There’s also a new “Media Views” feature, which looks promising. As of now the only add-on to take advantage of this is a simple tag-cloud library view, but I imagine things could get really elaborate there. Their line, “Tired of music players that look like spreadsheets?”, has me anticipating all kinds of innovative browsing environments; picture a navigable mood-cluster terrain, or a pannable, zoomable, clickable history wavegraph. I’m seriously considering teaching myself enough XUL to be able to write a hotness add-on.

Amazingly, 0.1 was first released over two years ago. And their releases have code-names like Bowie and Eno? Who knew.

My foray into MP3Toys was ultimately short-lived, brought to a halt when I found what people were doing with Single Column Playlist for foobar, particularly the playlist-embedded album art. Back in the foobar saddle, I also gave in and tried out the “official” Play Count component, which I had avoided for so long because it didn’t support %FIRST_PLAYED%, and because I wasn’t sure I wanted my playback statistics only kept in the database — even though writing them to the files posed a lot of trouble as well. Turns out, playback statistics stored by the official component are less sensitive to changes to the files it’s keeping track of than the unofficial one, which means I only have to be a little careful to keep all my stats intact, while being able to play and track files that I’m still seeding.

This, along with the invaluable $cwb_datediff() function provided by Bowron’s new foo_cwb_hooks component, called for a rewrite to the hotness code, which had been stagnating in some marginally compatible 1.5 version since May. After severely trimming the code down and robusting things up, I thought of a new and totally non-arbitrary way to soften the blow hotness scores receive when songs are played. I hated seeing them leap to 100 every time, and this new softening method makes so much sense, utilizing existing baseline calibrations to keep things a lot more interesting. How anybody tolerated the old method is beyond me.

Anyway, here it is.

I also dug up a lot of old screenshots this week and I’m planning a nostalgia-fueled retrospective in the near future.

hotness 2.0.