radio.blog DJ

by Garrett Albright

Download v0.9.6

released 13 March 2005
Download bzip2 tarball (40K)
Download zip (56K)

What is radio.blog DJ?

radio.blog DJ (or rbDJ for short) is a free PHP script designed to work with astro's radio.blog, a widget you can embed into web pages to allow visitors to listen to music as they browse your site. rbDJ allows members of a community to upload their own music in MP3 format into radio.blog's playlist, turning it into into a sort of community radio station. rbDJ can be integrated into forums, blogs and CMSs which feature a member database. Administrators will also have administrator privileges on rbDJ.

Have a look at the rbDJ interface. Much like this web site, it's not pretty, but it's functional... However, rbDJ's interface is controlled by Smarty, an easy-to-use templating system, so you can easily customize rbDJ's interface to fit your site even if you are not a programmer..

Integration-wise, at present, rbDJ only integrates with phpBB forums configured to use MySQL. However, rbDJ has a "Generic" setting which allows it to run independently of a database, so even if your community's software is not directly supported with rbDJ, your community can still use it. If you are familiar with PHP, please consider writing and contributing a "port" of rbDJ to other community scripts. See the bottom of rbdj.php for the relevant code.

rbDJ has only been tested with radio.blog versions 2.0 through 2.2. Also, rbDJ has only been tested on Unix/Linux. Compatibility with Windows-based servers is unknown... If you're using a Windows server, please contact me to let me know if this works or not.

How does it work?

The person installing rbDJ sets several settings upon installation; what forum/CMS/etc and database rbDJ will work with (if any), how many posts and days registered members must have under their belt before they can use rbDJ, how many song "slots" there will be, and how old a song must be before its slot opens up. When a user uploads a song, it fills up a slot; when all slots are filled, users can no longer upload songs. However, once a song has been in the playlist for a certain number of hours, its slot will "open" and users will be able to upload a song again. That song will take the place of the song in the "open" slot; the old song will be "purged."

Users can listen to the song they just uploaded (or any other song) by clicking on the musical note next to the song's name; that will cause radio.blog to open up and play only that song. If radio.blog's finicky music player doesn't like it, they can then delete the song.

Administrators can break most of the rules that normal users must follow. They can delete other users' songs and "lock" a song so that its slot will never be purged.

For more information, including version history and the open source license rbDJ is released under, check out the latest Read Me file.

Contact me

Please contact me about rbDJ only; please do not contact me about problems you are having with radio.blog. Please ask at the radio.blog forums for help with radio.blog.

Email: albright (a) anre (period) net
AIM: AlbrightGuy
ICQ: 150670553
Y!IM: g_m_albright
MSN: g_m_albright@yahoo.com (Don't email me at this address; I rarely check it)
Skype: GarrettAlbright