Well, here it is. A WordPress plugin for the Hype Machine. A while back I suggested to the HypeM team that they develop a plugin to allow users to list their current ‘loved’ tracks. I have yet to see one (but I’m about as patient as a 5 year old waiting for Christmas), however I have been told they will be working on one shortly.  So i created my own plugin. Personally I will only be using the ‘loved tracks’, but I have included all of the features that their current javascript ‘widgets’ will allow you to do. This hypemachine widget will do the following

• Display X number of loved tracks
• Display X number of tracks from your loved feeds
• Display X number of recent tracks
• Display X number of popular tracks
• Display X number of now playing tracks

In a future release you’ll be able to do more like order the above listings, or anything else that HypeMachine users think would be useful. Suggestions welcome.

Download Plugin\Widget

Technorati Tags: The Hype Machine, HypeM, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Widgets, WordPress HypeM, WordPress HypeMachine

Well, it appears that by default the newly released version of Songbird 0.3.1pre includes a bookmark that integrates it pretty well with the Hype Machine. Granted it’s not the same as things used to be, but it’s about 5 times better than having to use the web interface for HypeM.

With this newly released “Developer Release” of songbird you can now have a playlist, regular media controllers, track length time/slider, a playlist etc. It’s a shame the player itself is so damn big, but as far as functionality goes it’s leaps and bounds above the current Hype Machine web interface.

In the future I’d like to whip up my own plugin or front end for the HypeM via either plugins/extensions or the webapi, but I assume that the HypeM crew will likely make their own (and probably cover it with Amazon and iTunes links) which would likely be prettier and more usable than anything I’d have time to develop.

So for all of you that commented down below I highly suggest you check out Songbird
I have provided a direct link to the latest  Windows Installer
Or you could just check out the songbird site on your own

Technorati Tags: HypeM, Hype Machine, Songbird

Well, The Hype Machine appears to be listening to what their users want, although I think they still have their fingers partially in their ears. They have recently reinstated a pop up flash player so that users can play music from a seperate window. (read their blog post here) However this new ‘pop up player’ (and I use the term very loosely) definitely leads some things to be desired.
The old player had a true playlist that I could access from the small, yet manageable window. It also had the ability to scroll through the list of songs and choose what I wanted and did not want to hear. It also had the features that we generally associate with the most basic of music players (shuffle, repeat, volume, playlists etc.), those are now gone. The new ‘player’ window itself doesn’t really resemble the old flash player at all. It looks more like a banner/pop up ad. When I first clicked on it, I kind of half hoped to shoot monkeys, or play the orbitz football game, and that it wasn’t the player at all. The window has the one song title in a large cutesy bold font type with 4+ lines of information about the blog post, and of couse the 4 buttons (back,pause,stop,forward) that only somehow make it look like some vague sort of audio playing tool.
Am I let down by the ‘pop up’ player? Yes! It’s still not up to par with what was once available, but will this stop me from using the site all together? At the moment no, but I can hold one hell of a grudge. If the Hype Machine considers the matter of a decent pop up audio player resolved, then perhaps I will go eventually look elsewhere.

One final note for those of you that had been accessing the old flash player via my site. The directories on their site that had the old flash player in it have been removed and the location of the XSPF (the open source playlist they use) has been encoded so unfortunately without a lot of work I can’t use this to play their tunes elsewhere. Here’s a tip to the Hype Machine. Release an open API so people can really use your site the way they want to use it. Thats the only way you’ll be able to become one of the ‘big boys’

Technorati Tags: The Hype machine, HypeM, Hype Machine, Flash Player

Well I began by editing my previous post but thought this deserved it’s own recognition.
So, you don’t like the new hype machine. Let me guess, you miss the functionality of the flash player.
Well fret no more, it’s still there, just hidden. I whipped up a small little page w/ some links on it for you (being I couldn’t get a search box to work properly from w/in this wordpress post)

HypeM Flash Player Links!

Technorati Tags: The Hype Machine, Flash Player

EDIT: Looks like something was changed, the search no longer works. Tempted to look into a work around, however I’m guessing it was done for a reason.

EDIT: Looks like the search ability has returned, and everything is fully functional again.  Kudos to you HypeM

In posts past “Music for the rest of us….” I suggested (and even linked to) numerous sites that provide a lot of different ways to discover new music. One of these sights that soon clearly became my favorite was “The Hype Machine“. Recently they have redone their system and have provide a new cutesy interface for their users while stripping so much of the functionality that the old user base had grown to love.

