Playdar, your local music agent

Playdar is a content resolving service for your music.

It's essentially a semantic web agent - but with no RDF around to add in that 'semantic' part.

A website asks your browser for permission to play tracks, much like Songbird offers, and it allows you to index / search your music.

More importantly, it's possible to search your friend's music, auto-magically, and stream from there. Or at least wired claims so.

I'll wait and see if it ends up more polished.

Songbird, Hype Machine, Music Blogs

I am still in utter awe of Songbird + Last.fm + Hype Machine.

Right now I'm browsing around trying to find new sounds with hype machine. Hype machine points me to Superpose. Songbird makes it trivial for me to add it to my collection.

If I favorite it on hype machine, it'll twitter it for me; I can preview it right in songbird, add it to my library, and I can purchase tracks / albums from Amazon. As soon as I listen to it, it's right there in last.fm.

This isn't a music player, this is a distributed networked music experience.

Also, if someone could please buy me a whitefolksgetcrunk tshirt, or make superpose appear in Adelaide; I would be pretty happy

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• Watch out iTunes ... Songbird Fugazi rocks !

Songbird webpage api, bits, pieces, and notes

Imagine this scenario:

You are using your media player/browser, and you stumble across a track on a webpage. You preview it. You like it. There's no information on the webpage about where it's from, but luckily, the mp3 is tagged correctly.

You hit a button on your media browser, and bam! You can find popularity information on Last.fm, prices on Amazon, full album information on Musicbrainz. Last.fm suggests a similar artist. The process rinses and repeats. You get to stuff yourself full of delicious music.

To see (some of) this in action; fire up Songbird 0.3 or greater, play some tunes, and go explore.

Last.fm's API is being used to render information that the page asked songbird about.
Sweet.

Look at the code underneath: simple javascript. More about songbird's webpage api. That's pretty easy looking.


Other notes and odds and ends:
Songbird now takes regular firefox extensions, (say hello to greasemonkey) and Freebase is awesome.

Basically: Freebase has an API, it's got data from wikipedia, and you can do things like search for episodes of Battlestar Galactica. Or shows produced by JJ Abrahams.

So, mix the power of Songbird's webpage api with the vast data of wikipedia/freebase, sprinkle in a few applications, and you've got something far more fun looking than a simple google maps mashup.

Throw in greasemonkey and operator, and you can scrape information from pages into microformats. Then export them.

Songbird 0.3RC1

Songbird 0.3 RC1 is out.

Yahoo on DRM; and where Songbird really whips the llama's...

I want more of people standing up for what I want; and I want it now.

Yahoo says no to DRM.

So far, my favourite bit:

But the content experience on the Web is crap. Go to Aquarium Drunkard, click an MP3. If you don’t get a 404, you’ll get a Save As… dialog or the SAME GOD DAMN QUICKTIME BAR FROM 1995. OMFG. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? THIS IS ALL WE’VE ACCOMPLISHED IN 15 YEARS ON THE WEB? It makes me insane.

Hey, you want to get yourself some SongBird!

Pidgin, Songbird, and a Shirt

Alright, let's cut to the chase. I desperately want a ninja filled tshirt.


With the current state of the US dollar, it's probably a good time to prise $25 USD from my ever so tight pockets; but the penny pinching old grandfather in me just won't let me.

So, I have a plan:

1. Wait for either Gutsy Gibbon to land, or a decent feisty backport of pidgin


2. Learn just what exactly this dbus thing is


3. Use a mixture of kung fu and whinging to have Songbird inform Pidgin of what I'm playing, just like I've always wanted.

If I can get at least half way into doing that, then I can most probably convince myself:

• dbus is cool, and you are making something shiny enough that you deserve a t-shirt


• this is way too hard, you need a pity t-shirt

Either option is great for me.

Gecko 1.9 is spinning up...

Gecko 1.9 is starting to come together. This will be pretty awesome, not just because it'll help draw smiley faces.

From the roadmap:

• Cairo for rendering; meaning better performance.
• Python for XUL
• Javascript 2
• More oompf for XULRunner - this will directly help songbird, for instance.

I'm kind of excited.

You can stop with the software releases now...

Songbird 0.2, Internet Explorer 7, Gaim 2.0.0beta4.

What a busy day.

Audioscrobber for Songbird

http://www.songbirdnest.com/extensions

Songbird 0.2 RC3 is out; and it now features a couple of decent extensions - an audioscrobbler extension for one.

Stiff asks, great programmers answer

Interview with Linus Torvalds, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson, Steve Yegge, Peter Norvig, Guido Van Rossum, Bjarne Stroustrup, James Gosling and Tim Bray.

