get messy quick if I did allow that. But custom actions that can be triggered from the top menu bar under a special Plugins menu is a good idea. Every action could also have a user configured hotkey.

First we’d need to create a whole plugin framework though. Then there would be some section where plugin actions can defined that would trigger when a hotkey is pressed and chosen conditions are met. E.g. press a button and if any track is selected, then execute a custom script.

Sure, this is something that should take a backseat until more urgent stuff is done. I cannot commit to a timeline myself, as life really tends to get in the way with two kids.

The idea with the rightclick menu I stole mostly from musicbrainz picard, which allows you to register context menu actions that are grouped under a “plugins” section, but I guess either way works fine in the end, especially if there are hotkeys or key combinations.

I’ll just let this incubate with you until the right time comes around.

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Cool! Good to know what options we need before I start making something.

Just saw your message on discord. Fair enough, I’ll whip something up once I have some project time. Maybe that can then be used to brainstorm a better understanding. This is not time sensitive after all.

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