Fairtunes PluginFairtunes Plugin Fairtunes Plugin

 

gen_fairtunes

Fairtunes is an Internet service that allows digital
music
consumers to voluntarily send money to artists for their work.

Download

Get binary Version 1.1 here.

Get source code Version 1.1 here.

Updates for Version 1.1

Description

This winamp plugin is designed to interface into the Fairtunes (http://www.fairtunes.com) website, which provides a mechanism for you to donate money directly to artists...After installing this plugin, you will see a few new menu items in the playlist window...Just right click in the playlist and you will see something like :

You can see there are three new menu items,

1) Send Money to <Artist>

2) Top 50 Artist Played

3) Top 50 Songs Played

Let me describe what each one of these does...

Send Money To Artist

By selecting this menu item the minibrowser will open (if not already) and effective display the results of doing a search on "Artist" at Fairtunes.  So using the above sample, if I select "Send Money to Rolling Stones", then the following window should appear :

At this point, the interface is completely via the minibrowser and Fairtunes' website.

Top 50 Artists/Songs Played

One of the neat things that this plugin does is keep track of which songs/artists that you listen to..If this kind of thing bothers you, then by all means turn it off...No information is ever sent anywhere regarding what you are listening to..trust me..I wouldn't know what to do with the information anyway..But if you like to know what you are playing and how often you play it, then this menu item will bring up a little report which shows that usage...You can specify how many "Top X" Artists/Songs to display in the report...

Here is a sample report of what I have been listening to...

Hey, maybe I should send VH some money...

The plugin also works properly when listening to a Shoutcast stream with song titles, so as you listen you can send some money to artists as you listen to them....

 

Configuration Options

Well, there isn't much but these are the configurable options :

  • Disable Plugin
    Turns everything off.
  • Disable Fairtunes MiniBrowser Integration
    If this is enabled, then every time a new artist is played, it will open the Minibrowser to that Artist's donation page at Fairtunes...If you don't like that behavior, then turn it off here..
  • Disable Artist Tracking
    Check this to turn off the BigBrother monitoring...(like I said before all history info is stored and kept locally, none of this info is sent to Fairtunes (or anywhere else for that matter)
  • Display Top X Artists
    This is for the Report...
  • Disable Song Tracking
    Same thing here as above, but for songs
  • Display Top X Songs
    ditto
  • Clear Artist Statistics
    Click this button to clear out all your Artist history (i.e. what you have played)
  • Clear Song  Statistics
    Click this button to clear out all your Song history (i.e. what you have played)

Oh, and if you really like the plugin and want to send some virtaul tips my way, click here.

 

Version 1.1 Updates

I fixed a few issues....I now chop off all trailing spaces for Artist names and songs...This will make the Artist and Song tracking work quite a bit better...Also, winamp 2.7 modfied some low level stuff so that my "song change" logic broke...I fixed it...it should work for pre-2.7 stuff too...I guess that's what you get for using undocumented and unsupported interfaces to winamp.. :)

I am also releasing the source code...It's under GPL (http://www.fsf.org/copyleft/gpl.html).