The new iPhone app is here

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of our brand-new “3.0” version of 8tracks on iOS. The new app makes it easy to find the playlists you’ll enjoy most, wherever you may be. We think you’ll love it.

We fully re-designed the app to be bold and beautiful, incorporating both iOS 7 standards and numerous performance enhancements. You can now more readily pick playlists based on what you’re doing (e.g. study, workout, party, sleep) and how you’re feeling (e.g. happy, sad, love, mellow) in combination with a deep selection of genres and artists, a fundamental component of 8tracks since its launch on 8/8/8. Check out some of our favorite updates below.

 

8tracks3.home.duo

The new home screen features the Timeline, showing where you last left off; you can swipe right to reveal your playlist history or left to see upcoming playlists. Below it you’ll find your shortcuts, a personalized list of tag combinations and other playlist sets you tune into most frequently. The playlist page has also been redesigned to give you a clearer view of the artwork and easier access to the track listing.

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8tracks in the living room

Xbox_screenshot_4

After months of work, we’re excited to announce the 8tracks Xbox app. There are a lot of connected devices and related hardware for the home — Roku, Apple TV and Chromecast, to name a few — but 8tracks on the Xbox is a particularly good fit.

First, Xbox is the most popular set-top box in the US. More than 48m people have signed up for Xbox Live — far more than Apple TV (13m) and Roku (5m).

Second, nearly half of our audience is aged 18-24. By comparison, 51% of college males or 31% of all college students own an Xbox. Existing 8tracks listeners can now tune in from a familiar device, and new listeners can discover us through their Xbox.

As on 8tracks’ website and apps, Xbox listeners can browse playlists by genre, activity and mood tags.  Beyond liking mixes and following DJs, listeners on Xbox can navigate the app with voice commands, hand gestures (using the Kinect), and the good old-fashioned controller.

If you have an Xbox, please download the 8tracks app and enjoy. Meanwhile, we’re looking forward to spreading the 8tracks love on future platforms. For now, it’s game on.

New plugins for WordPress & Joomla

The new WordPress widget interface.
The new WordPress widget interface.

8tracks DJs and listeners have long had the ability to embed mixes in their own blog or website. But given all the quality blogging and CMS platforms out there, we thought we could offer something more robust, plus give a little love back to the developer community. To this end, we’re please to announce the launch of our first set of official Open Source plugins.

First is an update to our WordPress plugin by Jonathan Martin. You can now embed single mixes as well as entire mix collections – these can be all the mixes you’ve personally published, mixes by your favorite 8tracks DJ, or mixes tagged with your favorite combinations of genres and moods.

Second is a brand-new Joomla module from Emir Sakic, which includes all the functionality of our WP plugin plus the ability to specify the pages on which you’d like the mixes to be displayed, and the ability to customize their placement on a page-by-page basis.

Feedback, comments, and feature requests that could make these plugins more useful to the community are most welcome.  And any developers who are interested in helping us build plugins for other platforms, send a note to info@8tracks.com. Thanks and enjoy!

 

8tracks radio WordPress plugin
Download the WordPress plugin
8track radio joomla module
Download the Joomla module

 

Finally, here’s the WordPress plugin in action in a blog post using a collection of playlists: