that’s whacked

Last.fm Radio release!

Tuesday, Mar 24. 2009  –  Category: Songbird

It’s official… after many beers weeks of development, we’re ready to release Last.fm Radio support for Songbird.  If you haven’t gotten the Last.fm/Audioscrobbler add-on update yet you should be getting it soon… (or you can go install it manually from the add-ons site).

Here’s a few of the features provided by the new Last.fm radio support:

• Geolocates your IP and presents the most popular artists & tags from your country on Last.fm on the homepage (in case you were wondering why certain artists may appear there)
• Last.fm webpage links for “Play <foo> radio” get redirected to use the Songbird Last.fm Radio support
• Dynamic links on the sidebar for your Last.fm favourite/most played artists (based on your scrobbling history)
• Links on the sidebar for your friends and neighbours’ stations
• Dynamic links on the sidebar for your Last.fm stations based on your Songbird library’s highest rated and highest playcount artists.
• Click around and explore artist, tags, and Last.fm users
• Easily jump off to station webpages to read more from Last.fm
• When you authenticate with the extension it logs you in for both scrobbling and the Last.fm webpage

Note that due to recent changes Last.fm has made (recently being today), only US, UK, and Germany users can listen to radio for free.  Users in other countries will have to pay €3.00/month to Last.fm to listen to Last.fm Radio.  Sorry, but it’s their service and nothing we can control.

Last.fm tagging

Thursday, Mar 19. 2009  –  Category: Songbird

In the week and a half since we shipped Songbird 1.1, what have we been up to?  Well besides grandly horking a whole ton of iPods (sorry sorry sorry!), we’ve also been planning and scheming on some cool new stuff for the future.  Quite frankly, while doing performance and feature parity stuff is always good – we wanted to work on something innovative and different. Matt did a bunch of awesome mockups and threw up a planning doc on the wiki for anyone interesting in seeing what our [very rough] plans are.

Anyway, if you take a look you’ll see a big part of it revolves around activities, e.g. actions the user does to interact with their music.  We’re talking things like:

• rating songs
• making playlists
• adding new tracks to their collection
• tagging songs
• etc.

We’re looking to build something that can socialise these sorts of behaviours more and share them with a group.  It’s the online equivalent of you coming over to my house, and me saying “Check out this new album I found the other day, I’ve been listening to it on repeat all day.” Not only that, it’s also about the subsequent interaction and discussion we have…. e.g. you saying “OMG. Vanilla Ice? You’ve been listening to that all day??” and then you calling up all my other friends to tell them what a loser I am.

Anyway, let’s not dwell on what happened yesterday.  Instead, let’s focus on what we’re doing today.  We’ve been thinking about what sorts of activities make sense, how people would want to share them and consume their different friends’ activities.  I happened to be fixing a couple of Last.fm Radio bugs today (random tangent: we should be pushing this live next week!), when it occurred to me we could do something neat with Last.fm tagging.  Long story short, I was able to throw together something quick today that seems to do the job:

It throws a tag icon into the love/ban area of the faceplate, and when clicking it pops up a gratuitously-translucent panel allowing you to see the Last.fm tags applied (both by yourself and other Last.fm users).  You can add new tags, as well as delete any personal tags you’ve tagged the track with.

Ultimately it’d be nice to commit these tags into the Songbird local library so you can neat things like arbitrarily sort or filter your library based on tags but that’ll require some more bird-side work.

For now, this is a cheap and easy tagging solution that gives me a “tagging” action that we can make use of for our larger plan of socialising Songbird interactions.  The work has been committed to SVN and should be available in tonight’s nightly add-ons build.

Last.fm Radio update

Friday, Feb 20. 2009  –  Category: Songbird

For folks following the development of the Last.fm/Audioscrobbler add-on… I’ve been working on adding Last.fm Radio support. Check out the screenshot here for a glimpse of the latest revision.

As always, your feedback is appreciated… if you’re running a 1.2.0a nightly, please take it out for a test (XPI) and let me know your thoughts. This is still fairly alpha since it hasn’t had much exposure or proper QA testing – hence the 1.2.0a requirement.

If you find any good bugs, feel free to post a comment to this entry for now.

Update: This won’t work if your Songbird language is set to anything other than English (US) for now. As the UI gets finalised, I’ll get the extension localised.

Update 2: Several people are reporting duplicate Radio nodes… d’oh. I’m looking into it now.

more last.fm goodness

Wednesday, Dec 31. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

I’ve been working on some more on hooking up the various Last.fm radio streams into a directory of sorts.  Here’s a couple screenshots of what I’ve got so far:

In both screenshots you can see I’m logged in, with shortcuts to the 4 user stations (Your Library, Your Loved Tracks, Your Neighbourhood, and Your Recommendations) at the top right.

The right hand side is currently where I’m tracking a bunch of results… namely your most recently listened to stations, Last.fm recommended artist stations, your top tags’ stations, your top artist’s stations, as well as your friends and neighbours’ stations.

The main content area currently has a big honkin’ search box, and lets you search by artists, tags, and groups.

The first screenshot shows my Last.fm recommended artists on the right hand side, and on the left hand side it shows the results of searching for “killers”.  Every station has a quick “Play” link to immediately start playing the radio station… or you can click on the name/photo, and it’ll take you to a detail page, which is what I’ve shown in the second screenshot.

The detail page varies slightly depending on what you’re looking at:

• For artists, it will show the top tags applied to that artist, as well as artists Last.fm thinks are similar.
• For tags, it will show similar/related tags, as well as the top artists tagged with that tag.
• For users (which are the result of searching for a group, or when you click on your friends/neighbours in the right hand nav), it will show their top tags and top artists.
• In all views, clicking on the large detail photo/name of the station will take you off to the Last.fm webpage for that station for more information.

I’ve been playing with it all last night and today, and it’s pretty amazing jumping around from friends->tags->artists->tags->groups, etc. etc. etc. and just exploring the wealth of music available on Last.fm.

The UI undoubtedly needs polish and the eye of someone with better design skills than I… so I expect it’ll undergo some visual redesign as I get more feedback… but so far I’m quite pleased with this.  This extension is written all in JS, with all the UI done in HTML + jQuery, so it’s been quite easy to throw together (with fancy animations, natch).

last.fm radio

Monday, Dec 29. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

Since Ian left, I took over his prototype work on Last.fm radio support in Songbird.  I know I’ve said before that I  ♥ Last.fm, but I’ll say it again.. their use of semantic web technologies is fantastic…

Anyway, so far we’ve got support for the lastfm:// protocol, as well as support for redirection urls of the form http://last.fm/listen/*, so all the “Play your library” links, etc. you encounter as you browse Last.fm just work.  It’s hugely satisfying to just browse around the Last.fm site and click my friend’s radio stations and have them start playing inside of Songbird.

Some points of note from the screenshot:

• The previous-track, shuffle and repeat buttons become disabled.
• The Last.fm “Radio station” icon, and station name are displayed in the faceplate.
• “Now listening” works, and tracks you listen to on radio stations are scrobbled to your history.
• Last.fm is awesome and recognises the Songbird app ID as well as the fact that I’m tuned to my library’s radio station.
• EPSON has really annoying lame ads that prompt you to enter (redundant) user information that tricks you into clicking things in order to launch a pop-up.  BOOOO EPSON.