I’m continuing to cultivate my turntable.fm addiction by experimenting with various extensions of the music social networking application for the Chrome browser. No doubt there are many. So far I’ve found four that I enjoy.
Turntable.fm extensions give you more playlist power.
First a quick refresher. The way turntable.fm works is that you join a room as either a listener or a DJ. As a listener, you just listen. If you can get in as a DJ, you pick songs. Then you can search for tunes and queue them up with the rest of the group.
You can interact with the other DJs via a chat board. You can become fans of them. You can rank tunes as “lame” or “awesome.” And you can add various extensions that give you more knowledge and power over the social network.
Turntable.fm extended
Turntable.fm Extended is developed by Mark Reeder and Adam Creeger and adds a bunch of neat components to TT.fm. Among its features:
- You can now tag songs in your queue, then filter by tag. This allows you to quickly figure out what you’ve got in the current list of songs that you’ve compiled.
- You can view a complete list of room users that identifies the moderator and the current DJs.
- Users can set up a variety of notifications, including chat, song, vote, and DJ change messages. You can also filter out unwanted content.
- You can enable scrobbling of your selections to last.fm. And you can export your song queue in XML.
- Turntable.fm Extended will even offer you suggestions based on what was already played.
Turntable Plus and Turntable Playlist
Turntable plus (beta) was written by Michael Frick, who I mention in my Ars Technica article about Turntable.fm. Turntable plus will give you a nice big chat pane to the left or right of the central turntable deck and listener room. There you can more easily follow the discussion and song announcements.
The extension will also notify you when certain keywords are typed (like your user name), when new songs are about to be played, when there is an open DJ spot, or when users are voting on a tune. And it provides you a large, attractive song log to keep track of what has been selected.
Turntable plus can be configured to harmonize with Turntable Extended and with Turntable Playlist manager (written by Gil Barbara). As the title suggests, this very good extension allows you to create playlists and quickly insert items at the top of your song queue. The Playlist manager helps you find content in your queue much more quickly.
Turntable Tube
Last on our list is the Turntable Tube extension. The app places YouTube music videos related to the song you are playing in the large space to the left of the Turntable.fm deck. The music videos change as you shift songs or move from room to room.
This last application is lots of fun. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether it harmonizes with the earlier mentioned extensions, however.
There are other Turntable.fm extensions being developed for Chrome. I haven’t even gotten around to the ones available for Firefox yet. Any recommendations from our readers would be welcome.
