ColdFusion

sorry, my bad about the line not being in the default properties and the version still showing CF5. that's what happens when you work at 5 am. the line to add is: genre.setstation=true the comment is set to the station name if there is a station name detected this is the way it has been for quite a while (I don't think that's something I wrote. perhaps even it's way back from 7.4.0 which I used as a baseline) I'll fix the file on sourceforge ASAP. I'm here for comments / suggestions / bug reports! Thanks for the feedback guys.

Hey, I've been releasing pandora's-jar CF versions, one of the most important features is the mp3md5. (and one of the most important bug-fixes is that anything after an "&" in the song name / artist is cropped by the plain 'noob' 7.4.0) [scroll to the end of this message for info on upgrading] I'll try to explain what mp3md5 it is all about. *** WHY IT IS NEEDED: *** Pandora's jar, as great as it is, sometimes wrongfully names/tags a file. grabbing one file and naming it with an entirely different artist/title. if this was just a bug - it would be better to simply correct it rather than creating a workaround. but this happens for lots of different reasons that are dependent on many parameters such as internet connection speed, what other programs are running, amount of files in the temp directory and so on. While I'm working on solutions for many of the known scenarios that cause mismatches (slow connection, changing stations without immediately refreshing the window and so on), I am aware that this issue will never be solved entirely (in the current way pandora's jar 7.4.0 is working). so the MP3MD5 is here to help us all to reduce the mismatches to minimum. *** WHAT MD5 IS: **** MD5 is a hash function, it returns a fixed length (32 byte) value for any input. this is a good way of finger-printing stuff. it is highly unlikely (odds are astronomical) that two different mp3 files will have the same md5-hash. by collecting "votes" on pairs of [MD5 , artist/title] one can know how certain it is that a specific file is actually what it is tagged to be. at first - you don't know any files - so every vote for a pairing of md5 and artist/title is also the first vote (and hence the highest vote). this is not of much use - but once you have more than one vote per file - you can distinguish the mismatched ones. *** EXAMPLE: *** Let's say you're listening to the song "Bleeding Heart" by "The Go Find", the md5 file of the file that is about to be grabbed is "X". PJ sends in a vote saying "I think the file with md5 X is Bleeding Heart/The Go Find". 1) If your vote matches the highest vote found for "X" in the db - your file will be saved in the archive along with all the rest of your grabbed files. If it does not match the highest vote - the file will be saved in a folder named "mismatches" under the directory from which you are executing the jar. the file name will be it's 32 byte MD5. it will still have the ID3 tags of whatever it was detected to be. 2) The amount of votes for "X is matched to Bleeding Heart/The Go Find" in the DB is increased by 1. *** WHAT'S PLANNED FOR THE FUTURE: *** 1) a utility to do two important things a) re run an md5 verification of the songs grabbed, against the online db - hence enabling you to find songs that have been wrongly named (as the db grows - more and more songs are indexed) b) find out what the correct artist/title for files that have been tagged as mismatches / unclassifieds and then tag and name them correctly into the archive. I'm working on these right now. *** CONFIGURATION: *** in versions CF_1 to CF_6 mp3md5-online-participation is set to off, hence it works with a local 'db' file, collecting votes for files played locally. this means that you will be able to spot mistakes only after you've heard the song at least once. this is not so great. it is good for files that are marked as "positive" and which pandora will play a lot. if 'mp3md5.enabled' (in CF1-6) is set to true, the votes are made on an online database (which to date contains over 15,000 different songs). by opting-in to participate you are exposing your ip-address to whomever is running the database [by default it is mapped to a server I'm running]. I don't see this as any risk - but as it is not something I would want to do behind anyones back - it is set as an opt-in option (off unless enabled manually). by participating in the online distributing voting system - you have a better chance of detecting mismatched tagging - as most chances are that your vote is not the first one. And of course you are contributing to the database - hence helping others. in version CF7 and on the configuration format has changed, it is still set by default to work locally, but now instead of uncommenting a line in order to opt in, you have to change it from "local" to "online" (or to "off" to disable it altogether) *** WHERE DO I GET PJ_CF *** The project's source and binaries are available on sourceforge.net you can get both the 'noobs' 7.4.0 baseline and the jars of CF at the download page: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=184854 once you have 7.4.0 installed and working - simply replace the jar file and the configuration file with the newer ones. if you have made any changes to the configuration - integrate them into the new config file before overwriting your old one.

