Grooveshark.com Free Online Streaming Song Music Player – Widget Support Help Information

Effective Living > Music > Free Music Resources

Summary. Grooveshark.com has developed the world’s preeminent premier free online streaming song music player with an elegant user interface and searchable database. The instructions below describe how to create widgets that allow you to embed your favorite music on your blog or website.

Grooveshark Destinations. Here are quick links to the primary Grooveshark destinations.

Features – Learn about the Grooveshark features.
Music Search and Listen Page – Fast, elegant, simple, uncluttered, and easy to navigate.
Tiny Song – In three easy steps, create a simple short URL link for emails, blogs, and websites. (1) Search for the song, (2) play to confirm, (3) click on the song name and the short URL will be generated. The link will open the Grooveshark page and play the song you’ve selected.
Upload – A simple Java program installs instantly and allows you to upload entire folders of music in minutes. Then listen and share.
- Note: Apple users will notice a sharklet.jnlp file in their downloads folder. This is the Java program that can be saved for use with future uploads.
Widgets – Easily create a simple song player button or a more elaborate playlist player to be embedded into your blog or website.

Sample Playlists. Here are some Grooveshark widget playlists available on our site:

Copyright. Grooveshark is a secure mechanism to deliver streaming music only with no feature for downloading music. In this way, the musicians and the music industry are protected from lost revenue.

Grooveshark Music Playlist Widget Creation. Follow the instructions below to create playlist widget. These lengthy instructions may seem daunting. However, once you’re familiar with the process, you’ll find it takes about 60 seconds to create a widget from an existing playlist.

