Turntable.fm came around at the same time Google+ was introduced as a better alternate and obvious future replacement of Facebook. And perhaps only coincidentally, many Google Chrome extensions were being made to enhance the Turntable.fm experience. So after years of using Firefox and a week of using Turntable.fm, I finally made the switch from Firefox to Chrome. It’s free, has tons of great extensions that are constantly being created and added, and has the same renegade open-source flair of Firefox, but with less of a memory footprint.

As a graphic/web designer who is always at a computer, I am most concerned with satiating my obsession with Turntable.fm while remaining productive at my desk job. The goal is to hide the page at all times, because it’s difficult to justify a cartoon rave that looks like a time-waster game as a legitimate way to listen to music. With these Chrome extensions, you can get work done while enjoying the music, and seem active to other participants:

• Go to a bigger room. It just isn’t possible to chat and be productive. So it would be best to go into a room with 20+ people so you aren’t really expected to chat.
• Get Auto Awesome. It lives in your bookmarklet toolbar. When you go to a room, you right-click your actual Awesome button in the room, select “Inspect Element”, and copy that first quoted portion of the highlighted text. Then paste it into the Auto Awesome field. So now when a song comes on, it hits Awesome for you auto-magically! This lets people know you’re present and digging the music. “But how do I hit Lame, Manda?!” Oh I’ll feed you, baby birds.
• Get Turntabler. This is a little button next to the address field of the browser window. You click it and it offers thumbs up/down, add to queue, mute, and song info; no matter what tab you’re on! So while Auto Awesome is going, and you hear a song you dislike, you just hit the thumbs down and it changes your Awesome vote to a Lame.

Here are other great ways I enhance my Turntable.fm experience:

• Get Turntable Scrobbler. This allows Last.fm to scrobble what you listen to in Turntable.fm. Easy install, just follow the instructions. In case you aren’t aware, Last.fm keeps track of what you listen to and allows you to connect with other people with similar music tastes. It’s also great documentation of your own music growth.
• Get Turntable Extended. This adds a few extra features to Turntable.fm. The most beneficial features to me are Playlists (for organizing your queue into genres), and Room Users (for when you’re in a packed room and want to see who all is in there).

Sooo let’s not talk about how ironic it is that I wrote this at work.

Current Mood: Dorky