Turntable.fm Fans

Say Goodbye to Turntable.fm Fans. And, Hello to insideturntable.

Clint — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:03:43 +0000

The world doesn’t need multiple blogs dedicated to Turntable.fm, and since the newly launched insideturntable is available, now is a great time to bookmark that site and use it for your ongoing Turntable.fm info fix. I’ll be retiring Turntable.fm Fans in a couple of days.

For anyone interested, Turntable.fm Fans averaged ~250 human visits a day, peaking at about 400/day recently. Comments were low, but tweets and RTs were decent. The largest source of referral traffic was turntable.fm itself, with several rooms referring over 10 visitors a day.

Thanks for reading!

InsideTurntable Launch Party!

Clint — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 20:56:46 +0000

InsideTurntable Launch Party!

Friday, October 7th @ 7:00PM EST!

Exclusively in the InsideTurntable Room!

-anyone can dj (7:00pm-7:30pm)
-djbattle *prizes tba* (7:30pm-8:30pm)
-announcements (8:30-9:00pm)

Another Update from Turntable.fm Concerning Recent Issues

Clint — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 19:08:47 +0000

Like the last communication from Turntable.fm on this matter, I’ll quote their entire blog post and then link to the post if you wish to leave a comment for the team. While annoying, these issues are the sorts of things a systems team has to handle on a regular basis and it is nice to see the Turntable.fm team openly explaining what they are facing and what they are doing to address the problems.

“There have been increasing reports of connectivity problems on the site including DJs being disconnected, users being kicked out of rooms and chat messages being lagged or dropped. We are very aware of these issues and are doing everything that we can to try to fix them as quickly as possible to get Turntable back to normal.
We initially thought that the problem was caused by either the new server we added in anticipation of the iPhone client launch, or by the change in traffic characteristics that resulted from the iPhone clients. We use software that allows us to serve thousands of clients from one machine, but that sort of software tends to have problems when any of those clients are slow or block. We dug into it more, though, and realized that this wasn’t the problem that we’re experiencing.

We believe that the problems we have been seeing are all manifestations of the same issue but, unfortunately, we have had a harder time trying to track it down than we anticipated. Since we ruled out other suspected causes we’ve been poring through bug reports and server logs, dumping TCP traffic, debugging code on both the client-side and backend and working with authors of third-party libraries. We think that we are narrowing in on the problem, gradually shrinking the size of the haystack.

For the technically-inclined, we are seeing flakiness in our websocket connection from the browser to our servers. Sometimes this results in missing “heartbeat” messages, which makes the server think that you’re disconnected, causing it to remove you from a DJ spot or remove you from the room. Sometimes those messages are chat messages and they are lagged or just never come through, making your chat experience flaky.

In addition to this, we also had a bug in our code that was leading to communication problems between out servers, resulting in problems with things like search and upload. We initially thought that this problem was related with the bigger socket bug, but we recently discovered that it was a separate issue, found the source of the problem and rolled out a code fix that should make those services much more stable now.

We have finally managed to replicate the main problem in our development and testing environments, which is a major step toward our being able to fix it. We have all available engineers working to debug this code, trying every technique that we know of to track down a bug, from capturing and analyzing traffic, to inserting as many debugging statements as possible in the code to track down where the error occurs.

Thank you for staying with us while we bring this problem under control.

atomly, Sr. Software Engineer”

Link: Where We Are Now

NYC turntable.fm In Real Life Dance Party Tomorrow

Clint — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:44:20 +0000

Thursday, September 29, LiveTurntable.fm is putting on another real-life Turntable.fm party in New York City. Kap Slap, DJ Aylen and others will be guest DJ’ing.

Save $8 on admission by buying tix in advance (aka, today), or go “large stylee” (look at me, i’m kewl! i’m “down with the kids”!) w/ a ticket and event-specific T-shirt.

Link: NYC turntable.fm In Real Life Dance Party Tomorrow

Disco Party in the Indie Dance/Electronica Room

Clint — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 01:50:28 +0000

At night, this room gets a little “adult” : )

iPhone App Easter Egg

jasonsemine — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 20:57:20 +0000

Turntable.fm co-founder Billy Chasen revealed a cool hidden feature of the iPhone app at the F8 Conference yesterday. If you shake your iPhone, it Awesomes the song you’re listening to. So head bopping in real life can lead to head bopping on Turntable.fm!

Turntable.fm Room Spotlight: Indie Dance/Electronica

Clint — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 15:48:40 +0000

The Indie Dance/Electronica room is the most advanced I’ve been in, so far. By advanced, I mean its users are discovering what can be done with tt.fm and scripts/extensions seemingly faster than anyone else. Instead of trying to describe what the experience is like, being in a tt.fm room that is managed by a bot, I suggest reading up on all the cool automations a little js and jquery can add to the turntable experience, and then jump right in and listen to some of the best music being played on turntable.fm.

Turntable Themes Extension Follow Up

Clint — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 14:56:52 +0000

After a few hours of playing around with the Turntable Themes extension, I’m starting to see its potential. There are limits to what can be themed/skinned (bg, colors), but those elements are enough to make a significant difference in how a room looks. And, while the extension needs to be installed locally, the files that change how the room looks are centrally stored.

To coin an old man’s phrase, if you want to “jazz up” your view of tt, this extension does the trick well. Here is an example of the Space theme.

To use this extension, download/install from the Chrome store, then go to your Manage Extensions screen. Click the “options” link for Turntable Themes, select your color/theme then click “Save Options” and (re)load tt.fm.

More New Features for Turntable.fm

Clint — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 00:43:33 +0000

In addition to the new UI, new features (that I’ve come across include):

Favorites – Click the star in the upper left corner when in a room you wish to favorite/bookmark. To access favorites from lobby, click the Favorites link near the top of the screen.
DJs Needed – Click this link in the lobby to see a list of rooms with open turntables.
Sorting and Filtering – For All Rooms and DJs Needed lists, there are now options for sorting and filtering the list of rooms

Anything else new this week?

Fix for Today’s Turntable.fm Conflict Issue

Clint — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 00:27:19 +0000

There was a conflict between Turntable Extended and the new updates for Turntable.fm. A new version of TT Extended is up now, though.

Straight from the creator, “tt extended users, the fixed version is here! Version 0.6.3.4 is what you want. Thanks @Mark_Reeder!“