MusicTicker is a general-purpose plugin for Nullsoft WinAmp which enables you to output the name of the currently playing song and recently played songs to an HTML file ready for publication on the World Wide Web. This is very useful for SHOUTcast servers.

In addition, MusicTicker can monitor WinAmp's playlist so that tracks are played in a structure similar to that of a radio station's playlist--i.e., one in which different songs by the same artist should not be played consecutively, the same song should not be played twice in the same hour, and so on.

With MusicTicker, if someone is listening to a SHOUTcast server and hears a song they've never heard before and would like to know more about, they can just go to the server's webpage and access the file that this plug-in creates and find out exactly what song is playing, or what that great song that played ten minutes ago was called. In this way, it helps the listener learn about great new music, and it promotes the artist as well.

The MusicTicker Plug-In for WinAmp is freeware (its source code will also be released under the GNU license soon), and received a 4-star rating from Nullsoft's plug-in curator.

NOTE: This plug-in is still in the beta test stage and is not guaranteed to work on all system configurations. If you download it and it doesn't work, please email me about your problem, describing it in as much detail as possible, and I will try to fix it to the best of my ability. In the meantime, because MusicTicker is in such an early stage of development, it will be updated fairly frequently, so please keep checking this site for the latest version.

• Download the latest unstable release of MusicTicker (0.272b)
• Download the latest stable release of MusicTicker (0.262b)
• View the README
• View the instructions for using the MusicTicker Substitutions File (a new feature in v0.27b).
• See what's currently playing on my friend Cassie's SHOUTcast server (138.28.16.12:8000)

4/29/99 - Ow. Ok, people, I'm real sorry about this one... that name-munging bug was SO incredibly easy to fix, I can't believe I procrastinated for a month to fix it. I've got a few other interesting features planned, but unfortunately I won't be able to do anything with the program until post-Episode I (i.e., after May 19). If I get replies telling me that this version works fine though, I'll release the source code ASAP.

4/11/99 - Thank you all for the numerous emails regarding the new version 0.271b. There seems to be only one bug in it, which has to do with name munging. Apparently names of tracks on the playlist are getting mixed with parts of names from other tracks, which is probably an error in the artist/title substitution feature, but it shouldn't be too hard to track down. I'll fix this in a little bit and then release the source code! In the meantime, though, you'll probably want to just use 0.262b.

3/30/99 - Version 0.271b (unstable) released. Just finished splatting one big bug and made a few minor changes. I also made put an image at the end of MusicTicker's HTML output that says "Powered by MusicTicker" instead of the old "This page was created by The MusicTicker Plug-In for WinAmp." You can see two of these ads to the right. The top one was made by myself, and k-rad made the other one. The latest release of MusicTicker comes only with the top one, so as not to confuse novice users with many options. If you want to use the bottom one, you can get it here and modify the HTMLFooterImage variable of your plugin.ini accordingly.

3/28.5/99 - Ok, I'm just going to release this now. This isn't really the "official" release of 0.27b I guess, it's more of an unstable beta. I haven't run into any problems with it, but that doesn't mean there aren't any; but the only way to find out if there are is to get users to try it out. If you don't know much about computers and can't solve technical problems on your own very well, you might want to hold off on this release until it's been bugfixed, and just get v0.262b in the meantime. If you're adventurous, go ahead and get the new version. But please, don't email me asking many questions about problems you may be having... Try to limit it to the realm of bug reports and such if possible, because I probably won't have time to write you back. Sorry. :(

• Added HTMLRefreshTimeout variable to plugin.ini. Now you can specify how often you want MusicTicker's status page refreshed, in seconds.
• Fixed a missing HTML tag in the "Export Playlist to HTML" feature. Previously Netscape users weren't able to read the exported playlist file because of my lame HTML skills, but all is well now.
• Got rid of the silly "Open as read-only" checkbox in all the open/save file dialogs.
• Implemented the MusicTicker Substitutions File (aka artist/title substitutions). Simple, yet effective. Check out the file mt_subs.txt for more information on this. You'll also have to put the file mt_subs.inf into your Winamp\plugins directory for this to work.
• Implemented stripping of erroneous .mp3 extensions in track names. For some reason, sometimes Winamp gives MusicTicker the filename of the current track instead of the artist/title info (or whatever else you specify in Winamp's preferences). When this happens, it looks rather unsightly, so now MusicTicker strips those off of the name.
• Cleaned up the source code for release under the GNU General Public License. This source will be released when v0.27b is made stable.

3/28/99 - Well, I finally got around to it. I cleaned up much of MusicTicker's source code today, preparing it for release under the GNU General Public License. I also finally integrated the artist/title substitution feature into the latest build, and it seems to be working fine. I'm sure everyone's really going to like this feature. Version 0.27b should be out very soon, along with the source code!

I've also received a lot of emails in the past several weeks, and I'm very sorry that I haven't been able to respond to all of them. School's keeping me very busy (never take 4 math/physics courses simultaneously in college), so I haven't had much time to work on MusicTicker recently.

I got an email a while back from a user who got ftp uploads working via the ftp program that comes with Windows (ftp.exe). Very, very cool--I didn't know that Windows ftp supported command-line uploads. Here's the email:

Many thanks for this information goes to Kevin Wardrop!

