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July 24th 2007. Plastic Tunes

Plastic Tunes is a "now-playing" plugin for wordpress that allows your blog to collect and display informations about the music you play in your media player. Artists, titles, albums and pretty much any information included in your digital music files. All goes into your database for real-time or later use, ready to be displayed on your sidebar, on a dedicated page or wherever you want. The concept of this plugin, and quite a few lines of code were originally taken from version 0.1 of the muTunes plugin, made by Ken Smith -- although Plastic Tunes grew a lot since then.

Download latest version

» Plastic Tunes version 1.4
~ 950 new downloads since July 27th, 2007

Changelog

v. 1.4 Compatible with Wordpress 2.5, and minor fixes and redesign.

(Consult the read me file for a complete changelog.)

Features

-- Multi-User Capable
Saves to your Wordpress DB all informations from the music you listen to
-- Works with iTunes, Winamp, Foobar2000, QCD, and others
-- Flood Protection
-- Password Protection
-- Formatting easiness & flexibility
-- Widgets compatibility
-- The possibility to toggle the state of the sidebar elements according to the state of the media player
-- Automatic Google links for Artists and Albums if you need them
... and much more

For the future: If I find a satisfying way to do it, I might put back on the Amazon functionality muTunes had. I Also have one or two ideas to further amplify the flexibility of the formatting options. If I don't get bored before...

Screenshots

plastic_tunes3.jpg
-- In action on the sidebar

plastic_tunes1.jpg
-- a glimpse of the option page

Installation istructions (and much more)

Please consult the read me file included with the plugin. And comments, suggestions and requests are always welcome.

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23 Responses to “Plastic Tunes” :



daniele said

A question: i am a BLOGSOME platform user - was wandering if it is possibile to add that plug in into my remote server since it is based upon wordpress. I will check myself but i would like to know if you think it’s possibile.

a proposito, bel sito…



corpodibacco said

daniele: I don’t know about blogsome, I’m sorry. If you can try it there, please do and let me know the results. ps. thank you, I’m glad you like my blog–



Wil said

I can’t seem to get this to work. The instructions say that a user_id is provided in the options screen, but when I go there, there’s text that mentions it, but no actual user_id. I tried using the user_id from my users page, but that doesn’t seem to do anything. There’s no password provided on the options page either. Am I missing something? Where are these?

Thanks.



corpodibacco said

Wil, it should be in the table just below the italic descriptive text that ends with “Use the UserID and Password below for each user that is submitting music infos to the DB.” The colum titles of the table are “UserID”, “Name” and “Password”.
It is odd if you don’t see nothing under there. You can try leaving blank the “Password hash” field above and go without a password.
In any case your User ID is the same you can find on the “users” > “authors & users” page where in the table it says “ID”.
What version/kind of wordpress are you using? (I never tested this plugin with things like WP Mu or older versions of WP…)



Wil said

Thanks for the quick response. I’m using the latest version of WordPress. I’ll try reinstalling the plugin and see if that helps.



jwideman said

Very confused, both in setting up nowplaying and this plugin itself.
The instructions say this for nowplaying:
Extra Data = uid=USER_ID&pw=PASSWORD_HASH_FROM_SETUP
Okay, fair enough - but do I use the NAME or the UID NUMBER? Do I use the password hash I ENTERED or the one this plugin GENERATES?!?
In putting the widget on my page, I set the user ID to 1. How come NOTHING shows on my page?



jwideman said

Also, it’s plastic-tunes, not plastic_tunes as you have in the readme.



corpodibacco said

@jwideman:
USER_ID it’s the number (usually 1, check the table in the options page).
The password hash is the one you GENERATED (otherwise what you generated it for?)
If nothing shows on your page it could be because of one of the options in the options page.
“Songs to display a time” must not be 0;
“Hide the sidebar element if the player stops” must not be checked unless you try the plugin while winamp is playing a song (and nowplaying is working OK).