Create a Gooveshark account if you don’t have one already. You may want to create a separate account from your personal account to store your website playlists if you’re concerned about having published website playlists accidentally being deleting, modifying, or mixed up with your personal playlists.
Search for a song or artist, such as Sting. All currently available songs for that artist will be listed. When creating a Grooveshark music play list widget, it’s best to begin by using the full window Grooveshark player interface. The larger interface makes it easy to find songs and organize your playlist.
1. Album Artwork. When selecting songs, if possible, choose the version of the song that includes the album artwork. Original albums are preferred over Greatest Hits, because they convey the historical context of when the song was produced.
2. Duplicate Results. You may see duplicate entries in the search results. This could be the result of a song appearing in more than one album, or the song being in the database twice.
3. Missing Results. If the song you are looking for isn’t showing up, try searching by artist and song name, or artist and album name. Your initial search results may have been truncated.
4. Scrolling. When scrolling down the list, a mouse scroll button works, as does the scroll slider on the right side of the window. However, for longer lists, it may be easier to keep track of where you are by clicking on the scroll down arrow at the bottom of the vertical scroll area.
Add songs to your proposed playlist workspace, which appears sort of like a timeline or assembly line at the bottom of the screen with puzzle pieces representing each song. Remove a song puzzle piece by hovering the mouse over it to produce the context sensitive menu, then click on the little trash can (lower right). To organize songs in the proposed playlist, click and drag them right and left.
Save Your Playlist. When you have the songs you want, in the order you want them, click the Save icon (looks like a diskette or square) found to the right of the timeline/play list/assembly line of song puzzle pieces. You’ll be asked to provide a new list name or overwrite an existing name. To see your playlist listed, you may need click on the My Music button, then click Playlists.
Review Your Playlist and/or Manage Playlists. If you’ve not done so already, click on the My Music button, then click Playlists, then, with your mouse hovered over the playlist name, icons will appear. Click on the information icon (looks like an i in a circle). This view doesn’t show album images or puzzle pieces, however, it’s a quick way to view the song names, review for duplicates, and make minor changes in their order (a bit tedious without a click drag and drop).
1. Backup a Playlist. To make a backup copy of a playlist, clear the timeline (trashcan to the right), populate the timeline again using an existing playlist, then save with a new name. You could name all of your backup playlists preceded by the letter z so they will appear at the bottom of your alphabetized list of playlists.
2. Combine Playlists. Choose to play two or more playlists. This will populate the timeline with those playlists. Then, save with a new name.
3. Delete a Playlist. To delete a playlist, from My Music, click on Playlists, hover your mouse over the playlist and click on the Information icon (looks like the letter i in a circle). On the Playlist Information Page you’ll see a Delete Playlist button. Click that button. To confirm that the playlist was deleted, click My Music and then Playlists again. It should be gone.
4. Duplicate a Playlist. To duplicate a playlist for the purpose of creating a new playlist that contains a modified version of that playlist, clear the timeline (trashcan to the right), populate the timeline again using an existing playlist, then save with a new name.
5. Move a Playlist from One User Account to Another. To move a playlist from one user account to another, login as the first user, clear the timeline, choose to play the playlist, the timeline will be populated, logout, login to the other user account, the timeline will have been preserved, save the timeline/playlist.
6. Rename a Playlist. If you would like to rename a playlist, clear the timeline (trashcan to the right), populate the timeline again using an existing playlist, then save with a new name, then delete the old playlist.
7. Visual Timeline Editing of Playlist. When you play a playlist, it populates the timeline. So, you can clear the timeline (trashcan to the right), populate the timeline, use visual editing (click drag drop), then save and overwrite the playlist if you want to use both interfaces to review and modify your playlists. Deleting the old playlist, before saving the modified one may work better since it can take a while for changes to be reflected on the Grooveshark servers. Be careful when you do this because there is no undo feature. An alternative is to rename the old playlist as old and then create the new playlist.
Begin Playlist Widget Creation. Click on the My Music button, then click Playlists, then, with your mouse hovered over the playlist name, icons will appear. Click on the Embed icon (an up and to the right swoosh arrow) to use that play list and generate a widget with it in three easy steps
1. Playlist Type. If you choose the Copy Songs option, the songs in the Playlist you created will be copied to the Widget. This will create a duplicate playlist (by the same name which is confusing) When the playlist is changed, those changes won’t be reflected in the Widget. So, this isn’t a desirable option. So, choose to Mirror Changes. This will ensure that duplicate playlists aren’t created.
2. Appearance. To save time, do not attempt to change any of the options for colors or dimensions (250×400) of the player. Instead, change the color scheme to a desirable and readable color scheme such as Blue Moon I Saw You Standing There. Then click the Next Step button at the bottom of the page.
3. Adjustments. You can make adjustments to the playlist at this point by adding songs, removing songs, or changing the order. However, it’s recommended to manage the playlist using the method described above under 4. Save Your Playlist. Click the Finish button at the bottom of the page.
4. Copy Code. Click the Copy Code button found at the bottom of the page to copy the HTML code into your clipboard that you’ll need to paste into the HTML of your web page. Before continuing, try to paste the code into a text editor to ensure that the copy code button worked. If it didn’t you may need to highlight the code, right click, and choose copy (or use a copy keyboard shortcut such as CTRL+C or command+C on Apple).
  1. Paste Code. You’ll need to paste the copied code into the HTML of your blog or website. You should be familiar with this process, or get help.
5. Share. Optionally, there is the choice to post the song playlist to a variety of social networks, email it to someone, bookmark it, or review advanced Embed options. Note that the single song player doesn’t have volume control.
6. Modify. To modify an existing playlist widget, click on the My Widgets link. You’ll see any widgets you’ve created listed here.
  1. Simple Changes. Simple changes such as color can be made easily.
  2. Big Changes. To modify a playlist widget, you could make changes to them here. Or, better yet, you could delete the Widget and start again from the beginning. In this way, you would always have a matching playlist for your widget. If you’re concerned about deleting a widget accidentally, you could create the new widget, and only then delete the old widget once you’ve finished pasting the new HTML and testing it.
7. Delete. You may wish to keep your saved collection of Widgets simplified by deleting some. The purpose for saving them would be to go back and slightly modify them in the future. Once a widget is deleted, the widget won’t work on sites that have it embedded. However, you can delete the playlist used to create a single song widget. While single song widgets can be named, the resulting playlist will have a name like resourcesforlife’s widget 1. These temporary widget playlists will get added to your normal playlists. It’s okay to just delete them.

Link to a Song. In articles or emails it’s nice to provide a link to a song’s information page. The problem is that the URL for a song may not be recognized as a valid URL by your system.

The song Evident Utensil by Chairlift has the following URL:
http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/song/Evident_Utensil/21044411
The following URL is a workable alternative:
http://listen.grooveshark.com/song/Evident_Utensil/21044411
An alternative is to use the Grooveshark TinySong.com service.

Sample. Below is a sample of the music player widget by Grooveshark.com with selected songs by The Beatles that feature acoustic guitar. Feel free to keep this window open and minimized to keep the music playing.

By Greg Johnson