that’s whacked

Album reviews in mashTape

Tuesday, Nov 18. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

Following a great suggestion by ian, I just finished adding album reviews to mashTape (well, a first pass anyway… I’m sure we’ll have more visual follow-ups - but the core of it is there).

Obligatory screenshot here:

Album Reviews in mashTape

One of the fun parts of working on mashTape has been finding multiple providers… it gives me a general guideline to follow in determining what fields of data are common across different providers. Unfortunately, the only album review data I can find that is accessible via an API is from Amazon’s AWS. It looks like MetaCritic has some awesome data aggregated from other sources, but doesn’t provide an API to access said data.

Anyone know of any sites that have externally accessible review data?

MTV Music API

Thursday, Oct 30. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

I’ve been futzing around and exploring MTV Music’s new APIs lately. In a testament to how easy both the MTV Music and the mashTape Provider API is (okay, granted, I’m biased on the mashTape one… but still)… I threw together an MTV Music Video mashTape add-on. This add-on adds MTV Music Videos to mashTape’s Video Tab… letting you see full-length, high quality original artist music videos.

All I have to say is that it’s awesome. MTV deserves serious kudos for opening up such a fantastic and powerful API free of the usual red tape and crap that many APIs come with. Honestly, I was expecting a much more restrictive API with badges, and app keys, and embedding restrictions ( iMeem, I’m looking at you), and all that. And, I’ll just say it… I had really low expectations given this was coming from MTV. My impression of MTV lately is that they just don’t “get it”. “it” being music on the Internet, and in the age of Web 2.0.

Fortunately I was horribly horribly wrong, and I’m quite pleased with the new API. The only thing missing is external script control of the player, which I asked about. Hopefully it’ll come soon.

translating mashTape

Monday, Sep 8. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

I’ve just uploaded a pre-release of mashtape 0.2.0pre to BabelZilla to try and get some localisations ready so that when mashTape 0.2.0 ships with the next Songbird release, it’ll be available in some languages other than English.

If you’re on BabelZilla, I could use some help localising mashTape - you can sign up to help localise it here. (you must be logged into BabelZilla)

more mashTape screenies

Wednesday, Sep 3. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

I’ve made a bunch of good progress on mashTape this week, finishing up the RSS & video providers today, and adding a bunch of new RSS providers. The number of sources mashTape now has by default includes: * Last.fm (artist bio, photo, and tags) * Freebase (discography, band members) * MusicBrainz (related links) * Flickr (photos) * Google News (rss) * Google Blog Search (rss) * Yahoo News (rss) * MTV News (rss) * Hype Machine (rss) * Digg (rss) * YouTube (music video) * Yahoo Music (music video)

Here are a bunch of screenies of how the interface is currently looking. Obviously nothing is finalised, but all the data hookups are more or less functional. There are no preferences hooked up yet, but I hope to work on that soon.

mashTape @ mozdev

Monday, Aug 4. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

For Songbird 0.6 I built the SHOUTcast add-on, and for Songbird 0.7 I put together the Concerts add-on. Now that 0.7 is wrapping up and (knock on wood) I think I’m done with Concerts, it’s time to move onto my next add-on project…

For our next release my plans are to revisit and completely re-whack my very first Songbird add-on: mashTape. When I joined Songbird, one of the first things I thought was über-cool was going to be how simple it would be to pull this sort of contextual information into your media player from the web. Unfortunately, when I first joined Songbird - my XUL/JS was… well… about what you’d expect from someone who’d been doing systems/kernel development since undergrad.

mashTape has been in need of some serious love for a few months now, so I’m looking forward to getting the chance to rewhack it. as part of that, i’m moving mashTape over to Mozdev, so you can find it’s new home at http://mashtape.mozdev.org

you can see webpage design is clearly not my forté, but, ATM, all i’m interested in is some solid good Mercurial extension hosting (and having access to their project-owners mailing list ;-)). maybe when i get some free time (hah), i’ll make a better webpage for it.

mashTape and APIs

Sunday, Mar 30. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

Hacking on my mashTape extension has been a great way to find some wicked APIs and get the extension developer’s perspective on Songbird platform development. This morning’s hacking has made me realise we need a better way to allow extensions using display panes to set context for when their display pane should be visible. For instance, mashTape makes little sense when not listening to music. I’d love to be able to set something in my install.rdf, or in my display pane registration code to the effect of:

• Don’t show when “not playing”
• Don’t show in a non-media view (e.g. when I’m browsing the web, etc.)

I’ll have to think about it a little more and writeup a story/bug to figure out how I’d like to register this context for my display pane. Right now I’ve done it in mashTape through a combination of a tabbrowser select-tab listener, and a WebProgressListener, which seems like a lot of unnecessary work.

On the topic of APIs… I love Last.fm’s APIs, but it’s frustrating that their API for getting the artist bio information is incomplete. Perhaps it’s to drive traffic to their site (which is understandable), but I often get email requests to expose more of the bio information. Looking around, Freebase has got a wicked cool API, and they’ve somehow scraped Wikipedia’s great content into a bio/article for the artist. I’d love to use it… if only I could figure out how to get the bio! I played with their APIs for at least an hour this morning, and could grab all the information for everything except the “a.k.a.” and “bio/article” sections. Ugh.

Somehow I got from Freebase’s site over to DBpedia where they’ve built XML/RDF interfaces for Wikipedia’s content, and within 5 minutes I had a successful call to grab and parse out the full Wikipedia abstract text for artist bio, years active, etc. etc. I’m psyched. Now I just need to integrate that into mashTape and I should have a full artist bio.