September 17, 2008 by sharky
If you happen to be a diehard OiNKPlus fan, you’re probably already aware that one of their flagship features - the Last.fm media player - hasn’t worked for quite some time. The OiNKPlus coding team has worked tirelessly to correct the issue that pertains to the upgraded Last.fm structure, and it is now once again available in the newly-released OiNKPlus version 10. Other key upgrades include the addition of SSL to What.cd, and improved embedding into other supported BitTorrent sites.
For those of you who don’t know what it’s all about, OiNKPlus is a media enhancer and artist discovery add-on for Firefox, that works in collaboration with many music trackers (and other select BT sites). The added OiNKPlus info cleverly coalesces within the supported website for seamless integration on the .torrent download page - and it even works with The Pirate Bay and mininova. Below is a look at the before and after examples on What.cd and mininova.org:
| What.cd with… | What.cd without… | Mininova with… | Mininova without… |
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Check out the OiNKPlus blog for a complete list of supported sites.
Key Features:
— The OiNKPlus script adds two media players to the "details" area of a music torrent (Last.FM media player, and MySpace Player) which allows for select songs to be previewed.
— A short biography (from Last.fm) is incorporated (known as the "abstract") which gives a small background blurb about the artist.
— Links to External Resources - Various resources for similar content, including Hypem.com, AllMusic.com, Imeem, FoxyTunes, and more.
— 25 similar artists are added to the displayed artist or band; a great add-on for discovering new music. What.cd members have probably noticed an internal feature called the "Similar Artist Map" which connects a displayed artist to related ones (although this feature is not based necessarily on similar genres).
Personally, OiNKPlus is a great addition to Firefox - especially when browsing public trackers that tend to offer very little in the way of extra information to the torrents. The Last.FM media player is a little wishy-washy, and tends to only link to the "top tracks" of a selected artist (not the album itself), which may or may not necessarily contain actual samples from that particular selected album. For example, if you’re browsing on mininova (or Waffles, What.cd) and go into the torrent details for an obscure album from, say, The Rolling Stones - the available streaming samples in Last.FM will likely not contain any of those songs. You’ll need to actually visit the Last.FM website and search for that specific album in order to hear the samples.
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