Top Playlists This Month

We’ve been going back and forth on the time period to use for the top playlists section of the index. Lately the new and top lists have been pretty similar so we just changed the top playlists to cover the previous month. If it looks like things are getting too static we can switch it back.

Stats Processing Bump

Our stats processor crashed the other day and stopped importing play counts. Everything is back up now, so if you’ve had problems with your profile give it another shot.

Musicmobs Upgrade

Welcome to the Musicmobs blog! We’ve just released a batch of new features, dive in to learn more…

Play in Rhapsody – Lately we’ve been pretty excited about Rhapsody. We’ve always wanted to provide a way to open playlists into a music subscription service but until now, no APIs were mature enough. The new Rhapsody Web Services API offered a great way to link into their service and play the majority of the songs in any playlist on the web. Clicking “Play” will search Rhapsody for all of the songs in the playlist (or song list). It doesn’t always find everything but this should improve over time.
To use this, you’ll need to download the Rhapsody plugin (you’ll be prompted at some point when you click a Play icon). You get 25 plays for free without registering, after that you’ll have to get a Rhapsody subscription for unlimited plays.
This is the first step in a multi-part integration. Next up is tracking play counts from Rhapsody.

Improved CSS – We redid the CSS for all the pages to make the site more “liquid”. Content will now stretch if you resize your browser window. This should make for much better browsing at higher resolutions. We also updated the headers and tweaked various other UI elements. Consider the layout 60% complete. More updates on this coming soon…

Tag Cloud – Always a useful way to represent a folksonomy. This was part of an index redesign with more of a focus on functionality. The cloud is based on popular tags for the last 2 months. The time interval may change depending on playlist flow.

New Tag Pages – We now break out the playlists by popularity and what’s new on the tag pages (for example the “indie” tag). This should make it easier to find interesting playlists that you may have missed the first time around.

Better Playlist RSS Feeds – All playlist RSS feeds now include links to play in Rhapsody and to download a XSPF for each playlist. We also added some playlist metadata like tags, creator and date created.

More RSS Feeds – There are now RSS feeds for new and popular playlists for each tag and new playlists for each artist.

This Blog – The news has been removed from the index and replaced by this WordPress blog. I think it’s going to be a big improvement since it will allow for more 2 way communication. We’ve entered our backlog of news and at some point soon we’ll tweak the CSS of the blog to make it look cool.

If you have any questions about the new features just let us know!

UPDATE: The Rhapsody integration looks like it’s working in IE now. Please let me know if you have any problems.

Musicmobs is Back!

Our web server had a hardware failure and needed to be replaced, but the new hardware is up and seems to be performing well. Make sure to kick the tires a bit and please let us know if anything seems to be wrong.Now that we’re back up, we’ve got a few updates we want to roll out. Keep your eye out news soon…

Layout Changes

We’re testing some more layout changes. Make sure to clear your browser cache if things look funny.

WimAmp support!

Big news! Apparently there is a WinAmp plugin that allows you to export your playlist in iTunes XML format. This means that WinAmp users can now update their stats to Musicmobs! I haven’t personally tested it out, but one user has successfully signed up and uploaded his WinAmp stats. You can check out the plugin here. I’ll add more info about how this works after I find out a bit more. For now though, let your WinAmp friends know that there is a way for them to use Musicmobs.

Artist page updates

Put up my first round of artist page changes. Make sure to login to get the full effect. I also moved a lot of info off of the user artist page. So now when you click on an artist in a user library it will take you to just their song list with a link to get to the overall site summary for that artist. Anyway, I hope you guys like it, I sure do.

Album suggestions fix

Just tuned up the album suggestions a bit and fixed a bug that was causing multiples of the same album to appear. I also added links to the itms.

User page usability

I changed the user page a bit in the first of a series of usability refactorings. The “Favorite Users” and “Top Played Songs” have been moved to their own pages (you can now see all of your songs ordered by play count). I also put up the newest version of my album recommendation algorithm (which produces much better results). Due to the obscure nature of the results, the covers are gone and the album names get displayed in a list. On the plus side the results are now batched.

Album recommendations

This is only a test… You can now check out album recommendations for every user. I’m not sure if the results are good or not, so let me know if you hate them or love them. Oh yeah, I will be making it look better (or at least link it to the site a bit more). For now the links just go to Amazon.