Present Perfect

On the bad side of life, I was planning to go to an awesome Calcotada in Lleida today, but I spent last night awake until 4:30 with an upset stomach, so I had to cancel and stay home feeling like shit.

On the good side of life, I really had no excuse left to not do a little long overdue hacking on Digital Audio Database.

I still use it regularly to listen to music, but the GNonLin-based player is just really not very stable. I should really just rewrite it using simply adder just like roughly ten years ago, but my brain won't be able to do that. So instead I decided to clean up the web-based WebSockets using player I prototyped at OVC last year.

I started with some refactoring, clearly defining model/view/controller base classes and adapting the player and playerview classes to them.

WebSocket code seems to need an update every few months - I pulled the latest revision of txWebsocket on my fork, so my recent browsers actually play music again.

Since the last time I hacked on this, I actually added my 1500+ freshly ripped cd's, in FLAC format - which browsers don't actually support.

So, first off, I added an option for the scheduler - responsible for picking tracks, and picking audio files to represent them - to filter by extension. It's not ideal, but it will do for now, and I punched that filter through the levels of abstraction in DAD. I now start it filtering on .mp3 and .oga, and so Chrome can play back all the tracks the scheduler throws at it.

The web-based player just loads tracks and timing info from the scheduler relative to page load time. I've been wanting to make that absolute for a while, so I did just that - the player server schedules tracks for epoch seconds now through websockets.

I had an entertaining half hour listening to the awesome echo effects obtained by having three chrome pages simultaneously playing the jukebox schedule - each page being slightly out of sync with the others.

As I'll be wanting to use a smallish computer for music playback using a browser, I adapted the code to not use localhost any longer, but do everything with relative URL's. Voila - the laptop now plays music too, a little bit more out of sync, and of course through its own speakers, adding to the eerie effect.

As an encore, I wanted to stumble my way through some jquery code, to which I'm a certified newbie. I want a nice background slideshow related to the current artist, and I pulled together echonest and bgstretcher-2 as an experiment.

That seems to work relatively well, except that the slideshow plugin doesn't let you reload a new set of images to cycle through. And some of the other ones I tried instead after that seemed to have the same problem.

Oh well, it's a start. If anyone knows of a good jquery background slideshow plugin that lets me update the list of url's for images at any time, let me know!

On the bad side of life, I was planning to go to an awesome Calcotada in Lleida today, but I spent last night awake until 4:30 with an upset stomach,...