For a while now, I've been getting requests for official data feeds describing the music at Magnatune. I've now added an "API" section to the "Info" section at Magnatune, with XML and CSV data feeds:



http://magnatune.com/info/api



What I'm hoping to do with all this is to encourage 3rd parties to write interesting applications which know about Magnatune's music. These feeds could be used by stores such as netmusic, collaborative sites such such as webjay or iRate, or implemented as music-collection players in xmms, winamp, or other players.



I made two different XML versions of the song-by-song feed, as traditional XML is not much fun to parse, if you have to write a parser from scratch





Arthur Yoria

I'll Be Here Awake

1

2004

Rock

etc...



vs:





this 2nd version is easier to write a quick-and-dirty parser for, but isn't what XML parser usually like, which is why I also made the 1st format.



I also made a more hierarchical XML format, which adds the concept of an album, and tracks inside an album, like so:





Arthur Yoria

I'll Be Here Awake

2004

Rock

http://magnatune.com/artists/yoria

https://magnatune.com/artists/buy_album?artist=Arthur+Yoria&album=Ill+Be+Here+Awake&magnatunegenres=Rock

Rock Wakeup Singing



Arthur Yoria

I'll Be Here Awake

1

etc...





and finally, to make it REALLY easy to work with Magnatune's music, I made a CSV format, which can be dropped into any relational/sql db, or Microsoft Excel.



Of course, in making such a feed, I found a number of problems with my meta-data. A lot of albums didn't have "track length" id3 tags, so I used mp3info to calculate this, and id3v2 to put the data into id3v2 tags inside the mp3 file. A small number of albums were/are missing year or genre id3 data, so I need to go back and re-rip them so that the data is really clean. So part of this process of telling people what's at Magnatune is writing a meta-data "lint" program (which I've done now) and then fixing all data that cause metadata-lint warnings.



I've been meeting more people trying wacky redo-the-music-business ideas on the web, such as http://www.mediagora.com/ and http://www.opsound.com/ -- the easier I can make it for these other people to use Magnatune in their business plans, the more visibility Magnatune's music will get!





[buckman's magnatune blog]