Building a "Now Playing" Wall

I wish it was a wall, big enough for album covers and touch interaction, instead of having to fit everything into a little page. Here's what there is so far (click for bigger):

2008-02-21-Nowplaying

  1. "Now playing" track metadata, received by XMPP from Amarok (or somewhere else, like a radio station).
  2. Play controls for Amarok (XMPP).
  3. Similar artists (Last.fm), with pictures if no local albums. Linked to last.fm artist pages.
  4. Local albums (MySQL) for each similar artist, click to play in Amarok (HTTP).
  5. Musicbrainz info: web links (Discogs, Wikipedia, Myspace, etc), albums (green if available locally, click to play; red linked to source for downloads), band members.
  6. Last.fm info: artist bio, top tags.
  7. YouTube videos (moved this back into a single column already, it was taking up too much room).
  8. List of tracks from the currently playing album, shown on mouseover, click to play.

TODO: Add an embedded BBC radio player widget at the top. After a period of inactivity everything should probably fade out and just show the album cover.

February 20, 2008

Comments

This is an interesting hack.

I wrote a similar bot which, I have been said, has less than six degrees of separation with the BBC one.

It doesn't use the Last.fm or the MusicBrainz APIs but the Seeqpod and the Yahoo music ones.

Metadata are passed in user tune and in presence ; an ad hoc user mood is used to display the status of the bot (e.g : checking radio playlist, checking Seeqpod API, checking covers at Yahoo API, etc.) ; and covers are sent as vcard images.

Here are some suggestions :

How about using WidgetRunner [1] instead of Firefox, perhaps with a xmpp4moz ? This would allow to not have Firefox opened all the time.

And all traffic could pass over XMPP including images, for example as a vcard image (XEP-0054 & XEP-0153), or as a user avatar (XEP-0084) or perhaps with (a not recommended) XHTML-IM presence, or even with messages but without notifications (of the widget).


[1] http://www.developerfriendly.com/projects/WidgetRunner

Posted by: kael on February 20, 2008 6:00 PM

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