Sidebar
The most obvious change this month is the addition of a sidebar area which can be used to display extra information related to the current page. On pages where this isn't yet made of use of a block is displayed giving tips about interesting Libre.fm features that might not be immediately obvious to new users.
Neighbours
The first major use of the new sidebar is on the user profile pages, where any user who has loved some tracks will now see a box showing their neighbours. These are all people who like similar artists and in addition to displaying this information on the profile page you can now tune in to a user's neighbourhood radio station. This station plays all the tracks which this user and their neighbours have loved.
Volume control
The HTML5 audio player has been updated slightly to add a volume slider, with your volume preferences being remembered throughout the site.
Radio stream improvements
Radio stream generation has been improved, with better randomisation of selected tracks and increased speed when retrieving a playlist from the radio service.
Google Summer of Code
As mentioned in last month's news we're taking part in the Google Summer of Code this year. We had a lot of fantastic applications, unfortunately we were only able to accept one student, Matt Pugh, who intends to work on improving our statistics, both in terms of how they're presented and the range of statistics available to both listeners and artists.
Although only one applicant was officially accepted, the two other top candidates, Luke Slater and Patrick McDermott have both agreed to work on their proposed projects over the summer anyway, with the GNU FM team mentoring them as if they were summer of code students. Luke plans to work on integration between GNU FM and GNU Social, bringing more social abilities to GNU FM and exposing a user's listening habits through GNU Social plugins. Patrick is implementing a plugin system for GNU FM, and writing a plugin to provide users with karma and badges, awarded for doing useful things around the site such as tagging a number of tracks or listening to a lot of free music.
Bug fixes
There have been a lot of bug fixes this month, most notably fixing issues with artist URLs containing certain special characters and further improving the reliability of our service for forwarding scrobbles on to Last.fm.
New ways to donate
As well as simply sending us your hard earned cash directly you can now help support Libre.fm via Flattr and BitCoin donations. For more details see our donations page.
