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Feature request #230: REQUEST: Upload current track information to website with cover thumbnail and Amazon/iTMS links

Kind feature request
Product Synergy Advance
When Created , updated
Status open
Reporter Greg Hurrell
Tags no tags

Description

From a user email:

"I've been using Synergy more or less as long as I have using Mac OS X, which started with 10.2. It's probably the most useful tool I have installed .. anyway a few months ago I started my own blog and found the tool Recent Tunes 2.0 by Freshly Squeezed software ( see http://freshsqueeze.com/products/freeware) .. any this software basically allows you to produce a small text file / PHP etc that you can then FTP to your web server and hence you can display what tunes you have listening to.

Well as was good until I upgraded to Tiger .. and now Recent Tunes 2.0 doesn't work correctly .. e.g. I have to clear it's plist file everytime I want to use. So anyway I contacted the author asking if he planned to update it to Tiger compatiable .. simple answe was no he didn't .. and from his response I think he means it

I great example of what can be done with Recent Tunes is here http://www.command-tab.com/ .. anyway I have briefly played with Synergy Advance .. it looks good so far. Anyway you speak about having modules that you bring online afterwards and having a sort of plugin API stuff going on. Do you think you could add support in a feature such as what Recent Tunes offered ?? Maybe even expand upon it so tha Synergy produced thumbnails of the artwork .. linked to Amazon and even the iTunes Music Store ?? "

My response:

You can achieve what you're looking for already with Synergy Classic but it does require some work. The last few versions released have had the ability to run scripts when the track changes. Some people have produced scripts that do stuff like update their iChat status or update their website.

The next public preview release of Synergy Advance will also have a scripts feature like that but it will have several enhancements.

I was planning to add this kind of thing (independently of the scripts capability) but these two ideas (the thumbnails and the Amazon/iTMS links) are new.

My idea for the "write current track info to file" feature was to allow the user to customize what gets written by using a template. The fields in the template get populated with whatever the user wants (title, artist etc). Can you let me know the kind of file that you would like to see produced? Send me a sample perhaps?

I was also toying with the idea of having Synergy Advance take care of the uploading of it automatically but I am not sure yet.

Comments

  1. Greg Hurrell

    Reply received via email:

    Yes I think using a template format is definitely the way to go, Recent Tunes 2.0 does it via templates and it works quite well

    On Recent Tunes it has a Header, Current Tune, Recent Tunes, Idle and Footer

    Then it lists place holders .. e.g. song title as ^t , artist as ^p

    The fields they use are

    song title artist composer album year time genre rating count url current date file comment

    For each template you specify what the file should be saved as .. for example I have mine to write Current Tune as current_tune.php ..

    I guess extra to the fields mentioned above would be a link to iTMS .. and possibly a link to the iTMS artwork .. or artwork of Amazon.co.uk, best would be maybe if somewhere it was possible to specify a size for a thumbnail .. e.g. 100 x 100 pixels .. and then if Synergy could produce a thumbnail for that album, probably using some unique ID as the filename, so once the artwork is produced once it doesn't need to be done again. To me it should store the outputted files inside the users Sites folder .. and then ideally FTP it all to the webserver .. because more than likely the webserver isn't the same machine that they have iTunes running on.

    Like I say if you check this site http://www.command-tab.com/index.php/my-recent-tunes-code/ .. they explain better than I can what could be done with this type of idea.

  2. Greg Hurrell

    See also request #96, which is about updating weblogs by hitting an appropriately configured remote URL.

  3. Greg Hurrell

    See also:

    https://wincent.dev/a/support/forums/showflat.php?Number=845

  4. Greg Hurrell

    See also request #171, which is about controlling which types of notification will cause track change items to be launched.

  5. Greg Hurrell

    Changing assignment to reflect my new email address.

    https://wincent.dev/a/news/archives/2006/05/change_of_email.php

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