mobiuslive ajaxified

We’re inching ever closer to a real live beta with the mobiuslive music social network project and I’m personally having a lot of fun with the final set of modules, i.e., the playlist manager and Flash jukebox. As you can probably tell from their names, the playlist manager allows users to “star” their favorite tracks around the site similar to the way you would represent a given email’s importance in GMail.

(The icons on the right side mean “Has Video”, “Has Lyrics”, “Is a Favorite”, “Buy This Track” and “Preview This Track,” respectively.) Marking a track in this manner appends it to your personal playlist, which you can then manage via a funky little drag-and-drop interface built using the scriptaculous javascript library, shown below:

You can add tracks manually using a simple form below the list (although obviously these will not necessarily be playable by the jukebox). In either case, any item you add to this list can be dragged and dropped for sorting, regardless of whether it exists within the mobiuslive library or not.

The jukebox application itself is based on the very excellent XSPF playlist specification and web music player.

To get everything to work together, we created a dynamic XML file that pulls the relevant user tracks from the database, formats it according to the XSPF specification and feeds it back into the Flash player. I had to spend a little time tweaking the player itself to be a bit more in-line wiith the mobiuslive look, but other than that, it was a fairly straightforward process.