pop it out ! (the finetune player)

Okay okay.... I'm excited! heh

In the past, when you'd click on the www.finetune.com player, and then clicked on a link on the blog, the music would stop.

But NOW............. all you have to do is hold your cursor (arrow) over the album cover, and watch for it to say "pop the player out". Click that. It will open the player in a new window. That way, you can keep listenin to tunes while readin the blog. Just remember you have an extra window open. You can either close it, or go back to the player on the main page, and click where it says somethin like "listen right here".

Finetune keeps getting better & better. Their website is a lil slow at times, and I'm not sure about the "randomness" of the tunes. It seems that any time I'm here, I keep hearing the same handful of songs. Since there are almost 50 songs on the playlist, that shouldn't happen. But - I'm happy with them for now.

We have music.......... well sort of....

Okay.... I've tried to liven up this blog by adding music - via finetune.com. It's a great site, and has a bazillion songs. I managed to find every obscure song that I was looking for on the site. It's easy to install on a blog as well.

That's where the fun ends. When you click on one of the blog sections, the music stops. I see a new player shows up on each page, but then you have to click to start it up again. Obviously you're only going to spend a couple of minutes on each page... so it's really not what I was hoping for. I guess though, if you have some office work to do - bills to pay, or a hand-written letter (yeah right), you can visit my site, turn on the tunes, and listen while ya work. Okay, I guess you can turn on the tunes, minimize the window, and then open a new browser window or Word or something, too.

I also have a problem with finetune.com insofar as you can't choose the songs you want played. You have to set up a playlist on the site first - and you must fill it with 45 (count em - 45!) songs, or it won't work on yer blog. And while I now know how to operate the lil music thingie (jukebox?) on the bottom of my main screen, it's confusing enough so a new visitor might not get it at all. Oh heck... scroll to the bottom of the main page, and when you see the arrow pop up in the middle of the box with the teddy bear, click it. The music should play. There are "shadows" on either side of the main song playing... those are actually "albums" turned sideways. If you click the left one, you can play the song you just heard. If you click the right shadow, you get the next "randomly chose" song in the list. Unfortunately you cannot scroll through all 45 songs to experience my weird tastes. After scrolling through about 4 or 5, a pop-up shows up that tells you that you have to listen to some of the songs.

I made a handful of visits to my blog after the music was installed, and found too, that there's lots of repetition. So I'm not sure that even I will get to hear all 45 songs... and there doesn't seem to be any way of getting to the songs I wanna hear. I believe too, that songs have been included on my playlist that I didn't personally add. I mean, I like Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry", but I would never admit that to anyone.... ;) and I wouldn't include it on a playlist.

Oh well. I guess I'll be lookin around for a new music source. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy what you hear - if you get the thing to work. As always, comments/suggestions/feedback are appreciated!

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Update: After checking out several of the websites that host music and provide a player for your blogs/websites, it seems that finetune.com is actually one of the better choices. Their player is a little more sophisticated than others. They don't seem to have a "pop-up" player, but then so many computer users have pop-up blockers, so they wouldn't be able to take advantage of the player if they wanted. I went and hunted for more tunes at finetune.com, and still didn't have any trouble finding most of them. I guess I'll be keeping them until something better shows up.