One area that I am constantly trying to improve on this site is the Recent Playlist functionality. For a while now I have utilized the Do Something plugin by Oddsock to ping a script on my site whenever Winamp changes songs. But it has had one major flaw: it only reads information from the ID3V1 Tag instead of the information contained in the ID3v2 tag. While that might sound like a bunch of gibberish, it boils down to a couple of major differences. The updated tag (ID3v2) has more fields for information, and more importantly, doesn’t have the character limits assigned to the old tag.
Using the limited confines of ID3v1 causes a lot of albums to not appear as their names would be cut off. For example, the Duke Ellington disk “The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts January 1943 (Disc 2)” would be cut to “The Duke Ellington Carnegie Ha”. Not very helpful for people reading it, is it? It is even worse as Amazon (which provides the album covers) wouldn’t understand it either, and thus would not return the proper (or any) album cover.
Now that I have rambled on, explaining the nuances of the issue, I will introduce the solution to the problem: Now Playing, a great Winamp 5 plugin that pulls the information from the ID3v2 and sends it to the PHP script on my site exactly as I want it to.
Now, all I need to do isi eliminate the disc number (typically “(Disc 2)”) from the query sent to Amazon, and we should see vast improvements in the Recent Playlist area!
Update: I have packaged and released my code as SilverSpider Play List.
I’ve been using the Do Something plugin and noticed that quite a lot of the songs I play never even show up on the sidebar of my site. I’ll be taking a look at Now Playing, once I finish the conversion to Wordpress.
How would you feel about sharing the PHP script you use to pull the album images/link to Amazon? :D
I’ll be happy to share it with you Pamela. :) Give me just a little bit of time to clean it up. While it is in good shape, I have been working on it to make it more distribution-friendly. Specifically I want to:
* Create a central spot for variables that can/should be changed by the user
* Make it easier to change the output format
* Decide on a license (CC, GPL etc…)
* Set a version number
* Package with some simple instructions
I’ll try to knock this out in a couple of days, so you can have it soon.
You rock! Thanks again for the CSS help the other day. I’ve been able to fix a couple of other small issues based on what you told me.
And there’s no need to rush to get it ready for me. I’m literally going through each of my old posts to make sure that the HTML syntax is correct, get rid of some odd double-line spacing the MT export caused, and put titles and categories on all the old Blogger entries that didn’t have them. I think I’ve been doing this for 5 days and I still have 600 posts to go. :P
But how does it owrks with not-mp3 files, say WMA and OGG ?
But it does not easily save plain text file in pre-choosen charset, so i could add this text into, say, Opera’s signature.
This one http://anton-sheyko.chat.ru/
does almost what i want - but it does not give You HTML, and it can’t transcode text to UTF-8 or launch some extra apps.
:-( Now Good.
I’m not sure about the non-MP3 file formats, nor do I have any experience implementing it with UTF-8, but you may want to post to their forum, as they seem to be responsive to requests.
Hopefully they can help you solve those issues.
Wow, this is exactly what I have been looking for! I just recently have been trying to find something to display the songs I have most recently played. Nothing seemed to be quite what I was looking for until this. I am hoping I can display this info in a little block on the side of my PHP-Nuke Site.
I’ll have to check back every once in a while to see when you finish that PHP stuff. Hopefully I can figure out how to format it into a block.
Thanks Alex!
~Jeff~
Hello, I use the Now Playng plug-in with winamp 5.06. I like this plugin and I want to ask: Is it possible to show the album cover with it’s original colors? Thank you
Alessio, I don’t understand what you mean by “original colors”. SilverSpider Play List pulls the album covers from Amazon, and as far as I can see, the colors are exactly as they should be.
For “original album cover colors” I mean that the album cover jpeg is showed with a monochromatic skin(i.e. if winamp is working with the color theme blue, the album cover in the window now playng is showed completely in blue and not with it’s real colors).Bye
Hrrrm, I’m not experiencing that issue as you can see by the album list at the top right of this page. Do you have a site where I can see this, or is the problem occurring within Winamp itself?
Hello Alex, I’m having the same problem that Allessio has, I’ll put my link so you can see how it has just one blue color:
http://www.geocities.com/dibutonic/Nowplaying.JPG
The name of the artist is Govinda, and there is a Flower, and a circle (originally in red).
Hope you can help me.
Thanks in Advance
Omar
Ahhh, the picture helps! But, to be honest, I don’t think it has anything to do with the plugin. The name of the plugin happens to be the same as the first view within Winamp’s native Media Library screen.
It’s possible that the problem you are seeing may be due to a skin, so if you aren’t using the default Winamp skin, switch to it, and then look again. Otherwise, I would recommend you download the latest version of Winamp, and if it is still a problem, post the question to the official forums, as they are much more likely to have an answer than I am.
Hey Alex thanks for your help. I know what was the problem. And I may help to Alessio. In order to see the original picture , you must Right click on ” List Opts” below the playlist, and then go to options > “Default (Original Cover).html” and it will appear the original picture.
Hope I helped
Peace
Great! Thanks for posting the fix.
Absolutely great, but did you ever get round to supporting ‘Disc 2′, ‘CD 2′ etc?
The last few CDs I’ve played have included:
Pink Floyd Echoes - The Best of Pink Floyd (CD 1)
and
Pink Floyd Pulse (Live) CD1
but I get no Amazon results or images for these despite them being million selling albums.
Your code is in place at home.kingboyk.com and I’m really grateful for it. Cheers mate.
Hi Steve, I’m glad you like SilverSpider Play List! I haven’t built in support for (CD 1) and the like, though it is still on my future features list. I just haven’t had a ton of time. One note, if you use ‘(Disc 1)’, SSPL does strip that, providing proper Amazon searches. I know it isn’t ideal, especially if you have an extensive collection of MP3s, but it is an option.
Please continue to send me your questions and feedback!