[sorry, i lost my earlier writeup of the "now playing" tool, and also there have been some recent changes to how it works. i will make a better writeup at some point (better than this temporary writeup) once i decide what the future of the tool should be.]

the "now playing" tool is just a simple slapped-together utility to publish (on your personal web site) some information about the particular track of music to which you're listening at any particular moment.

here's what the "now playing" tool looks like (at this particular moment):

now playing 8:07PM, Sun, May 31 (EDT) artist: Johann Sebastian Bach album: Bach: Brandenburg Concertos; Orchestral Suites title: Concerto No 5 in D major BWV1050 1: Allegro      attributes:   [none]

you can see the tool in action on my personal home page (in the upper right corner).

at present, the tool displays the following track information

• title
• artist
• album
• album cover album image (if one can be screen-scraped from info.winamp.com)
• subjective (user-supplied) evaluations of the track's ~musical attributes; these attributes are configurable, obviously, and are very handy for generating mood-based playlists
• my current list of attributes include the following (subject to change):
• uplifing
• soothing
• energizing
• stimulating
• sad
• distracting
• english lyrics
• favorite
• obscenity
• garbled
• in previous incarnations, the attributes included the following:
• composer
• larger body of work comprising this piece
• [i'm thinking about adding attributes like "annoying", etc. the list could be endless, naturally, but the point is to specify attributes which are useful / important in generating playlists]

at present, the tool is implemented (in a very slapped-together manner) using

• Winamp (5), to play the music
• the "ek$i" plugin for Winamp, to initiate the "now i'm listenting to another track" event (as an HTTP request)
• home page is at http://www.saveoften.net/ek$i/ (and at http://classic.winamp.com/plugins/detail.jhtml?componentId=56857)
• PHP, to run the server-side publication scripts and the client-side attribute-storage scripts
• Perl, to run some other client-side playlist-creation scripts
• OmniHTTPd (or any other similar personal web server), to run the client-side PHP and Perl scripts
• eventually, once i phase them back in, PostgreSQL (database server), to store all track information on the server, and Tomcat (application server).

at some point, I'll scribble down all the details (and supply some code) for the currently-implemented system, but what i really want to do (whenever i get some time handy) is make some of the planned updates to the system (especially to re-establish database-backing and to re-implement the album cover lookup / publication) and post the design (and code) of the updated system.

so, if all you eager masses out there (this page gets about 20 hits per day, and with absolutely no promotion on my part) can just find a way to send me some extra time (maybe a personal secretary?), then i'll get my act together, update the system, and publish it to the world (FLOSS style).

note that the point (and future goals) of the "now playing" tool are more about managing and analyzing an individual's music library and musical tastes and less about being a snazzy Winamp plugin. the "now playing" tool is just a nifty (and, hopefully, extremely simple) way to surface music library information about whatever song happens to be playing... the real meat of the system (and the emphasis of future development) is on the back-end library / analysis stuff, and my hope is to use this all as a testbed for some heavy-duty studies in cognitive science and musicology.