I did it, I finally added the now playing feature!

So as you may know, I revealed in my second devlog of this project that the now playing feature had to be removed because I just could not get it to work. Today I woke up and thought: “Let’s give it another shot”

##My biggest challenge:

I had thought of a way to make it work but AE would still keep freezing every now and then because the process was happening through AE.

How I made it and fixed the freezing problem:

I made a sort of “scout” that would launch a small, hidden powershell process in the background every 6 seconds. This scout then asks windows: “Bro what song is playing right now? I gotta know.” So then windows responds with the answer written in a temporary file. AE then reads this file and displays it on the “Now Playing” section near the top. If the answer comes empty then AE keeps the same song. This way AE doesn’t freeze because the process happens outside AE. One other problem was that the text would get cutoff due to panel resizing issues. To fix this I simply added a marquee scrolling effect to keep it nice and smooth. I won’t go into detail about that but know that I had to search up how to do it since I’ve never done it.

AI usage disclaimer:

Claude Sonnet was used to point out syntax errors and Manus was used to help guide me to using the “background scout” method. Both AI helped out a whole lot.

Hope someone uses this and if you are reading it, have a great day!