Make Turntable.fm Easier: Playlist Manager Chrome Extension

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Krista Summitt

So you know I’m mad into turntable.fm. I’ve got a little “residency” every Friday with DJ Diva in the Soul Bounce Hang Suite. What you’ll find if you start participating regularly is, managing your songs can get to be a chore. Most of the “rooms” have certain genres of music they focus on, or in our case, themed sets. What happens is you accumulate more and more songs, but it gets more and more time consuming to search through them and queue them up.

Thankfully, if you use Chrome as a browser, there are some extensions available to make it easier to focus on enjoying the music rather than frantically searching for your next song. I’ll be looking at them each in separate posts this week.

Turntable.fm Playlist Manager is the one I’ve had the most luck with.

Quite simply what it does is allow you to create a playlist, then drag and drop songs to that playlist. Then, when you want to play a song. you just clip the “top” button and it moves it to the top of your DJ queue. NOW, VERY IMPORTANT:

DO NOT DELETE THE SONGS FROM YOUR DJ QUEUE.

Without getting too techie, the reason is, this extension doesn’t make a real “copy” of your song when you drag and drop it. Think of it as a ‘virtual copy’.

Okay, so here’s a quick screencast to show you part 1, Making a Playlist. I didn’t narrate as it’s pretty self-explanatory. Part 2 will show you how to back your playlists up to Dropbox. If you have any questions please leave it in the comments and I’ll try to help.

Does Turntable.fm’s Playlist Manager Let You Dig In The Crates?

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Krista Summitt

Right up front, let me say I know it’s butt-backwards to write a post on a Turntable.fm extension before I write one about Turntable.fm. However,this extension is new, and Turntable.fm is hot, so I wanted to check it out and report back to you guys right away. I really love Turntable.fm so far, so when I read on The Next Web that there was a Chrome extension that let you create playlists, I had to check it out.

The skinny:

Think of the Playlist extension as a way to organize the music you’ve uploaded to Turntable.fm, not as a way to actually “play” it they way you would on iTunes, and you’ll be fine. Still some bugs to be worked out.

The specifics:

All right, so this is how Turntable.fm looks with the Playlist Extension installed below. You can grab and move the Playlist sidebar around wherever you wish.

Next, I created and saved a playlist called “Pre-House House” using songs I already had in my DJ Queue. The new playlist is in the left column, and my existing DJ Queue is on the right in the screenshot below. One important thing to note: if you install this, when you drag and drop a song to a new playlist, you aren’t going to see the ‘ghosted out’ visual of the song being dragged over to the playlist. The playlist will highlight itself in orange when the song has successfully made it over, but that’s all.

My biggest issue is, it isn’t very intuitive how to play songs from your playlist, as opposed to your DJ Queue. To complicate things further, not all the songs in my playlist showed a play button. Initially, I thought it was because it had to be played once from your DJ Queue. I finally determined you can only add songs from the Turntable.fm database to your playlists. (The songs you put in your playlist are actually images, not actual files.) So once you get the songs loaded in to your playlist, you click to play them just as you would from your DJ Queue.

So, as I said earlier on, the big word here is ‘organization’. If you have a lot of songs, or better yet DJ in multiple rooms on Turntable.fm, this will keep you from hunting back and forth so much. If they’d named this Turntable.fm organizer, I probably would have had a different expectation going in.