Problems with Grooveshark!

Grooveshark is the website that drives the links below to streamed music. Its a good concept. I particularly like the way you can upload tracks. Anyway, they recently updated the interface, and Grooveshark is not playing nice with my web browser (IE8). I decided to make up a small, dedicated browser that only played Grooveshark. This is easy because the open source Mozilla web browser is available as a package that lets you install the browser as an application dedicated to one web site. This is known as the Prism project. I guessed (rightly) that my problem was IE8, and that the Mozilla browser would be more compatible. As a bonus, running Grooveshark as an application means that it doesn’t get affected by other web pages open on my desktop, it can be minimised to the task bar etc.

1. Download the installer for Prism from here and install it. Run the program and use the Grooveshark web address, i.e. http://listen.grooveshark.com/ You will now have a program that runs from the desktop shortcut that is dedicated to Grooveshark.

2. I had a problem getting Flash to work and Grooveshark depends on Flash. In the end I downloaded the Flash plugin files as described here and added the two files that I needed to the plug in directory (C:\Program Files\Prism\xulrunner\plugins)

3. I had to add the plug in directory as an enviromentment variable (easily done by right clicking on My Computer). Add MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH with the value being your plug in directory, i.e. C:\Program Files\Prism\xulrunner\plugins on my PC. See this website for more.

C’est voila