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The Finetune Circle of Engagement now has a brand new family member:

Finetune for Facebook

Finetune for Facebook is a fully featured standalone application in which you can build playlists and soundtracks with your friends, in both active and passive ways. Here are some the features of the app:

Playlists and Soundtracks

Finetune.com is centered around building Playlists. In Finetune terms, a Playlist is a list of 45 or more tracks that you select that are played back to you in a way that meets the requirements of internet radio rules set out by the RIAA. Playlists are a great way to casually listen to all your favorite tracks, and guarantee that you are listening to exactly what you want.

Finetune for Facebook however, is mostly based on a new concept called Soundtracks. Soundtracks are a list of 1 or more artists, in which the tracks are selected randomly at runtime. The Finetune recommendation engine will insert extra related artists when needed, and everytime you listen to the soundtrack you will most likely get a fresh new mix of tracks. If you have used Finetune before, Soundtracks are an evolution of Tag Radio.

Favorite Artists Soundtrack

When you install Finetune for Facebook, it will look at all of the music you have defined in your “Favorite Music” on Facebook, and add them to your Favorite Artists section on Finetune for Facebook. You can add and remove artists from this section, as well as add comments about why you like them. Finetune for Facebook generates a Soundtrack of all these artists that you or your friends can listen to at anytime. Your friends can also view your favorite artists and make comments as well. Comments in themselves are very cool, and will be explained later when I talk about the Finetune Embedded Player 2.0. Overall the Favorite Artists section is great for your own personal radio enjoyment.

The Daily Special

The Daily Special was one of our ideas for a social experiment in soundtrack building. We wanted to explore the idea of a soundtrack that everyone within a social group could contribute to, and that contribution would be passive, but very regular. We wanted it to be “What my social circle is listening to today”. So as we were flushing out the idea, we decided to borrow from an already well established system on Facebook that produces this passive yet regular participation: My Status.

The feature was designed to be like a music oriented My Status. To be specific it is:

Tony is + a statement+ an artist

For example: “Tony is a big fan of The Human Abstract“

The Daily Special section will aggregate all your friend’s “statuses” list them, and build a soundtrack out of all of them. All statuses are treated like comments which are explained later when I talk about the Embedded Player 2.0

We have had a tonne of fun with The Daily Special as it has rolled out in development. Ryan Gildea, Ursula Deelstra, and I created a concept that we call Daily Special Poker. Ryan changed his status to:

“Ryan is hating Brittney Spears”

in which I responded:

“Tony is seeing Ryan’s Brittney and raising him a Pussycat Dolls”

Needless to say, the overall impact of our game was not a positive one for the quality of programming of all of our friend’s Daily Special Soundtracks, but regardless it is a tonne of fun.

As more and more of your friends fill out their Daily Special, the soundtrack grows and grows to the point that no extra content need be added by the Finetune recommendation engine. The resulting soundtrack can be very interesting and diverse.

Social Soundtracks

This feature is the big one. You can create a Social Soundtrack around any theme, add any artists you want, and invite friends to participate and add artists as well. In development I had playlists like:

• Teknision’s in office playlist -> all tek employees.
• Warped Tour 07 -> all my friends going to Warped Tour.
• Your Favorite Band Live -> pretty much everyone.
• My Patio BBQ Party this Weekend -> my beer drinking buddies.

Comments can also be added to the artists added to the soundtrack, like all the other soundtrack types.

Finetune Profile Linking

On the Finetune for Facebook home page, you can also link your Finetune.com profile to your Facebook profile. This imports all of your custom playlists from Finetune.com, so that you and your friends can listen to them.

Soundtrack and Playlist Sharing

All playlists and soundtracks (except the Daily Special) have a Facebook “Share” button on their page. This allows you to post a soundtrack or playlist to your profile mini-feed on Facebook or to message a playlist to someone specific.

Finetune Embedded Player 2.0

One of the most noticeable things that people familiar with Finetune will see, is the new Embedded Player that plays the music. It is not the old coverflow-esque player anymore. It has been redesigned both graphically and technically. The new embedded player has tonnes of new features including:

• Resizeability
• Larger Album Art
• Standalone Popout capability
• Comment rendering
• Playlist Transport 2.0

And much more that people will see in the future as it proliferates around the rest of the Finetune players. The player has been rewritten in Actionscript 3 and built as a Flex SWC component for maximum reusability.

Comment rendering is one of the coolest features and makes it’s debut on Finetune for Facebook. All of the comments attached to any soundtrack are displayed in the player in the form of pop-up bubbles as the playlist plays. This takes the conversation about artists into the activity of listening instead of just during the building phase.

Playlist Transport is the capability of any embedded player to push it’s playlist to another player. The Finetune Desktop was the first implementation of this feature. Embedded Players can see that the Finetune Desktop is open, and they prompt you asking if you would like to play the playlist in the Finetune Desktop.

Playlist Transport 2.0 is an evolution of that feature, that can pass the exact state of the playlist. This means that it will allow you to pass of the playlist while it is being played, and the recieving player will resume from the exact point in the track you were at. You can see this in action when you click the “Pop Out” button in the bottom left of the new Embedded Player. It is likely that a new Finetune Desktop will appear in the near future that uses the new Embedded Player 2.0 and also supports Playlist Transport 2.0 as well as comment rendering (and maybe other things….?).

The Finetune Desktop’s Role

An update to the Finetune Desktop was released recently (version 0.9.13). That update came with support for new Finetune for Facebook Soundtracks. The Finetune Desktop now knows what they are, and how to handle their outgoing links. You will also see a little Facebook icon beside them. Currently there is only one way to get soundtracks from Facebook into the Finetune Desktop, and that is using Playlist Transport.

If you have the Finetune Desktop open, then visit a Finetune for Facebook soundtrack page, when you go to play it, it will ask you if you would like to load the playlist in an external player. If you say yes, the playlist will open in the Finetune Desktop, and from then on will appear in your “Recent Playlists”. At this point you can use the playlist file capability of the Finetune Desktop to hold on to the playlist. Grab the Facebook soundtrack from the Recent Playlists and drag it to your desktop. It will appear as a file that you can then double click to play at any time.

A new Finetune Desktop will be coming in the future that has much more support for the Finetune Facebook app, as well as implementing the new Embedded Player.

So I would love to invite everyone to try out Finetune for Facebook, and let us know what you think!