More importantly, nothing shows up if there is nothing to show up. If nowplaying is not sending to the blog any data, plastic tunes will not show the title or any other element as well. Make sure nowplaying works, and send in at least one song: something will then show up.



jwideman said

Okay, I sort of got it working, but it doesn’t update for every song. About 1/3 of the songs even end up in the database.



pixelpusher said

hey just wondering if theres a way to add support for album art. great plug in. email me if you ever get around to it. thanks!



Jens said

After 1.5 Days of testing i cant get it to work. Data from “NowPLying” dont go to the database. If i setup Nowplay to put it via FTP on my webspace than it works. I dont now why, but it downst work anymore.



corpodibacco said

@jens and all the other that may encounter problems with this plugin: Plastic Tunes is far from perfect and I know it still needs a lot of work… unfortunately now I don’t have the time and I can’t say when I will. So I apologize for my not being able to give support on this plugin or any other for that matter… I wish things were different but that’s how it goes right now.



GG said

It is now working for me. The sidebar doesn’t show no matter if I have the “hide” button checked or not.



Jenn said

Am I correct in assuming that this plugin is not compatible with WP 2.5? I uploaded it to my plugins folder, but when I tried to activate it I was given the following message:

Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.



corpodibacco said

@Jenn, true, but the plugin has been updated now and it should work with WP 2.5 without problems.



Cordanim said

Hmmm, having the same issues with it not showing in my sidebar…it should be at the top of my righthand sidebar. Finally figured out the USERID (using 1 since I’m the only user) and PASSWORD (which I set in the Plastic Tunes options page and also in my NowPlaying WinAmp plugin…)

Nothing showing though :(



Cordanim said

Checking the “nowplaying.php” file from my admin dashboard it’s not adding any songs from what I can see…yet the NowPlaying WinAmp plugin doesn’t seem to be generating any errors…

Hmmm…



corpodibacco said

have you checked the settings of plastic tunes? maybe where it says “Songs to display a time” something is not set right? Are you sure of the NowPlaying configuration as well? Also: have you hashed the password?



Cordanim said

Yeah all the settings in Plastic Tunes seem right (using USERID 1 - I’m the only user)…songs to display at a time is just left at the default…and the NowPlaying config seems right as every time a new song starts, I see it going through the motions of updating via the HTTP Post…when I go to the Manage page of Plastic Tunes, though in my blog, there are no songs being added (none in the list). I must have done something wrong…using WP 2.5 and your latest version (1.4 I believe).

Great idea and I’d love it to work :)

Kev



Cordanim said

When you say “have you hashed the password” what exactly do you mean, sorry? I entered a password in the options page and saved the changes…added the password to the line in NowPlaying plugin…is there something else involved there that I’ve missed?



Mike said

I had some problems getting it to work with Winamp and the NowPlaying plugin. No songs were added to the database.

In the ‘extra data’ field you need to add the & before the uid, like this:
&uid=USER_ID&pw=PASSWORD_HASH_FROM_SETUP.
This was not there in the readme.

Also note that the plastic tunes url should be with */plastic-tunes/* instead of */plastic_tunes/*

Now it’s working perfectly, thank you!!



hobo said

Does it work on OSX?



Jerome said

it’s not working for me.

I mean i just extract the curl.exe, and put on my C:\ — (no need to install ??? )
then i wonder why won’t it will update my website ???

do i need to rename my folder to plastic-itune, or just edit the input in AIMP to “plastic-itune”

please englighten

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WP Plugins DB » Plugin Details » Plastic Tunes // ITUNES TOOLBOX: 30+ Tools For iTunes // 30+ 个iTunes周边工具 at 火星猴.部落 // links for 2007-08-22 « napyfab:blog // iTunes ToolBox: +30 outils/services pour iTunes // Winamp- und Picasaeinbindung in Wordpress : Rainer Bendig
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