Okay, so there's a bug that causes and error when the song from Grooveshark doesn't exactly match the song on the playlist. You know the one where you click on a song and it doesn't play. Fix in 0.218, in a couple hours. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhgghhhhhhh!!

I've been getting a few questions lately, about the search limits on the Search form. The search results limit is 32 results, however Grooveshark (and therefore GrooveWalrus) usually returns far less than that. Now if someone wants to report this as a problem (Tinysong API returns less than 32 results) to GrooveShark (http://getsatisfaction.com/grooveshark) feel free.

However, one of the pillars GrooveWalrus was built on was to allow me to NOT search through my song collection (or GrooveShark's, or Dizzler's, or ...) to generate playlists.

Searching through your hard drive and seeing the 'safe' albums you know are good and just playing those, combined with not wanting to seek out the good songs from the crappy albums generally amounts to playing only 10% of your music collection. What if there was a way to get a list of the top songs for a certain band, or songs that were similar to one you already liked, or the best songs on an album, or the top 100 songs last year? You know, (play)lists of songs that are pre-made for you, so you don't have to dig around your harddrive. Hey! The internet has a bunch or lists like that. Last.fm in particular has a whole bunch, but other websites do too.

So, from that, we have the Last.fm tab and the List Sifter tab, which are a couple ways to generate playlists in GrooveWalrus. Combine the ability to generate playlists with pretty much any song, with a collection of pretty much every song, and you get GrooveWalrus.

So, if that seems familiar, it is, because it's pretty much the same as iTunes, Pandora, Grooveshark, ... , etc. Hopefully though, mashing all those things into one application and focusing on letting you pick a few variables to quickly generate a playlist, makes something useful.

GrooveWalrus 0.217 is out, finally "re-fixed" the version updating feature so for the next version it should be available and hopefully, working.

- Version update changed to it's own program, uses .zip files, hopefully better.
- Sync, Zongdora plug-in icons changed. Sync info typo fixed.
- Fix for Grooveshark updates.
- Changed GS version to check if user entered version is less than the hard-coded version number, uses what's greater.
- Fixed all the SYSLOC's to either use the current working directory or what gets passed as the sys.argv.
- Added the pl_PL Polish translation to the setup.exe, was in the .zip.

Version 0.216 of GrooveWalrus is now available for download. There's 3 new additions in this version. You can now select a backend (Options > Music Stream, which may help OS/X or Linux users, Windows users should probably keep pymedia). Sync Playlist plug-in has been created that may help you copy songs on the playlist to your mp3 player/some disk drive. Zongdora plug-in will get song recommendations for the playing song from Pandora (or clicking on a recommendation will get results for that song too). If you find bugs or have problems, send me an email.

Okay, I'm unable to make any updates for more than a few weeks. If direct streaming isn't broken yet, when it does get broken, using the Flash plug-in is the other option. Also, comments are now offline.

Anyone with OS/X installed somewhere and some programing ability might be able to get 0.215 working on their computer machine. If you have:
- a copy of the source code (http://code.google.com/p/turnip-town/)
- python 2.5 installed
- wxpython (latest version) installed
- some other stuff installed (maybe?)
You can edit gw.py (line 373):
from: "self.use_backend = 'pymedia'"
to: "self.use_backend = 'wx.media'" (update: latest source has options in the Options > Music Stream tab, you'll want 'wx.media' and 'QUICKTIME')
and then run 'python25 gw.py' at your command prompt and things may work. There's probably a minimum of about 6-10 things that are broken, that you may have to go in an muck around with. I don't have time or a copy of OS/X to get it working right now. Sorry!

There is a problem with wx.media, it won't (or I haven't figured out how to) play partially downloaded songs. So, if you get it running on OS/X, the first song you play won't play until it's fully downloaded (hit play again after that). You should enable Options > Music Stream > Pre-fetch songs, so that after the first song, other songs will (hopefully) be already downloaded.

The above should also apply to Linux users too, although Wine might still be the better choice: http://groove-walrus.turnip-town.net/dru/node/101

Hello again! Version 0.215 of GrooveWalrus is out, streaming should work again. I didn't really test this release too thoroughly, so if there's problems let me know. More details later.

Looks like there was some Grooveshark updates, so streaming is busted right now. I recommend you use the Flash plug-in, till streaming gets fixed (Alt+F). If the first song you play via the plug-in doesn't seem to play, hit play again. Thanks to the users that pointed this out, I'll try and get a fix out when I have some time.

Hopefully, things are more or less back to normal,. If you find problems let me know. Details:

- Made the lyrics plug-in use the more friendly matching option.
- Fixed delete pop-up not showing up on RSS feed list.
- Fixed ratings refresh errors.
- Added right-click option on the Folder tab of the Song Collection tab, to allow you to add a folder (only) to the play list.
- Fixed problem where after loading a mp3 file, the plug-ins wouldn't load.
- Updated search to use tinysong.com's JSON results.
- Fixed an error that wouldn't let you load an .mp3 from your local drive.
- Added an 'isfile' check when loading .m3u files.
- Changed the Album tab's album cover not to get changed to the bio pic if an album cover can't be found.
- Fixed error that occurred after updating the Song Collection after a download.
- When searching for songs locally, exact matches are returned at the top of the results list now.
- New search returns better results when searching for a local file on the fly.
- Local mp3 times are updated no matter what, now.
- Local search results are now ordered by random, gives you a chance to hear different versions of the same song (if you have multiple versions of a song).
- Added a specific method for the 'search local songs on the fly' to make sure the best results have a chance to be played (ie. before Pearl Jam - Black my have played Black, Spin The Black Circle,... other Pearl Jam songs with black in the title).
- Added 'lazy' and 'strict' on the Lyrics plug-in, lazy works most of the time, try strict when it doesn't.

Hooray, new stuff! Details:

- Added menu option to open the GrooveWalrus website.
- Made minimode a little smaller, added a close button, allowed you to undock the window from the top of the screen.
- Added Lyrics plug-in, it fetches lyrics (sometimes).
- Separated out song collection tab.
- Changed the cover art to use bio picture if we can't find a cover, letterboxing(?) added if image is not square.
- Fixed the GS version number to get it from the correct path.
- Added TreeListControl handling for eventual treelistctrls.
- Fixed ratings not updating after rating.
- Added filters on the Favorites tab to filter based on the available ratings.
- Added option to clear a rating on the right-click menu of the Favorites tab.
- Moved the rating icon for each song to it's own column on the Favorites tab.
- Removed Rating plug-in, all functionality is on the Favorites tab.
- Updated GS version and secret stuff.
- Fixed some unicode/crazy character errors when displaying results on the Song Collection tab.
- Auto-title-case id3 tag song, album and artist info from mp3s.
- Added error checking for screwy album id3 tags.
- Album viewer now displays bio picture if it can't find an album cover.
- Added a tree list display for folders on the Song Collection tab (it's not complete, you can't add songs to the playlist from there), things will get changed to probably a combination of both views, maybe.