"So what is Turntable.fm? It’s a browser-based chatroom that streams music based on the choices of a rotating cast of DJs drawn from whoever is in the room. There are up to five DJs at any one time who create playlists; the station cycles through the playlists one song at a time, moving from one DJ’s pick to the next, as the room votes on how “lame” to “awesome” the track is. A (sometimes fast-moving) discussion takes place in a chatroom on the bottom right of the screen. DJs get points for picking popular songs and if enough people think a song is lame, it skips to the next. You can upload songs or search through the Medianet-powered library to create your playlist when it’s your turn to DJ." (read more ...)
But, other then the music aspects, Turntable.FM has brought lot's of opportunities for engineers to hack it and extend it. One of the pioneers on extending Turntable.fm was Michael Frick (@mdfrick) which created TurntablePlus a chrome extension that allows users see a variety of extra information from the current music rooms, such as who has "lamed" or "awesomed" your song, who has been afk and for how long, etc.
Another engineer that brought the possibilities to extending Turntable.fm to the next level was Alain Gilbert (@alain_gilbert), which created the "unofficial" Turntable.FM API (source code available in github) and with that, enabled users to create "bots" for Turntable.FM music rooms. One of the first bots that I'm aware of was #Cleopatra (a.k.a cleo), developed by Frick. Initially, Cleopatra main feature was to control the DJ Woooo NoAFK room, and kick anyone that was afk on that room. This is when I got involved with Turntable.FM and with Node.js and created my own bot named #Mermaid, which was usually in DJ Woooo main room, counting awesomes/lames for the djs. Later on, bots started becoming more common, with a variety of functionality such as dj queue management, booting afk people once the room gets to it's capacity, etc
If you are still reading this post, you probably got interested and already have some ideas to create your own extensions or just to start hacking around Turntable.FM, so here are some resources that can help get you started:
Turntable.FM Extensions
- Turntable.Plus
- Turntable Extensions
Turntable.FM Bookmarklets
- AutoBop
- Turntable autobop, autodj, etc
Turntable.FM API and Bots
- Turntable.API (unofficial)
- the BusDriver Bot
Hope you enjoy, and start hacking and extending Turntable.FM.
And look for me (a.k.a.[DJ] Luck) around the Turntable.FM EDM/Mashup rooms, .
Sounds great
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