Monday, July 10, 2006

The new ScrobblerDJ

ScrobblerDJ is a script I wrote for MediaMonkey. Basically it uses Last.FM community statistics as a base to play songs you already have in your library. It's a really cool feature if you have a large library (more than 10,000 tracks) as it allows you to dig out music treasures that perhaps you don't even know you have...
The last month I am rewriting the whole script from scratch as it started as a simple one but I kept adding more and more users’ requests and at the end the script was filled with spaghetti code making it very hard to further evolve it.
So, a new version it on the way, but because soon I will move to Cyprus for my PhD (I live in Greece now) I also have to finish a lot of other stuff, making the progress of the development really slow...
Perhaps this is the main reason I wrote this post since somewhere deep in my head I believe that this way I will be "forced" to speed things up.
Anyway, here is a brief list of things (in random order) that the new ScrobblerDJ will support:

  1. Asynchronous XML retrieval (already available)
  2. Check if Artist's tracks are accessible (already available)
  3. Don't play the same artist unless X minutes have passed (already available)
  4. Error trapping (already available, further improvement)
  5. Exclude artists based on Last.FM match (already available)
  6. Add ScrobblerDJ icon (already available)
  7. Options dialog (already available, further improvement)
  8. Error logging (already available)
  9. Fix special characters (e.g. &, /) from and to Last.FM (already available, further improvement)
  10. Don't play the same song unless X minutes have passed
  11. Don’t play same album unless X minutes have passed (especially for various artists)
  12. Allow larger values in the restrictions (e.g. days)
  13. Add more than 1 songs every time
  14. Option to start ScrobblerDJ even if not the last song in playlist
  15. Exclude tracks by “Genres”
  16. Skip and mark as played
  17. Option to not show status bar
  18. Option to always show status bar when ScrobblerDJ is on
  19. Right click on any track in my library and then play the track(s) in my library that are highest on that artist's chart
  20. Play tracks from "Default genre" (along with the "Default Playlist")
  21. Better recognition of connectivity issues
  22. Option to delay Last.FM queries, so user has the chance to skip a track before query

1 comment:

Ioannis_K said...

Ok Sam, i will check on it
Thanks for reporting