Update: Now Listening Room is in beta its structure has changed somewhat. These scripts will no longer work. The Listening Room Add-ons Chrome extension provides some of the features that these user scripts once did.
Me and a few other readers of Dinosaur Comics have been having an awesome listening party at http://listeningroom.fettig.net/room/qwantz/. It’s a pretty fantastic site where you can start a listening room and then everyone in the room can upload songs and then you all listen to them at the same time.
As there’s a high percentage of geeks in the room we’ve started customising our listening experience using user scripts. Rather than constantly sharing them in the chat I thought it’d be good to make a list somewhere. These can be used on Firefox if you install the Greasemonkey extension. For Chrome all you need to do is click on the link.
- http://files.alnorth.com/last_listeningroom.user.js - This adds a button next to each record to search for the track on Last.fm. It also adds buttons linking to pages on the QwantzListens Data website for the track, artist and user.
- http://files.alnorth.com/bg_listeningroom.user.js - This sets the background of all the records without cover art to the @QwantzListens avatar. It also uses the page background from qwantz.com.
- http://userscripts.org/scripts/source/94690.user.js - Last.fm and Grooveshark search buttons, @QwantzListens avatars, twitter user name links and a more convenient “add song” button. By @nathanf77.
- http://files.alnorth.com/queuelength_listeningroom.user.js - Displays the total length of all completely uploaded tracks.
- http://files.alnorth.com/twitteravatars_listeningroom.user.js - If a user’s using their twitter user name then this adds their avatar next to each record they play. After a bit of a rewrite to use JSONP this now works in Chrome.
- http://andymikula.net/listeningroom-cover.user.js - This sets the background of all the records without cover art to an awesomely retro picture of T-Rex. By @andymikula.
- http://kempfffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff.info/donotfeedtheofficersofthelaw/cool-chat.user.js - Linkifies URLs in chat and converts
*bold*and_italic_text. By @takempf. - http://files.alnorth.com/volume_listeningroom.user.js - Adds a volume control. Unfortunately this is Chrome only.
On top of these there’s also @AwesomeFunTunes that tweets all the songs that get played in the room. As it has to scrape them from the page it’s a little fragile at the moment. Hopefully it should get more reliable as @SleeperCo add more ways of getting data from the room.
You can also play with this data on the QwantzListens Data website and see what the most popular tracks are. This will only work with browsers that support the new HTML5 client-side SQL databases, like Chrome.
If you’ve got a user script you’d like to add to the list then tweet it at @AwesomeFunTunes or @alasdairnorth.
