If you use Firefox, you might be familiar with search plugins - these are little add-ons that let you change whether your current search engine is Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, or something else. I generally use Google, although I played with A9 for awhile in order to get the pi/2 discount from Amazon.

One of the new features we added in version 1.7 of MusicIP Mixer lets you do the same kinds of things with the search bar in the mixer. Rather than creating a whole new scheme for search plugins, we’ve adopted the same Mycroft format used by Firefox - that means you can any of the search engine plugins available on the web (over 9,000 as I’m writing this).

Now I’ll grant that most of you are probably scratching your heads and wondering who fell out of the coconut tree when they decided to add search plugins to a playlist engine. Let me show you the kind of things we had in mind while adding this feature, and maybe it will make more sense. Warning: This may get a bit technical, and is only officially supported in the Windows version of the mixer right now. I’ll put the scary bits in a box.

Here are some mip links you can use to add some popular search engines to MusicIP Mixer. If you followed the instructions to set up the mip protocol, you can just click on the links below. Otherwise you’ll need to copy and paste the mip url into a file with the .mipcmd extension, and set up the search engines that way.

Ok, so what’s the point? If I’m browsings songs in the mixer, I might see an artist, say The Killers, and wonder “What’s up with that band?”. I’ll use Ctrl-/ to copy the text of the selected item into the search window and move keyboard focus there. Then I use the up/down arrows until Wikipedia is selected, and press enter. Up pops Wikipedia with info about The Killers (you may need to select the right subpage if there are multiple matches). If you go to the bottom of the Wikipedia pages, there’s usually an External Links section, which points to official pages, fan sites, and other useful resources. Naturally, you can do the same thing by clicking in the search window with your mouse, typing in the name of the artist, and using the little triangle search gizmo to select Wikipedia out of the list of search types.

If you don’t like Wikipedia, pick one of the other 9,000+ search engines, or include all the ones you like. You can take the URLs from the Mycroft website, adapt them to the format shown above, and install any plugin you like. Technical details for creating new plugins are available from the links at the top of this post. (If you get carried away and want to clear out all the search engines, pass -resetsearch on the command line.)

We have at least one other nifty trick for that little search window which we hope to put up in the not too distant future - keep an eye out for it. Until then, enjoy some great music listening.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 8:39 pm and is filed under MusicIP Mixer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.