I'm sad to say that CF6 won't solve your problems. (except for tagging "quickmix" as the station name, instead of nothing). I'll try to see what I can do to improve your situation. I'm writing a comprehensive guide to all the md5 and tagging issue - I hope it will explain things well. watch for them in the main thread - in case I forget to post them here.

Still works for the rest of us here, what might you have changed (on both your PC and laptop?!) first of all verify you are using flash 8. let me know if it's 8.

Birra, CF6 is released, fixed the quickmix thing - and added an option to write the station name as the genre See: http://www.hak5.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=55429#55429 cheers,

CF6 is now available at sourceforge (same url): http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=184854 changes are: 1) bug fixes 1.1) station name was not detected when playing quickmix. 2) changes in default.properties 2.1) add support for field: "genre.setstation", if set true - genre will be set to be the name of the station currently playing. usefull if you'll want to browse later on your mp3-player by station (a mix of actual genres) and not by genre. [not to mention that actual genre is not working great right now] 3) changes in log file 3.1) add log entry for addition to playlist file 3.2) add log entry for overriding genre with station

I'm not using the last.fm so much myself, so I can't really say. Let me check that. Adding 1 hour would be really easy - but who says that is the actual bug? perhaps it will fix it for you and create a bug for everyone else... I'll try to see what I can do. you are more than welcome to fix it yourself - the project is on sourceforge...

Yes, I have. Please quote only relevant text when replying.

how have you configured noscript? for me it works only if: 1) scripts are globally blocked 2) scripts are enabled for localhost I'm wondering why enabling scripts globally and then just blocking pandora.com won't work. can anyone advise? Thanks.

Yes, I did it the way you suggested. though there was a little trick there, the URL for the current station is using a different format of the username, so I first access the http://feeds.pandora.com/feeds/people/" + pandoraUserEmail + "/stations.xml?max=100 and grab the correct username from there. About the quickmix - I have no way of knowing what station it is currently playing... so I'm just setting the station name to quickmix, and it behaves as if that's a regular station. If you have any magic solutions for this - I'm here :-)

could you guys describe better exactly what happens? is it the fist song that is tagged with everything? or just a random one? how many songs have you downloaded by now? how do you tell which ones are tagged and which are not (logs? file properties?) and so on... Thanks.

well, the example config file (as I have it here) has the following line: # create playlist with name by station name, if true, "playlist.filename=" is ignored. true by default. playlist.filename.bystation=true which mean it is on by default. please verify with your file. you should see files with .m3u extension in the directory the jar runs from (not necessarily the directory the jar itself is in, depends how you run it)

1) I can add a property to the config file to put the station name in the genre as well, but wouldn't you rather get the real genre of the song (somehow?) 1.5) how about mapping station names to genres... like if station name="pantera radio" genre will be set to "metal" (or whatever you'll choose for 'pantera') 2) Please send some more info about the quickmix bug... what does your config file look like? (don't post it here, use pastebin or something similar) 3) did you notice the auto-playlist creation by station name? doesn't that solve your need for genre? what do you plan to use the genre for anyway?

CF5 is now available on sourceforge.net. download the jar-only from here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=184854 developers are more than welcome to join in on the project! all sources are checked in to the CVS on sourceforge. you are welcome to join me there - or take the sources and create your own branch. --------------- features included over CF4: 1) added new configuration option: mp3.archive.dir (to choose a different name for the folder instead of the default 'mp3') 2) fixed fetching of station name. Will set the name of the currenly playing station PER USER! if your user is logged on on more than one machine - this field will be the same for all of them, it will be correct for at least one, but certainly not all of them. Sorry. 3) new config option "playlist.filename.bystation" if true, a playlist file with the sation name will be appended with the songs. if this is "ture" playlist.filename option is ignored. ------ Important: a) Please go over the changelog if you're upgrading from something earlier than 7.4.0_CF4. b) integrate all the new settings from the example file (or just use the example file instead of your existing default.properties) c) if you don't mind submitting the song you are listening to including with it's file signature on the internet to the mp3-md5 verification DB - please enable mp3md5 (it's "opt-in" so it's disabled by default) - this way you get more reliable file-names and you contribute to the PJ community by providing song-name<->file-signature data. Feel free to ask questions and suggest improvements. Currently planned features for CF6 are album art and info grabbing off the pandora directory (instead of current way - which doesn't really work [at least for me]). bug reports are more than welcome. CF.