Interesting read. Go read it, and if you like post your own answers in the comments here...

How did you learn programming? Were any schools of any use? Or maybe you didn’t even bother with ending any schools :) ?
mIRC scripts (hah!), HTML, and basic PHP. A bit of javascript. I then went off to AIT and went through iCarnegie.

What do you think is the most important skill every programmer should posses?
Humor, and the ability to work in a team without direction. Obsessive compulsive urges to document things and put in meaningful info into version control software / any public communication.

Do you think mathematics and/or physics are an important skill for a programmer? Why?
Not really; most math is terrible for preparing you to build a web application. Which is what I do.

What do you think will be the next big thing in computer programming? X-oriented programming, y language, quantum computers, what?
SPARQL backed web applications. Or apps based on XULRunner; like Songbird - half program, half browser, half finished, totally nifty...

If you had three months to learn one relativly new technology, which one would You choose?
I don't care about new stuff, I just want to be able to compile PHP extensions properly! On any platform I need to also...

What do you think makes some programmers 10 or 100 times more productive than others?
Attention to detail and the ability to communicate. If you can't articulate what's on your mind; how can you express ideas in code?

What are your favourite tools (operating system, programming/scripting language, text editor, version control system, shell, database engine, other tools you can’t live without) and why do you like them more than others?
Unix like environments, PHP 5, Editplus, SVN, bash, mysql, ZendCodeAnalyzer and PHPUnit. Oh, and firefox.

What is your favourite book related to computer programming?
*Shrug* - there was a decent one on refactoring, but I've lost it.

What is Your favourite book NOT related to computer programming?
A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge; or Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds (I just finished it; it's awesome)

What are your favourite music bands/performers/compositors?
Derb; Cosmic Gate; etc. If it's hard trance, I'll tend to like it. My tastes wander a lot as I buy more vinyl.

What about you; readers?

Last.fm vs Google Music Trends

Google Talk just got a 'show my music' feature; like MSN has and like mIRC scripts have been doing since the dawn of time.

I wonder

• Is it easy to do what google talk has done as; say; a gaim plugin?
• Does the jabber protocol have features for this?
• How hard would it be to do a last.fm / audioscrobbler plugin that submits to google music trends?
• How hard would it be to make the google talk client know what songbird is playing?
• How hard would it be to make songbird export XSPF?
  

Songbird 0.2 Screencast

Songbird 0.2 Screencast: "Do you want to learn how to use Songbird 'more better'?

Behold! A new Songbird 0.2 Screencast has just been published to the 'nest, suitable for forwarding to friends.

There's a screencast out from the 'nest, about songbird 0.2. It's awesome to watch the small features demonstrated; like drag and drop saving of web links to my local mp3 list.

The problem I have is this; in a nutshell: to use songbird as the songbird creators suggest requires me to break down my existing barriers to doing such a thing. I'm so used to not being able to do these things; if I'm presented with the opportunity to do them; my mind rejects them as stupid / silly / impossible.

No idea what I mean? Go watch the screencast.

Ack!

I feel like my parents must.

Songbird, Extensions, & Windjay

Windjay looks promising - the current offerings don't do it for me, but perhaps I'll see my wanted songbird extensions yet...

Wanted Songbird Extensions

Songbird is releasing nightlies... sort of. I would give anything to have two extensions in particular:

• MusicBrainz tagging built right into the bird.
• Last.fm / audioscrobbler plugin to record my listening habits.

The latest nightly seems stable(r)... I can't wait for 0.2!

Update More on extensions...

Songbird Democracy

Democracy is released today, and it feels a lot like Songbird.

Note to self: tinker with it.

Songbird pleases me....

Songbird.

It just works.
It's found my media, and kept an eye on it even when I had iTunes reorganise it.
Performance is fine - iTunes gave me the shits minutes ago by refusing to play my music well.

Winamp had the right idea: play the damned music even if it means you have to take the highest thread priority you can. Why can't iTunes do this?

Complaints so far for songbird:
I can see that firefox's rendering engine, gecko, is embedded right into this application. Where's my damned address bar, in that case? (Oh: I didn't realise it was an address bar! But ctrl+l to focus it, ala firefox, is sorely missed).

Also: the icons for shuffling, etc, aren't very meaningful.

It doesn't grok video files and just spits them out as audio.

I can't open things in tabs - ctrl + click is disabled, and I miss it. Tabs make firefox wonderful.

How do I customise the bookmarks sidebar content?


Have you tried it yet? What gets you?

Songbird

Songbird perks my interest - built on the same engine as firefox; so does this mean I can expect to write extensions easily (greasemonkey for a media player)?

I wonder what can be done with it...