Tuesday 21 April 2015

Further problems with Spotify and Screensleeves

Recently people have been reporting that the Screensleeves album art screensaver is displaying some information (track name, artist, album) but not all (album art is missing, time elapsed/remaining) when using the Spotify player.

Recently there has been a problem where Screensleeves has been unable to detect that Spotify is playing (and displaying the 'Paused' message). If this is your problem then the problem is at Spotify's end and here is the workaround.

The newer problem involves Screensleeves recognising that Spotify is playing and some information being displayed, but not the album artwork and certain other information. This latest problem is also at Spotify's end, they are aware and say that they're working on it.

Screensleeves is capable of fetching album artwork from the web if none is supplied by the player, though this may or may not be kicking in. I suggest checking Screensleeves' options in System Prefs and making sure that 'If no artwork is available' is set to 'Attempt to find cover image from the web'.

Once again, I hope that Spotify will be fixing the problem soon and things will be working as they should once more. Through all of this, other music players have been working fine as far as I'm aware.

Thursday 16 April 2015

New domain

Luckily, moving domains on the web doesn't involve cardboard boxes and heavy lifting but it can mean things being lost or broken. (Though I've been lucky in being able to use Scrutiny to clean up the links on the new site. Its new feature - checking the canonical href of each page - is a result of a subsequent need on my part).

The website is moving from the co.uk domain (which I've used since about 2000) to a new peacockmedia.software  home. This is because Google is treating the .co.uk domain as targeting the UK and there seems to be no way to change that.

I'm not sure how I feel about the vast number of new top-level domains. A couple of years ago I failed in a sniping match to secure peacockmedia.com as it became available for registration (and was then offered it for hundreds of pounds, which I wouldn't pay out of principle - there's something really wrong in all of this). I feel that it'll be more difficult for consumers to tell a legitimate website from a fraudulent one from a url. I also rather cynically feel that it's a money-making exercise - businesses (legitimate businesses as well as speculators) will feel obliged to snap up various suffixes.

But I'm hoping that the more international new domain will get better recognition by Google in countries other than the UK. Time will tell.