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Kung-Tunes - Post your iTunes listening habits to the web Pick of the Week
Kung-Tunes iconThe macosxhints Rating:
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I spent much of my time this weekend working on a new site for our family pages. The original site was pure HTML, and as a result (you know what's coming), it was never updated. So this weekend I installed something like 12 different blogs on my OS X box and started playing around with them. After much research, I decided that Textpattern was the package that best fit my needs. But that's a different story (or a future Pick of the Week, perhaps).

In the course of setting up Textpattern, I was browsing their forums and stumbled across a post explaining how to put iTunes song information on your Textpattern page using an application called Kung-Tunes. Kung-Tunes has been previously hinted here, but I'd never seen it (full proof that I no longer have the time to try absolutely every program that gets mentioned!).

After downloading Kung-Tunes and playing with its capabilities, I came away impressed enough to make it this week's Pick of the Week. Using a template, you can create an HTML file that gets updated each time your song changes (or on a schedule you specify). You control what information (track, artist, etc.) gets presented, as well as how many songs are presented. Since the file you're creating is straight HTML, you can embed tables, formatting, etc., to really make some sharp looking output. The forum post I was reading even explained how to include URLs for the CDDB, so the songs, artists, and albums are all linked back to informational pages. Once created, the file is then transferred to your webserver via FTP or other methods.

Kung-Tunes has a few limitations, mainly imposed by AppleScript and iTunes itself -- you can't post lists of songs if your library and songs live on your iPod, and iTunes AppleScript support of the Music Store is currently missing. But that's about all I ran across during my use this weekend.

Kung-Tunes may not be the most important application ever released, but it's a fun way to add some dynamic content to your website, as long as you're willing to tell the world what type of music you listen to!
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Kung-Tunes - Post your iTunes listening habits to the web
Authored by: Ranger Rick on May 05, '03 12:53:25PM
Another related but different thing is AudioScrobbler. It's a site where you can see everything you've played in your MP3 player and it correlates your listening habits with users that have similar tastes. Good way to find new bands you might like. (AudioScrobbler has an iTunes plugin called iScrobbler to submit your music to the site).

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Problems Using AudioScrobbler
Authored by: grrr223 on May 05, '03 05:46:06PM

I don't know what caused it, but a few days after I installed Audioscrobbler, it started sending duplicate copies of my songs. It would send 3, 4, 5 copies of it to them, so the stats were all messed up. It was a fun idea, but it just uses up too many resources, accessing the internet 3 times a song.

Also, keep in mind that any program or script that accesses iTunes can be a huge system hog. There is no way for iTunes to notify the programs when a song has completed, so they have to poll the program every so often, some as often as every 3 or 5 seconds, it takes a toll on your system in a big way, esp. if you have more than one running at a time, like I do sometimes when I have Synergy, AudioScrobbler, M-Beat, and a few Konfabulator widgets all accessing it every so often. I eventually just settled on Synerty with the access interval at it's most system-friendly setting. Using the function keys as hot keys to rate a song from any program at any time is sooo awesome.



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Polling...
Authored by: robg on May 05, '03 07:21:55PM

That's one of the nice things about Kung-Tunes; I set the polling time manually to three minutes -- no need to update more often than that as far as I can tell...

-rob.



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Kung-Tunes - Post your iTunes listening habits to the web
Authored by: aranor on May 05, '03 06:07:06PM
I personally enjoy a prefpane called iChatStatus. It runs an applescript/shell script at a user-settable interval (mine's set at 5 seconds) and sets the iChat status to the return value of the script. The default script grabs information from iTunes, and I edited the script to also write the information out to a file. I then wrote a simple PHP script to interpret, the file, and so you get this page. Very nifty :D

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Kung-Tunes - Post your iTunes listening habits to the web
Authored by: ChiperSoft on May 05, '03 06:11:36PM

I did something simmilar, but rather then post to a local file, I
used curl to send the information to a script on my website.



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Kung-Tunes - Post your iTunes listening habits to the web
Authored by: bluehz on May 05, '03 06:28:36PM

This is a really nice implementation of KungLogs usage. Ifyou
click on the song links it will take you to the Apple Store for that
song. I just wish I knew how they got the alternating row colors
in KungLog!

http://nslog.com/itunes.php



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Kung-Tunes - Post your iTunes listening habits to the web
Authored by: djwudi on May 06, '03 01:16:42AM

I've been using Kung-Tunes for quite a while on my blog - great
little app.

I've currently got it so that each song listed displays both an
Amazon icon and an iTunes icon, linking to Amazon or the iTMS
respectively, so that people on my site can explore what I'm
listening to, if they're so inclined. Pretty nifty.



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Kung-Tunes - Post your iTunes listening habits to the web
Authored by: gblake99 on May 06, '03 09:31:58AM

I love Kung-Tunes. It took a little bit of effort to get it working correctly, but now that I have I love it. There is one issue with it and iTunes 4, due to a limitation with iTunes 4 it can't show what you are listening to if you are listening to something off a shared playlist.

Hopefully Apple will address this soon.



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Kung-Tunes - Post your iTunes listening habits to the web
Authored by: sjk on May 06, '03 09:54:03PM

I'd love if Kung-Tunes could recognize individual internet radio
stream tracks, like iTunes and stream rippers do.



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Kung-Tunes rocks!
Authored by: iobuffa on May 07, '03 11:23:44AM
From the moment I installed Kung-Tunes, I knew it was a winner. I immediately donated to the author and you should too! My favorite feature is the concept of the # tags where if information is not available on a track (say the Composer field), then Kung-Tunes will not display what you wrap inside the tags!

#cComposer: ^c #c

will show:

Composer: Mozart

if that information is available from the song, if not, it won't show anything. Very useful.

(I forgot what the composer tag is, don't use c because it's for count :))

Another nifty "feature" is by using the comment field of itunes tracks to store album cover information. This allows you to show album covers on your site whenever a song is played. Example:

  • Place: http://my.site.com/images/mozart_cover.jpg in the comments field of a mozart track.
  • Use the following html in Kung-Tunes: #k<img src="^k">#k

    Viola, you now have dynamic cover art displayed on your page. Downside to this is that you have to manually upload all the cover art to your webserver, but that shouldn't take too long, right? :) For more neat tricks, check out the author's online tutorial.

    Anywho, I can go on and on about how I love kung-tunes. Try it for yourself like i did

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