Remote Show Control with a Laptop

Tips for using the system

Here are a few tips for getting more out of this system.

Bigger playlist font
You can alter the font size in Winamp’s playlist, which makes it more readable at a distance. To do this, click on Winamp and press CTRL-P to get to the preferences. Click “Display” in the left pane of this dialog. On the right side, you’ll see “Playlist font size.” The default is set to make the playlist small, so Winamp will fit on your computer desktop without blocking anything else. If you increase this number, the information in the playlist window will be displayed larger.  Try 20, then click the Close button and look at the playlist. You might want to stretch the playlist window so it’s bigger, just grab the lower-right corner like you would with any Windows application.

If you set it large enough, between 80 - 100, you can use the playlist as a visual aid for the tracks. Of course it's only good if you have the computer in your line of sight.

Customizing Fade-outs
Winamp allows you to customize how a track fades out, and under what circumstances. First, press CTRL-P to get to Preferences again, then click “Output” in the left pane. On the right side, click “DirectSound output” and then click the “Configure” button. A panel will pop up that allows you to control several settings; click the “Fading” tab along the top.

In the middle of the pop-up window, you’ll see several options.  For example, if you click “on pause/stop” you can adjust if Winamp will fadeout when you pause or stop a track, and how long it takes.  If you click the checkbox for “Enabled” and then for “Use custom fade time” you can set the length of a fade.  1000 ms = 1 second, so you can set longer or shorter fades as you like. The default is 333, which is 1/3 of a second.

You can customise to fade on pause, fade on stop, fade on seek and when a track starts, in any combination of the above, and it works much better than Winamp’s own fade on stop command. You can just hit the pause button on the remote and Winamp will fade the music out.

Credit for these tips go to Greg Hudson, who’s touring Australia and New Zealand with this rig and his hypnosis show.