How Will I Know My Song Got 28 Plays??

November 28, 2008 10:03 AM

Did the play counter disappear from Mefi Music?
posted by Corduroy to MetaFilter-Related at 10:03 AM (27 comments total)

Yes, the play counters are gone from Music. We upgraded the music player for a number of reasons—a functioning scrollbar for playlists was one of the top reasons. And with this upgrade, the old style of counting plays isn't possible.

But the play counts were speculative at best because it only counted plays via the website player, and then only after a minute of playing. So songs < 1 minute didn't have any play counts, and the system was very susceptible to gaming. With that in mind, we decided the upgrade was worth the trade-off of no play counts.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:15 AM on November 28, 2008

I see the new player also fixed the slow playback issue. Bless you!
posted by Paid In Full at 10:57 AM on November 28, 2008

Perhaps there could be a link to some sort of Last.fm page for each song and/or artist if they have it in their profile, then people that scrobble could be represented.

scrobble. scrobble. scrobble. scrobble.
posted by blue_beetle at 11:28 AM on November 28, 2008

So songs <>

I feel much better now.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:38 PM on November 28, 2008

(songs less than one minute)
posted by Meatbomb at 12:39 PM on November 28, 2008

Ah, I see. Perhaps it is better for all our bruised egos.
posted by Corduroy at 1:09 PM on November 28, 2008

Does the new player crash anyone else's browser?

:(
posted by motty at 1:44 PM on November 28, 2008

What browser are you using, motty? You might try upgrading to the latest version of Flash and see if that helps.
posted by pb (staff) at 1:56 PM on November 28, 2008

Iceweasel 2.0.0.18 on Linux, pb. Already tried installing the latest version of Flash (10 isn't it) but it will require a major system upgrade at my end as it's compiled against a more recent glibc than I seem to have on Debian etch.

It's obviously totally not your fault but I resent having to look at upgrading my OS just because they released a new version of Flash. My fault for running Linux. I know.
posted by motty at 2:08 PM on November 28, 2008

But... I had SIX play-counts! *sob*
posted by Devils Rancher at 2:19 PM on November 28, 2008

Hmm, Safari has been crashing for me this week whenever I visited the Music page. I thought I just had crappy ISP speed or something. Sometimes it will load about halfway and then just hang.

Oh, also, is there a set number of songs the player will have on a list? If I go to the "Music posts" link from my user page, the playlist only loads about half of them. I don't really care, just wondering.
posted by chococat at 2:46 PM on November 28, 2008

We have the player on the user activity page set to the last 25 tracks. But we could probably increase that to 50 to show everything that could possibly appear on that first page.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:54 PM on November 28, 2008

My thousands and thousands of playcounts. Gone. Gone like a train. Gone, gone, gone.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 3:02 PM on November 28, 2008

motty: If you're talking about the installation script complaining about your glibc version, that's a problem with the script. (I edited the script to require glibc 0.0, & it still complained.) Try installing via a deb from testing or unstable, maybe?
posted by Pronoiac at 3:13 PM on November 28, 2008

Pronoiac: Etch may never have Flash 10, so I downloaded the tarball directly from Adobe and cp'ed the .so to the relevant location. When it didn't work, ldd told me about the glibc version problem. That was where I gave up for now.
posted by motty at 3:29 PM on November 28, 2008

Play counter got punched in the dick.
posted by Rock Steady at 5:16 PM on November 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

I can't get the new player to work with Firefox on Ubuntu Intrepid x64, either. (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008111319 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.4)

I don't usually complain about things not working with Linux, but since someone brought it up...
posted by SteveTheRed at 6:03 PM on November 28, 2008

Oh, I forgot to mention that Flash 10 r12 is installed and works for most everything else.
posted by SteveTheRed at 6:08 PM on November 28, 2008

Seconding SteveTheRed on the Ubuntu problems- inline players display as the full-height player with video box, sized to fit in the slimline space, making it too small to see. Among other issues.
posted by potch at 6:12 PM on November 28, 2008

I just fixed it on my computer. I went into Synaptic package manager and reinstalled the flash plugin. 30 seconds and everything works fine. Who says Linux is harder than Windows? ;)
posted by SteveTheRed at 6:30 PM on November 28, 2008

My thousands and thousands of playcounts. Gone. Gone like a train. Gone, gone, gone.

Not only that, but we've also retroactively unlistened to all of your songs!
posted by danb at 9:31 PM on November 28, 2008 [1 favorite]

(Also, I've had intermittent trouble with the Music page using Safari as well. Doesn't crash all the time, but occasionally. I can't figure out what exactly sets it off; sometimes I don't even try to play a song.)
posted by danb at 10:05 PM on November 28, 2008

Well, anyway, my playcounts been down so long they look like up to me.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 11:08 PM on November 28, 2008

SteveTheRed: Whaddayaknow, that fixed it up great.
posted by potch at 11:48 PM on November 28, 2008

Did you ubuntu-ers try restarting firefox before reinstalling flash? Occasionally, my flash will stop working; I'll get a gray box where the flash stuff is supposed to be. A restart or two fixes it. I even got the restart-firefox plugin so I wouldn't lose all my tabs and stuff.
posted by philomathoholic at 9:30 AM on November 29, 2008

potch: at least I've done something useful this weekend besides eating turkey.
posted by SteveTheRed at 12:57 PM on November 29, 2008

This does put a damper on my little ego-booster. :(

I don't have much, that ever-increasing number was comforting on lonely nights.
posted by mediocre at 6:01 AM on December 25, 2008