Music to my ears
Me.dium just released a new version of our XPI (firefox extension). I’m particularly excited about this release because Me.dium now officially works in the Firefox 3 beta and the Songbird media player.
You can download the latest release from Me.dium’s homepage but if you like it you should leave a review for us at Me.dium’s Mozilla Add-ons page or Songbird Add-ons page.
I should probably also mention that I am excited about this release because I did a lot of the work to make sure our extension would work in Firefox 3 and Songbird, but I also have to thank the guys I met at Songbird DevCamp for helping me to get Me.dium working in Songbird. I had a lot of fun there and Songbird is quickly becoming my new favorite media player.
If you want to read more about this release, check out Me.dium’s Blog or the articles on Digg or Mashable.
If you’re already a Me.dium user, you may have noticed that we added sounds to our sidebar at the end of last year. Hopefully you liked the sounds we chose, and if you didn’t you probably found the sound icon in the upper-right corner to turn them off. But now that Me.dium works in a music player, I thought I’d let slip a little-known secret about our sounds (nobody reads my blog anyway so I think it’s okay).
The sounds that are played by the sidebar are simply wav files that are loaded from URL’s that you can override in your Firefox or Songbird about:config. If you’re not sure what about:config is, you might want to check out this article or maybe this one.
Now that you know how to get to about:config here’s how you can change your sounds in Me.dium.
Caveat Emptor: Messing around with config settings when you don’t know what you’re doing isn’t always a good idea. Don’t hold me responsible if something you changed causes firefox to crash, sets your computer on fire, etc. etc.
Also, changing your sounds isn’t really supported, so it’s not my fault if this doesn’t work with future releases of Me.dium
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Once you have about:config open, right-click to bring up the context-menu. Go to New -> String, it will bring up a dialog box to create a new property, there are four different properties you can set for the four different events that Me.dium will play sounds for. Here are the property names you can add (you need to put in your actual username):
me.dium.[username].sidebar.NewChatMessageSound
me.dium.[username].sidebar.NewFriendRequestSound
me.dium.[username].sidebar.PresenceOnlineSound
me.dium.[username].sidebar.PresenceOfflineSound
Set the values of the properties to a URL of the .wav file you want to play (sorry, no .mp3’s yet). If the files are saved on your computer’s hard drive somewhere, you can use a file:// URL. If you just create the property and leave the value empty, it will disable the sound for just that property. Now you can have a cool sound that will go well with the music you want to listen to in Songbird, and you can (for example) disable the sounds for your friends going on- and offline so it won’t interrupt your favorite track.
Enjoy!