2/17/99 - MusicTicker 0.261b released. OK!!!!!! I'm really really really sorry I didn't get back to all of you MUCH, MUCH earlier about this, but I've been quite busy with school and a flu I got last friday from some evil math professor. But the good news is that the crappy "garbage track name" bug you've all been experiencing should be fixed!! If it's not entirely fixed for you, try increasing the "TitleCheckCount" variable to something higher than 5. Thanks to Grant Rietze for beta testing the new version!

However, I have been FAR too busy with other things to be able to support this plug-in very much longer. As promised, I will be releasing the source code to MusicTicker under the GNU General Public License, once I finish cleaning it up a bit more and have integrated the artist/title substitution feature into the current build, so hopefully a lot of you hackers out there will be able to implement all of those other great features you wanted to add collectively. Long live free software!

1/26/99 - MusicTicker 0.261b released. It's mostly a bugfix release--due to my bad programming, a lot of people have been experiencing problems with MusicTicker. I've changed some of the memory allocation code, and I'm hoping that MusicTicker should work fine now; the link to the MusicTicker homepage definitely works, and I implemented a feature that checks to see if the song title contains garbage characters just in case this release still doesn't fix the garbage track name bug.

1/24/99 - MusicTicker 0.26b released. Ok, everything's a bit too busy right now, so I had to release this version before I could add everything I wanted to add to it. The artist/title substitution feature has been written but not implemented yet (I wrote it on my Linux box as a console app and will integrate the code with MusicTicker very soon), and I would also like to add a feature that makes MusicTicker write the entire playlist to an HTML file. Unfortunately, however, I'm extremely busy right now so I'm not sure exactly when something like this will be released.

Also, check out www.mp3spy.com. Gamespy took their program and turned it into a SHOUTcast server finder instead of a game finder, and it's very cool. I have no idea if Gamespy is going to inplement MusicTicker-like capabilities into mp3spy (their FAQ indicates that they intend to), but I'm not sure if what they're doing will be as extendible and configurable as MusicTicker currently is (and plans to be). Currently, however, mp3spy doesn't offer any capabilities like this plug-in does, so it would be great if you could go on their chat system and tell people about MusicTicker if you get a chance.

1/21/99 - Crap! Ok, school started this past monday, so I've been a little busy. Almost all of the new version is done, however; alpha testing has gone well and all visible bugs have been fixed, I just have to add the artist/title substitution feature (you'll see what that is once it's released) and modify the documentation to reflect the new changes, and I'll put it up. The new version should be out by sometime this weekend.

I'd also like to compose a FAQ for MusicTicker, if possible. There have been a lot of common questions people have been asking me about it, and a lot of the things that people are requesting as features can already be done with the current version of MusicTicker. If anyone out there has successfully used MusicTicker in concert with WS_FTP, CuteFTP, or any other major FTP programs, it would be GREAT if you could email me a step-by-step guide on how to get it working with MusicTicker, so that I can put it in the FAQ. You will be credited for it, of course.

1/15/99 - I am currently working on version 0.26b. This new release will support a lot of customizations that many of you have requested. Here's what's been implemented so far:

• The text color, background color, etc. can all be modified via the plugin.ini file. You can also change the font and the table color, so you should be able to tailor MusicTicker's output well enough to fit in with your website and make it look pretty cool. The SHOUTcast logo at the top of the output page has also been integrated into the default HTMLHeader config variable (instead of being hardcoded into the DLL, which was dumb of me), so it is optional now. Any more customizations to MusicTicker's output will probably have to be done using ODBC/SQL; I am currently collaborating with an ASP Senior Developer to implement this functionality in the plug-in.
• Added a check box in the config menu to enable/disable MusicTicker. When switched from enabled to disabled, the plug-in will write "The server is currently off-line" to the output HTML file. There was also a small bug in 0.25b regarding the posting of this off-line status message, and it has been fixed.
• Added an option to export only the tables containing the current song and recently played songs to the HTML file. I.E. the HEAD and BODY and other tags will not be output, only the tables will, so the file can be "pasted" into another web page using ASP or SSI, or using a DOS batch file in combination with MusicTicker's HTMLPostProcessCmd config variable.
• A couple other bugfixes and minor features which I can't recall right now. If you sent me an email about a bug or a suggestion, it's probably been fixed or implemented, except of course for anything regarding ODBC/SQL support.
• When the playlist monitor checks for artist matches, it will now compare the entire artist string instead of just the first 3 letters of it. It does this by taking whatever comes before the "-" character in the title, eliminating any spaces between the last word and the "-", and using that as the artist. So "Superchunk-For Tension" and "Superchunk - Like a Fool" would be identified as the same artist, but "Superchunk-For Tension" and "Super Friendz-Come Clean" would not. In 0.25b they would, however, since it only checks the first 3 letters of the titles.
• The "Apply" button in the configuration dialog now works like a normal Apply button should; i.e., it's only enabled when changes are made.
• When the plugin exports to HTML and can't write to the file, it will now tell you that an error occurred (instead of crashing).

1/11/99 - MusicTicker 0.25b released! This new version supports automatic uploading of the output HTML file to FTP servers, as well as some fixes to the thread code. Instructions for setting up MusicTicker to upload the status HTML page to your remote web server (such as XOOM.COM, Geocities, etc.) via FTP can be found in the README. Please tell me how this works for you!