Thanks Lucas. I love the stuff you, Ian, William White, and the rest of the Y! Music team are working on these days. I'm bummed we never met while I was working at Yahoo! Hopefully, we'll cross paths some day. Keep up the great work.
ian c rogers
· 1 year ago
This is great. Thanks for the kind words, too.
My Last.fm username is iancr, but I'm not getting any results. I should just keep trying, eh? Seems like those Stephen Malkmus songs would get a hit out there these days, those tracks are all over the blogosphere...
ian
Joe Lazarus
· 1 year ago
Hey Ian, there are some quirks. I'm using a narrowly defined search on Skreemr to find MP3s. In order to find a match, the track must be indexed by them and have the exact track / artist data in those specific fields. When I tried a less specific search, I was getting some false matches. I'd like to switch over to Hype Machine instead of Skreemr. I was using them before with better results for my own site, LastButNot. However, they store some of the MP3s on their machines and I didn't want to call more attention to those files since I don't think HypeM wants people downloading directly from them. I'll try some other approaches to see if I can increase the match rate.
Pipes caches the data hourly, so if you don't see anything now, wait at least an hour. Hopefully some tracks will come through. Once you load the feed into Tumblr, the updates will flow through automatically in the future.
Probably way more info than you wanted.
YMP is awesome. Thanks!
~ Joe
Joe Lazarus
· 1 year ago
Ian, I just made some changes that should improve the MP3 match rate without sacrificing much in terms of match quality. The changes should push live within the hour. I hope that helps.
pat
· 1 year ago
Holy cow, this is a brilliant mashup of web bits. Such an awesome idea. I'm in awe.
Joe Lazarus
· 1 year ago
aww, shucks. thanks pat!
davidporter
· 1 year ago
Joe - I'm getting same issue Ian had. I've typed in my lastfm username but i'm not getting any tracks. I haven't listened through iTunes in a few days (listening on 8tracks ; ) ) so maybe it needs fresh data or something?
Joe Lazarus
· 1 year ago
David, part of the problem is that Skreemr doesn't have MP3 search results for some of your recent Last.fm tracks. However, I just noticed that Skreemr is also limiting the number of searches from Pipes. They must have some detection that limits the number of searches for a given IP address per minute. So, I just made a change to how the Pipe tries to find MP3s. First, it searches Skreemr and tries to find your tracks from their results. If it doesn't find the track or Skreemr blocks the search IP address, the Pipe tries to find the same track on the Hype Machine (as a backup option). That should help.
Once you load the feed into Tumblr, this stuff shouldn't be an issue. If the track isn't found, it will just skip to the next one. It's only this first step that's kind of a pain... getting a feed with at least one result or Tumblr won't let you import it. As you can tell, the entire process is a hack and not as stable or user-friendly as a real web app.
Julissa, it looks like your site is updating. Note that it won't include every track you listen to. It only posts new tracks (ones not previously posted to Tumblr) and it only posts songs when it was able to find a matching MP3 online through either Skreemr or the Hype Machine. So, it's an incomplete list, but still a good reflection of your music interests.
Humantarget, I was just able to listen to a few songs on your site. It worked fine for me. The Yahoo! Media Player will occasionally skip over a track if the site that is hosting the MP3 is unusually slow. It tries to play the track, but if it doesn't start within a few seconds, it skips to the next track.
Nice work, Joe. I really like the way this trick turns people's listening habits directly into blogging without introducing any intermediate friction. At http://grabb.it we're trying to do a very similar thing. We let you search for songs and browse what other people are talking about. It's easy to make a playlist so the the music keeps rolling while you're doing something else. Whenever you find a song you especially like, you can blog about it right there on the spot. What you write will show up on your own personal Grabb.it blog (mine's here: http://grabb.it/users/greg ) and you can also send them to your existing Tumblr or Blogger blog (like I do with mine: http://idfdz.tumblr.com ). I think it's s a similar spirit of intermingling listening and blogging to what you're trying to accomplish here.
Glad you like it. Interesting modification too. I think I like mine with just MP3 links, but I do like that your version provides a more complete view of your listening habits, whether the MP3's are available or not. Nice job!
edythe
· 1 year ago
sparkles or joe, it would be great if sparkles' Pipe could be combined with the Loved Tracks Pipe?
Unfortunately, I am having issues with the media player. None of the tracks are playing. I just tried to play some tracks on LastButNot and noticed the same issue. Have you run into this problem lately or often?
Thanks for the pipe and post.
