Blog Playlist Plugin?
February 28th 2005
I’ve been working on a playlist database app in PHP for the last couple days to replace the antiquated BlogAmp. It’s turning out quite nicely, so I thought I’d share. The basic premise is that the Now Playing Plugin for Winamp sends song information to the PHP script in the form of a POST request. The PHP playlist program takes that and puts it in a database, and the display functions allow you to print views for most recently listened-to songs, most listened-to songs, top artists, top albums, song details, and more.
Take a look at the app so far and tell me what you think. I know there are a few things wrong with it: it needs better navigation for one, and there are some bugs with the paging functions I need to fix, but other than that, it serves its purpose well. I’m also planning on adding all of the features I bragged about above (top albums/artists are not yet implemented) as well as album art from google images, so it will look all nice in your sidebar and in the album/song/artist detail screens.
My question is this: would there be any interest if I released this as a WordPress plugin? Or even if I released it standalone (with the ability to integrate it as a WP page)? I imagine current BlogAmp users should be quite interested. Let me know and I might work faster. But don’t expect anything before midterms. Those always come first, of course… usually.
Yes, I definitely think you should release this.
However, and that’s a big however: the main reason I’m using BlogAmp, is that it allows me to style my ID3 tag display just like I want it, and it’ll work for OGG, MPC and MP3. I seem to remember that “Now Playing”, had problems with displaying both OGG and MPC meta data, and especially in ways of styling this.
If, however, that’s a thing of the past, I’m game!
Most of my files are FLAC, which uses the Ogg file tagging system. It does have problems with it. However — from within the folder structure, it discovers all information, but I realize that’s just for my system. It works well for me because I like my folders organized anyway.
One big option that I actually considered before I found Now Playing was parsing the JavaScript file produced by BlogAmp into the database. It would be kind of clunky — you’d need to set your “history” to almost infinite in BlogAmp, and then set a cron job to parse it every hour and parse it whenever someone loads the page (to make sure it’s nice and current). After that, have the javascript file emptied. It’s doable, and I could integrate it into this as an option if you still want to use BlogAmp.
I will e-mail the Now Playing developers and see if they can update it to use Winamp’s playlist library to get the tags instead of relying on id3 and file names. Either that or give me some source code so I can do it myself
I’ve message-boarded the Now Playing developer about adding Ogg/FLAC/MPC tag support and they responded pretty quickly with this:
Don’t know when that’ll be, but it’s relatively good news in any case. You can read the thread here.
Fantastic news!
I’ll buy in to this plugin for sure.
This plugin is great, however Winamp is unavailable on Mac, rendering this plugin unavailable to many people. Otherwise, I would surely use it.
I like the idea of having each player use POST on a single online file, and that way no matter what player you’re currently using, it’ll ping it, and show what you’re currently playing.
Sorry for the moderation Jeff — I do realize that the plugin for Winamp isn’t available on Mac, or on the same thread, anyone using a different player of any kind.
Unfortunately it will have to be available only to Winamp users for now. You’re welcome to write plugins for your favorite music player that can POST to a web address with the correct information however, and it should work with them.
Yes, i would be interested in a plug in. I have some yet defined ideal that mixes playlist, album reveiw, and amazon/cdBaby plugin. I want to share a playlist of songs that have active links or hovers of my review of the album and links to amazon or CDbaby to buy the album.
Never thought of integrating reviews… it would be very easy to add to the database, I’ll see about that.
A release won’t exactly come soon, but within the next month or so I’d say. It’ll be in 2 versions — integrated WP plugin with its own control panel, and a standalone simple playlist page for the rest of the world (just because).
Interesting work! I like that you went the next step to storing in the database, and having longer ‘playlist’ pages/views.
I do just a tiny bit of this through my WP plugins: CG-WhatTunes handles the POST, data store (flat file at the moment), and sidebar display function(s).
WT works with my other plugin, CG-Amazon, which if available is called to provide an amazon link to the current-playing song. You can also ‘tag’ stuff you add to your ‘amazon database’ with extra html, such as a link to a review-post — I’ve done that myself.
To Jeff if he sees this: there are iTunes blogging tools on both Mac and Win, that use POST commands — that’s what CG-WhatTunes was built for (though any music-blogger tool that can be formatted with the ‘proper’ POST string will work with it). So you could likely get iTunes working with Now Playing (and thus Tristan’s Playlist stuff) pretty easily if the POST format is reasonably simple.
Thanks for the comment — I recently updated the playlist with some navigation to make it slightly less confusing. I don’t think I’ll release it as a plugin, but rather as a standalone app with a bloglet display (as you see here). It’s true that it’s very easy to modify the program to accept input really in any way you want to give it; even multiple methods from multiple programs could be supported.
i am looking for a plugin like this, basically all i need it to do, is upload the album art of the currently playing song. there are iTunes plugins that do this nicely, but no winamp plugins that will upload album art.
We are working on something similar over here at gofish.
Here is a sample of our code for embedding a playlist that includes album art, and sample audio clips. We are working on some better designs and approaches. We would love your feedback if you have any ideas.
Please keep in mind that this is just a ‘beta’ version.
BTW, you can use any of your winamp, or itunes playlists to create a blogabble playlist widget at http://www.gofish.com/mygofish
email me back at jake@gofish.com.
Thanks
Jake
sorry- here is the playlist:
http://www.gofish.com/blogplaylist.html?gfid=23-63&cols=2&uid=12
hey, i just found your site via google.
this project definatly looks promising.
keep up the good work!
a standalone version would be my favor
bye and greetings from germany
fishy