Looking for a way of thinking about a Now Playing Module for Wordpress site
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Stephen HurleyStephen Hurley
    Posts: 14Member
    Hello all, 

    This is a "I-know-what-I-want" question and before thinking about it too much longer, I wanted to see if anyone had any ideas. 

    I run voicEd Radio (http://voicEd.ca) which runs education-related broadcasts and live broadcasts 24/7. I'm looking for a module that would allow me to enhance the "Now Playing" information presented by the Airtime Pro widget.

    I want to be able to have each podcast track that is playing be associated with a piece of cover art. When a track is playing, the cover art would appear on my website, with an embedded player. 

    I know that this is possible with album art that exists in some music databases, but all of our podcast are home grown and aren't catalogued anywhere.

    Has anyone tried anything like this before. Does what I'm asking make sense? (to anyone other than me?)

    Many thanks,

    Stephen Hurley

  • 12 Comments sorted by
  • Vote Up0Vote Down John ChewterJohn Chewter
    Posts: 899Member
    I managed to do similar in AT on a PROGRAM basis. So a logo showed up for the show.
    This may do what you need?
    Its much easier in the newer fork of Airtime at libretime.org which actually has a dedicated show image,
    No longer using Airtime or Libretime.
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Stephen HurleyStephen Hurley
    Posts: 14Member
    So, i use Smartblocks to program larger blocks of time. So a "show" on voicEd Radio might be 5 hours long, but may contain 10 different podcasts. I can include an image for the show, but I would love to be able to display artwork for each podcast track within the show. I don't think that I can do that within Airtime.


  • Vote Up0Vote Down John ChewterJohn Chewter
    Posts: 899Member
    If you are a coder, you could do a postgres query to get the image url out of the cc_files table by looking up from the track name which the now_playing API exposes. You could also maybe get the track name from the Icecast API
    Post edited by John Chewter at 2018-05-03 22:16:31
    No longer using Airtime or Libretime.
  • Vote Up0Vote Down John ChewterJohn Chewter
    Posts: 899Member
    Have a look on my station page and see what I extract? http://deprogrammedradio.com
    No longer using Airtime or Libretime.
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Stephen HurleyStephen Hurley
    Posts: 14Member
    Not a coder (but I am a philosopher). I guess my first step is to find a way of associating a track name with a particular image. 
  • Vote Up0Vote Down John ChewterJohn Chewter
    Posts: 899Member
    You can manually add an image url in the track dialog. into the unused 'website' field. Enable the column for that in the column drop-down.

    Then you just need to poll an API every few seconds to match the tack title from the icecast now playing api or the Airtime Now Playing and so retrieve the track image url

    If you are not a coder, I can assure you that it can be done using Javascript AJAX. But I would guess you would need a local friendly coder who understands what I just said, and a day's pay to get it done.

    You can see from my sites program listings box that I am retrieving an image for the program. It is almost the same job.
    Post edited by John Chewter at 2018-05-03 23:01:23
    No longer using Airtime or Libretime.
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Stephen HurleyStephen Hurley
    Posts: 14Member
    or a brother-in-law who loves a good IPA! Thank you!
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Stephen HurleyStephen Hurley
    Posts: 14Member
    Going over to take a good look at your site! 
    Post edited by Stephen Hurley at 2018-05-03 23:07:41
  • Vote Up0Vote Down John ChewterJohn Chewter
    Posts: 899Member
    Or.......... you could probably do it more easily using a PHP cli script, Zend or Python and do the whole thing server-side on a cron job, which would make an image available and just pull that in the player periodically using a random number on the station player like so:

    http://myserver.com/my_track_image.php?<random number here>

    That will avoid caching and so allow the image to change when the track does.


    No longer using Airtime or Libretime.
  • Vote Up0Vote Down John ChewterJohn Chewter
    Posts: 899Member
    Are you on FB Steve?
    No longer using Airtime or Libretime.
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Stephen HurleyStephen Hurley
    Posts: 14Member
    So, this is where I bring the brother-in-law in! We're getting together on the weekend to plan this out. John, your help has been more than valuable! I think that qualifies as "invaluable" 
  • Vote Up0Vote Down Stephen HurleyStephen Hurley
    Posts: 14Member
    I am on Facebook. stephen.hurley.543908
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