Joe Lazarus
· 1 year ago
Hey Todd, the player is working ok for me on LastButNot, but the tracks on your site aren't working. I don't think the issue is the player. Rather, it's the MP3 files that your page is pointing to. The way this thing works, it searches for a MP3 on Seeqpod and posts a link. The problem is that sometimes the site that hosts the MP3 file removes the track from their site at some later point. Some sites automatically remove MP3's after a few days so that they avoid possible legal issues. So, it's not uncommon that a few tracks on your page won't play. A good way to see if that's the problem (vs. some other issue) is to click on the MP3 link from your page and see if the track appears in your browser. If you get an error message, it means that the track was removed from the site my Pipe linked to earlier. I wish I had a way of updating the links in that case, but I don't now.
Hope that helps. If you give it some time, your site will probably pick up some active links. In my experience, the links work probably 70-80% of the time.
Todd Wickersty
· 1 year ago
Thanks Joe for the info. I'll keep posting tracks and checking things out.
steveray
· 1 year ago
I put this up as a sidebar plugin at http://Youarekillingme.net using the tublr javascript. Love it! Any ideas for taking the post track title out so it just displays once?
Joe Lazarus
· 1 year ago
Cool. You could modify the Pipe if you know how to do that. Another option, which is probably much easier and might look better, is to use the Yahoo! Easylistener sidebar widget to play your Tumblr page instead of that javascript you're using. Go to this page:
Hey! the RSS looks great in Friendfeed as well: they have a player there so it's a great addition! I just added my loved tracks from the other pipe as a "blog feed" and it works just as I thought it would! thanks for the Yahoo pipe!
Joe Lazarus
· 1 year ago
philou, i added the feed to my friendfeed page a while ago. i like it, but there are a few things i want to change. i plan to make a version of the feed specifically for friendfeed that will include some additional stuff. stay tuned!
Joe, those pipelines you set up are awesome. Thank you so much for putting those together. I just finished putting my music log together. http://lionsden.tumblr.com
I wanted to ask you, where did you get the custom script that makes your Tumblr look so snazzy? I'd love to fix my other Tumblelog up. Thanks again!
-B
Joe Lazarus
· 1 year ago
Bernard, I made my themes myself since I wanted something unique. I'm not very good at HTML & CSS, but I just started with one of the standard themes and modified it till it looked the way I wanted. It's not that hard if you have the patience.... or, you could always pay someone to make you a custom theme.
All Comments
My Last.fm username is iancr, but I'm not getting any results. I should just keep trying, eh? Seems like those Stephen Malkmus songs would get a hit out there these days, those tracks are all over the blogosphere...
ian
Pipes caches the data hourly, so if you don't see anything now, wait at least an hour. Hopefully some tracks will come through. Once you load the feed into Tumblr, the updates will flow through automatically in the future.
Probably way more info than you wanted.
YMP is awesome. Thanks!
~ Joe
Once you load the feed into Tumblr, this stuff shouldn't be an issue. If the track isn't found, it will just skip to the next one. It's only this first step that's kind of a pain... getting a feed with at least one result or Tumblr won't let you import it. As you can tell, the entire process is a hack and not as stable or user-friendly as a real web app.
i made one (http://modernthings.tumblr.com/), but it seems to have stopped updating :\
thanks for this, though!!
Cheers from Paris, France.
any idea ?
http://humantarget.tumblr.com/
this is my page: http://matthieumusic.tumblr.com/
The steps you outlined worked great, thanks very much!
My site is here: http://sparklesbian.tumblr.com/
I modified the pipe so it adds an item if an mp3 can't be found. It's here: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=fcf6...
Cheers!
Sparkles*
I finally got around to doing this - http://music.toddwickersty.net
Unfortunately, I am having issues with the media player. None of the tracks are playing. I just tried to play some tracks on LastButNot and noticed the same issue. Have you run into this problem lately or often?
Thanks for the pipe and post.
Hope that helps. If you give it some time, your site will probably pick up some active links. In my experience, the links work probably 70-80% of the time.
http://next.yahoo.net/archives/32/easylistener
Enter your Tumblr URL as the "playlist URL", customize the size and color of the player, copy the code, and paste it into your blog template.
I wanted to ask you, where did you get the custom script that makes your Tumblr look so snazzy? I'd love to fix my other Tumblelog up. Thanks again!
-B
very good at HTML & CSS, but I just started with one of the standard themes
and modified it till it looked the way I wanted. It's not that hard if you
have the patience.... or, you could always pay someone to make you a custom
theme.
I've made mine at http://listenow.tumblr.com
Thanks! :)