April 26, 2004: Audio sweetness
Jack pointed me to Audio Scrobbler, a site that builds a profile of songs as you listen to them via a plugin available for various popular MP3 and CD players under windows, linux or mac. As as result you do nothing more than the usual: listen away at work, home, school, the wireless-enabled coffee shop | downtown | airport (gotta love Gainesville) while your friends - who’re always wanting something new to listen to - can easily keep up.
The even sweeter thing is the site provides you with an RSS feed so I started scrounging for PHP RSS parsers but after four tries didn’t find any that worked the way I expected or seemed simple enough to integrate. So what is a software engineer to do in this sort of dilemma but to write his / her own!
Sure, scrobblerRSSParser is scrobbler-specific but that’s all I currently need to keep the parsing / integration simple and fetch the fields that matter (most other parsers seemed to crap out when fetching the artist / album data). Plus, it was a nice exercise to become familiar with writing PHP classes and using the XML parser functions. Sometimes there’s just no better motivator than plain need.
Now the only problem is the scrobbler crew is working to simplify things in order to handle the increasing load so the feeds have been a bit flaky. Regardless, the script is integrated into the digressed link bar and is also available for download (GPL‘d). I’m sure there are quirks to be ironed out but take a look if you’re interested and send me any comments along the way.
Happy listening and, thanks, Jack.