I’m kind of hooked on the website turntable.fm. If you’re curious about what it is, you can read the post I made about it shortly after joining. My username on there is mitcharf (shocking, I know). The purpose of THIS page is to collect turntable-related hints and tips, but first I’ll also list my current favorite rooms on the site:
Favorite Rooms
Since turntable combines social networking and music, these rooms are ones in which I like both the music and the people.
- Desk Job DJs – This is my “daytime” room on weekdays. If I am on turntable between 8am and 6pm on a weekday, chances are this is where I’ll be. It is a hangout of several of my real-life friends (who also happen to play good music).
- Ctrl-Alt-Destroy – I wasn’t on turntable very long before I started making friends with people on there. One of them was named Ctrl-Alt-Destroy, and this is a room he created. It has become a hangout for some of my favorite folks on turntable. If I’m on turntable and I’m not in Desk Job DJs, then I’m almost certainly here. These two rooms comprise 99.9% of my turntable existence. In fact, I don’t think I’ve been in any other rooms for the past week.
And now, on to the hints and tips!
Tip #1: Use Google Chrome
The main reason is because there are several Chrome extensions available to enhance your turntable experience:
- Turntable.fm Extended – Does several things: shows you who has lamed/awesomed a song, shows you a list of who is in the room with you, ties in with Google desktop notifications so that chat messages can pop up that way, and also includes a copy of Turntable Scrobbler (also listed separately below), which reports tracks played on turntable to last.fm. And more!
- Turntable.fm Playlist Manager – Allows you to create playlists out of songs in your queue. Why would you want to do this? It helps you search through your songs provided you have a large queue. Rather than searching through your entire queue for a song, you can search through a particular playlist.
- Turntabler – Allows you to lame/awesome a song from any browser tab.
- Turntable Scrobbler – Reports the songs played in the room to your last.fm account. This is included in Turntable.fm Extended, but is useful for folks who only want the scrobbling and not the rest of it (since there is some performance cost).
Tip #2: Make sure turntable plays the right song
Sometimes turntable will choose to play a song other than the one at the top of your queue. Some things have been observed to help prevent this:
- Always use the “top” button to move your chosen song to the top of your queue (rather than drag ‘n drop, or any other method)
- Finish uploading any songs BEFORE getting up to the DJ stand. Uploading songs too close to your turn to play can cause problems
- Do not try to change your song selection within 15-30 seconds of your turn to play
Tip #3: Browser text search can search through your queue
I haven’t tested this for all browser types, but for me I am able to search through my song queue by hitting control-F and searching for text. It searches the entire page, including the chat window, but it also includes the song queue. Since I have a LOT of songs in my queue, I find this very useful.
Tip #4: /ignore trolls
Some folks like to enter a room and spam the chat window. If you don’t want to see their nonsense, type /ignore <their username> in the chat window. Then you will no longer see any more of their messages. This can be undone with /unignore <username>. In my experience, ignoring trolls (and laming their songs if they happen to be a DJ) is the fastest way to get rid of them. They’re doing it because they want attention — don’t give them what they want.
Tip #5: Don’t repeat a recently-played song
You can view which songs have been recently played in a room by clicking on the “Room info” button above the DJ stand. This can help you avoid playing a song or artist which was recently played.
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