Muusic

Yeah, you've probably already noticed the new feature around these parts - recently played tracks. This is just to confirm that, yes, you can have your recently played tracks published automatically on SE, as long as you're using one of the following: Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes, foobar2000, XMMS, AmaroK, QCD, RhythmBox, J. River Media Centre or Noaturn.

So that should be just about everyone. I expect to get a whole bunch of messages from people who have signed up. I want to see how many pages I can get the script to retrieve before it goes into meltdown.

Edit: Answer: Many, many pages

Comments

Yes, audioscrobbler is very cool. I particularly like how you can check out other users who are big fans of music on your list at a single click....

I'm still waiting for them to refresh the index so that I can check out my 'musical neighbours'

That's No Name.

Yeah, I posted that. Strange. Really strange.

I wonder how many song wars are going to esculate?

A couple of my tracks consistently don't show up on Audioscrobbler... And one that did even refused to show up on the SE sidebar despite being my latest track for over 12 hours. Still, this is very cool.

If an mp3 doesn't have an id3 tag (version 1 or 2), it won't show up on AudioScrobbler, no matter what you do. Note that Winamp will try and guess metadata by looking at the filename, but the Winamp plugin specifically doesn't guess because of the protocol guidelines. This makes it hard to tell which of your mp3s are actually tagged. Make *sure* the song has a tag, and try and make it accurate.

Also, AudioScrobbler has close links to the MusicBrainz database - a database of metadata that works with a sortof 'audio hash' if you like - songs that sound the same are supposed to come out with similar hashes reguardless of encoding. If your tags aren't up to date with this database, AudioScrobbler will often give an OK back to the plugin, but not add the track to the submissions queue. You could use the MusicBrainz tagger to update all your mp3s at once, but I've found it's not yet very accurate for rare tracks, or tracks you've ripped yourself.

Then there's the question of how long the submissions queue currently is. If you look at the plugin config there's a figure called 'submission interval' - it's basically an indicator of how busy the AS server is. The lower the number, the lower the load on the server. Apparently it can sometimes reach figures of around 400. If this number is high, the submissions may show up on the 'Recently Played' on your AS profile, but not make it to the Webservices server which is what SE parses.

After a few hours, a track isn't ever going to show up on SE. This is because a 'recently played' list isn't the same as a 'last played' list - tracks gradually drop off a recently played list, and if you haven't played a track in the last few hours your list could actually be empty. Repeating the song might help.

Also, note that the AS system does a bit of parsing on the song that you submit before it goes into their databases. They have a type of redirect system (they call it moderation), whereby a commonly submitted but erroneous song name can be automatically changed to what it actually is. So, Green Day - Time of Your Life might be changed to Good Riddance. The problem with this system is that they're not too worried about case. This might be why a Sentence-Capitalised track is appearing in lower-case.

Finally, just to fill in Laura's question below - the recently played on SE updates every five minutes, reguardless of if anyone is visiting the site. At the moment I'm still tweaking it a bit - it seems to be dropping about 5% of the updates because it can't reach the SE database. It's getting better though.

In any case, it's very cool so well done.

Thanks :)

Does it only update on SE when Dom updates/comes on to SE or does it automatically update as wsoon and someone starts using their selected media palyer (updating on SE im meaning)

All the time. Cept it hasn't got my last track that I played hours ago...

It does that to me sometimes too. I think it depends on the Audioscrobbler website too. It is very puzzling(sp?) tho

Yeah it's odd. I have found a few of my tracks don't get listed on audioscrobbler at all, and a few do get listed on audioscrobbler but don't get updated onto SE. I've played a few tracks since Blur-Tender which is currently displayed as my latest track. Still, it's pretty cool to see what people are listening too, even if it isn't *absolutely* perfect.

Yeah. I have found that if you play short songs or only listen to part of a song it doesn't show up on your recently played tracks list. There must be a time limit for how long audioscrobbler considers a 'track' to be.

I dunno about it being a length thing - the tracks of mine that don't show up on Audioscrobbler aren't particularly short. And then there are the tracks that show up on Audioscrobbler, but don't make it to the SE display, despite being my latest track for hours and hours.... Mysterious.....

The time limits are as follows:

- Tracks under 30 seconds are not submitted
- Tracks over 30 minutes are not submitted
- You must listen to either 50% or 240 seconds of a song, whichever is shorter, before it is submitted

But I think it's more likely that you've got not ID3 tags, or erroneous tags on the songs that aren't showing up.

Ok, so in layman's terms, how exactly do I go about fixing these tags?

You just update them don't you? As far as I know (if you're using Winamp), you right-click on the song you want to update the tag on, select either the ID3v1 or ID3v2 tag and manually update the data by typing the correct information into the boxes. You then click "Update". Am i right? Am I even close?

EDIT:

When you right-click selecy "View File Info...", THEN select one of the two tags...

Yep. There is an easier way though:

If Winamp has done it's job and correctly guessed the track name and artist by looking at the filename, you can just select an mp3 (or multiple mp3s with this method), and push CTRL + E. Make sure update file tag(s) is highlighted and push enter - no need to manually type the info in.

I guess if I am using Windows Media Player then I'm s--t out of luck. I have looked everywhere in WMP and can't find anywhere I can select or edit anything. Or I'm a retard.

WMP is a bitch of a program... I really don't enjoy using it. (When I have too..)

Yeah, I think Microsoft removed the 'select' functionality - it was confusing too many of their users.

This just in - by visiting the audio.php page, or by going mouse-over on the little icon in the sidebar, you can check how long until the next update.

It really awesome when it just stays at 2 minutes and 51 seconds.
Though if my brain is working i'm guessing it takes the 'time to go' from when the page is loaded??

Whoa! Double postage-ness havn't seen that in a while!