your internet connection (at least to the pandora servers) is too slow. how close to the end of the song do you have to be? try changing the amount of seconds to wait before grabbing when in cruise control. this is done like this: edit jspandora.js and find the following: else { if (isCruise()) { InitializeTimer(15, "grabMp3()"); } } replace the '15' with something larger, perhaps 60 is a good value for you. don't go over 120 by much - I'm unsure but most likely it will either grab the old file with the name of the new song playing OR it will try to grab the new song and fail. if you fail to find a good value - let me know, I might be able to work on modifying PJ to grab a song when it ends instead of when it starts. Please debug your settings and let us know how the new ones work - make sure that grabbed files are getting tagged and named correctly. which version are you using? 7.4.0 or 7.4.0_CF5? I recommend CF5 (I made it ;-) ) and please opt-in to the mp3md5-db thing, it will help us all - plus help you to prevent mis-tags. 7.4.0_CF5 contains many bug fixes and extended configuration features. a link to it can be found in the main discussion thread.

I'd say it's most likely something else that is running on the system. what might create 80mb files in the temp dir?! PJ grabs the latest file in the temp dir that seems to be an MP3 file... perhaps someone should make the mp3 detection a bit more sensitive - and even bound it by size. try to compare the first 1000k of two of these huge files, if they are the same - it is most likely a single file that is appended to in the temp dir, every 5-10 minutes, causing it to be detected instead of every ~second song. check the log files and/or monitor the temp dir [including sub-dirs] (clean it up before starting pandora - it will make life easier). If this is indeed the case - find out who's creating that file and stop that program/task. good luck

CF5 is now available, http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=184854 features included over CF4: 1) added new configuration option: mp3.archive.dir (to choose a different name for the folder instead of the default 'mp3') 2) fixed fetching of station name. Will set the name of the currenly playing station PER USER! if your user is logged on on more than one machine - this field will be the same for all of them, it will be correct for at least one, but certainly not all of them. Sorry. 3) new config option "playlist.filename.bystation" if true, a playlist file with the sation name will be appended with the songs. if this is "ture" playlist.filename option is ignored. ------ Important: a) Please go over the changelog if you're upgrading from something earlier than 7.4.0_CF4. b) integrate all the new settings from the example file (or just use the example file instead of your existing default.properties) c) if you don't mind submitting the song you are listening to including with it's file signature on the internet to the mp3-md5 verification DB - please enable mp3md5 (it's "opt-in" so it's disabled by default) - this way you get more reliable file-names and you contribute to the PJ community by providing song-name<->file-signature data. Feel free to ask questions and suggest improvements. Currently planned features for CF6 are album art and info grabbing off the pandora directory (instead of current way - which doesn't really work [at least for me]). bug reports are more than welcome. CF.

guys, you are more than invited to check out my branch off of 7.4.0, it's named 7.4.0_CF, current version is CF5. lots of fixes and features over 7.4.0. for details see main thread.

I'm working on a fix for this, well - not exactly a fix - I'm fetching the info from pandora's site instead of last fm. look for PJ version 7.4.0_CF6, will be released soon - and announced on the main thread. (http://www.hak5.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=55186#55186) other solutions are more than welcome of course.

Autodetecting that would be quite hard. one solution is to add a button to manually tag the songs somehow - but that has many implications on the way the software currently works (for starters - what if the song is played again when you're not there to "thum it down manually" (Again) and the file gets overwritten with the new, not tagged, version? How about a button that just adds the song/artist to a text-file which you can later use as reference when creating playlists? or another thought - I could automatically comment-out songs in your playlists (which you have if you've enabled them in a CF version of PJ) based on the contents of the black-list textfile... let me think about it - any comments / suggestions are welcome.

1) watch out when using the phrase 'blue screen' 2) I have bad experience with FlashSwitcher, I was never able to get it to work. check with this site that you are actually able to run version 8 successfully: http://duber.com/LetsTalk/playerCheck.html

I believe what Zoltan suggests will not work, Wait until tonight, I'll release a version where it's no longer hard-coded.

I'm working on getting the station name. as for the album/cover, which page are you referring to? are you talking about the one you get to by searching the song-name on pandora.com?

1) if the first file does not rip - your internet connection is too slow. the file does not finish downloading within the 15 seconds the "cruise control" gives it. 2) if no station name was detected, it is replaced by "UNKNOWN STATION". If you have better suggestions - let me know. The station detection code is not something I wrote - and has never worked for me. if you know how to find out which station is currently playing - let me know.