Within the past week or so I was allowed to participate in the closed beta. I found a couple of minor bugs as well as provided a lot of suggestions as to how the new site seemed to be lacking compared to the old one, as well as suggested features that didn’t exist on the new OR old sites. Today, the new Hype Machine was deployed to the masses, after a somewhat failed attempt to promote their own hype. They wanted users to sit at a page that contained an actively moving counter, and wait for 10,000 continuous users to be viewing that page before the actual site was deployed. Either they got antsy, or realized that they set their sights a little high and just called it good at 3000 some.
Upon my arrival to the new site I poked around for a bit, and for the most part it appeared to be the same as the beta that I had been toying with days before. They did fix the bug I found, but there was no implementation of any of the old or new features that I had suggested. Personally I was a little disappointed, secretly hoping that this was/is just the initial version of the new Hype Machine. But as far as I can tell, I don’t think it is. After reading through the comments on the latest hype machine blog post, it becomes quite evident that most everyone feels the same as I do. The general consensus is that we want our flash player back!

If you’re not familiar with The Hype Machine I’ll try my best to explain to you what it was then and how it is now. To start, site still allows you to search for artists or songs, and find blog postings about these artists and their music. Great, base functionality! So, the site still does allow you to discover music (it’s true purpose), it’s just not as friendly as it used to be. In the past there was a flash based player that would pop out and generally list 25-50 songs based on your selection (popular, what is being searched for now (now called SPY), or results from an artist or song search) You could see artist/title in this player, as well as skip, fast forward, rewind, randomize, loop etc.. Basically it had the functionality of any modern day media player, however it played songs over the web, instead of your personal music collection. This player has now gone missing. Instead you get a web page with songs listed. You can still play them, one at a time. If you play one, it will continue on to the next song, but only IF you have the browser window in front/active. No longer can you just start playing music and have it continue on it’s own. There is no way to Fast Forward or rewind a song any longer, just start, stop, and pause.

No one seems to know why this massively popular feature was stripped, and thus far the Hype Machine crew has not come forward and said why? If it was for legal reasons, I’d understand. I’ll still continue to use the site to find music I love, but it probably will no longer be my go to place to discover new tunes or just listen to a compilation of what the blogosphere (i promise I’ll never use that word again) is all a titter about.

Technorati Tags: The Hype Machine, Hype Machine, Music

EDIT 10/17/07: Do you miss the flash player (for me it’s mostly for the NOW(spy) music) If so, Read the post above

As some of you may know I tend to enjoy indie/less main stream music artists. The problem being is where to find such up and coming artists as well as get a hold of their music, being there isn’t much of an indie music scene in Waterloo Iowa. Well, problem solved! You’ll notice that I have added a new section on the right with websites that will provide you would hours of free music downloads (and not that streaming crap, or the 30 second clip crap that iTunes or amazon lets you listen to)

First up: Large Hearted Boy
This site features daily FREE (and legal if that’s a concern of yours) Music downloads as well as book reviews among other things. Personally I couldn’t care less about the book reviews, but I think that is because I read at a 3rd grade level

Up Next: The Hype Machine
The Hype Machine is an MP3 Blog aggregator that allows you to listen view streaming, or search blogs for artists which generally have links to full MP3s of their songs. I usually discover an artist I like and then go here to find a few more songs that they have available.

Third: Mars Needs Guitars
This site has daily downloads of bands that have some of their music available as well as somewhat random mixes or songs based on some theme that the author is feeling that day. (Note MP3 links are removed once they are 2 weeks old probably to keep people from leaching)

Last but not least: Del.icio.us MP3 filetype search
This is probably the most random of ways to find new artists or podcats. What this does is searches through delicious for links that point to a .MP3 file. Generally that link I provided consists of 5-10 of the most popular MP3s linked to however if you click the ALL link it will come up with all of the recently submitted links that point to MP3s. If you scroll to the bottom you can click “earlier” and it will go back to older links as well. Yes you find a lot of trash and a lot of random crap but there are also some gems buried in there as well.

One final note, if you actually explore these links and the music contained in those pages do yourself a favor and don’t just download it and listen to it once and delete it because it sounds weird. Listen to the lyrics, and all the different styles that you may come across. Anything I download i listen to 2-3 times at least then judge if I feel like adding it to my collection.

Technorati Tags: MP3, MP3 Downloads, Legal MP3s, indie music