Don't send update if content is empty

[mahemoff]

Hi, I'm the creator of Player FM, which a Scroblr contributor recently patched in support for. The way my player works is it's always present, but invisible, so Scroblr is sending an empty track on startup, and I suspect this may happen with other audio apps. My suggestion is to update pollSongInfo where it checks if it should send an update:

if (currentsong.name != song.name || currentsong.artist != song.artist)

I would suggest adding a check that $.trim(currentsong.name) isn't empty here. Alternatively, you may wish to default song name and artists to be '' (empty string) instead of 'undefined', though I think the aforementioned check is probably more robust (in case a value includes space characters for some reason).

[cgravolet]

Hey Michael,

Thanks for the suggestion! I've got a few open source contributions I need to test before pushing out an update, I'll be sure this change gets in there.

Charles

On Aug 17, 2012, at 9:19 PM, Michael Mahemoff notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi, I'm the creator of Player FM, which a Scroblr contributor recently patched in support for. The way my player works is it's always present, but invisible, so Scroblr is sending an empty track on startup, and I suspect this may happen with other audio apps. My suggestion is to update pollSongInfo where it checks if it should send an update:

if (currentsong.name != song.name || currentsong.artist != song.artist) I would suggest adding a check that $.trim(currentsong.name) isn't empty here. Alternatively, you may wish to default song name and artists to be '' (empty string) instead of 'undefined', though I think the aforementioned check is probably more robust (in case a value includes space characters for some reason).

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[cgravolet]

Looking into this a little further, pollSongInfo uses the following selector to grab the artist:

artist = $('.permaplayer .meta .track-wrapper .title :first-child').text();

If you enter that in the console on the Player.fm homepage without playing a track, it returns the character "»". Furthermore , if you inspect the request that get's sent to Last.fm you'll notice those characters showing up as the track name / artist. I guess for some reason it's picking up the title/source seperator (») as the first-child when the anchor tag is empty. I think the workaround would be to check first if the player was visible or perhaps if the title/source had a length greater than 1, otherwise return empty strings.

[mahemoff]

I see. Actually it might be due to some update I made, but I think it's probably selecting too much.

Would you mind trying this:

artist: $('.permaplayer .meta .track-wrapper .current-series-link').text(),
name: $('.permaplayer .meta .track-wrapper .current-episode-link').text(),

for the Player FM entry? Combined with the check for zero-length string, it should work.

(I'd try myself, but I haven't set up the project for development. If this quick fix doesn't work, I'll set it up and work it out.)

[cgravolet]

Hey, that's pretty much exactly what I did, then I noticed your reply :)

[mahemoff]

Excellent, does that mean it worked? :)

[cgravolet]

Yea, it seems to be working so far. I'd like to test it some more over the weekend and hopefully push out all these fixes on Sunday. Thanks for your help!

[mahemoff]

Great, thanks for your help too. Looking forward to the update!