molly.com

Friday 5 March 2004

winamp5 and movable type

I’m working on a playlist that generates what I’m listening to in real time from winamp5 to my movable type weblog.

You’ll notice the playlist in the right hand column (of my home page if you’re reading the archive) tracks, underneath the poll.

So long as my local connection remains connected to the web, and so long as I do not disable any of the scripts, you will see what’s playing in my personal winamp queue at this moment.

I’ve grouped songs into sets of 10. The song at the top of the list is what’s playing right now, and I’ve listed recently played songs, too. A full carriage return indicates a new set or a pause in my connection.

I need help!

  • I’m using trackback pings to generate this list and I want to make each song entry linkable at my discretion and for my preferences: Amazon or other affiliate links; XFN relationships too, and with all that updated and managed by either PHP or Perl scripts. I want it to auto-update (right now it only updates upon refresh or new visit). I also want to make it more usable and accessible, such as emphasizing the band names and visually discerning the song that is currently being played. Oh, Oh! Archives would be cool too. Suggestions welcome.
  • Read my playlist and tell me if you like what you hear. Wouldn’t it be cool if I had a bookmarklet that enabled you to recommend what you like?

I’m using a combo platter of the great but poorly documented DoSomething plug-in for winamp2 (compliant with 5, note that winamp 3 scripts typically are not compliant with winamp 5+ versions), movable type tags, and JavaScript.

Filed under:   general
Posted by:   site admin | 05:54 | Comments (8)

Comments (8)

  1. scott says Friday 5 March 2004 at 09:50

    I started working on a script (php) that stores the songs in a mysql database. it works now but it’s just not elegant yet.
    I’m using the dosomethingplugin too so if you want to see the code I’m using, I’d be happy to share. You can see my top 20 for the current month and the most recent song on the following page http://www.somethingtoforget.ca/winamp.php

  2. anders says Saturday 6 March 2004 at 08:37

    i actually had something like this working on my blog about 4 years ago. of course, i was using the same linux box as my workstation and as the webserver, so it was pretty easy to set up. i just used XMMS‘s ‘Song Change’ plugin to write the title to a text file that was then included with SSI. people would write to me and tell me that they were visiting multiple times a day just to see what i was listening to. they would also actually get somewhat annoyed with me when i was away for vacation or something and the ‘now playing’ wouldn’t change for days at a time. it’s strange what will entertain people. i dropped the feature when i moved the weblog to a dedicated server and was too lazy to rig up some more complicated system for updating it (we didn’t have trackback back then).

  3. shoo says Sunday 7 March 2004 at 09:28

    Very interesting idea. I’ve had an idea about this before – but never knew if it was possible. I love the playlist! I don’t have any experience with Movable Type, but a possible option would to have a scrolling textbox or an iframe with the playlist and have it refresh every 30 secs or so. Or… Ya, that’s the best idea I have. Refreshing the whole page would suck.

    What would be cool is to have links to the artists webpages, or have a link that throws the band name into a google search for that artist. Still out of my area but couldn’t you grab the artist name from the IDv3 tag?

  4. Gandalf says Thursday 18 March 2004 at 07:56

    Hi

    Thank you very much for suggessting me an idea !

  5. Steve Lareau says Wednesday 14 April 2004 at 11:25

    Hi Molly, it’s been a while- there is a goodie out there that does pretty much what you want to do-
    http://www.audiomatch.net

    Just thought I’d mention it if you never ran across it.

    Be well,
    Steve

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