Announcing IndieRock

March 29, 2004 6:12 PM

BEST. ASKMETAFILTER REPONSE. EVER.
On March 1st, I posted a question about how to have "recently playing in iTunes" data show up on your website if you use Windows (solutions already exist for Mac users). I got a lot of interesting answers, and I used one suggested app, Bloglines, for a few days before it inexplicably stopped working. But then MeFite krunk was so inspired by my question that he coded an entire freakin' app to mine the iTunes XML file and upload a list of the latest songs you've played to your webserver. Ladies and gentlemen, meet IndieRock, probably the first piece of software inspired by AskMetaFilter and a damn fine way to show off your listening habits to the world. Now that's an answer!

Major, major thanks go to krunk (a.k.a mild-mannered engineering student Robin Senior) and Bob (whose MeFi username escapes me at the moment, sorry!) who helped beta test it with me. And to Matt, of course, who makes things like this possible in the first place. [ / sucking-up ]

The PHP code I use to format the resulting tab-delimited text file to my liking is listed on my blog; feel free to use it or change it. I'm still trying to get it to play nicely with the MTAmazon plug-in; no luck yet. Robin says that Audioscrobbler support is coming soon.

By the way, I realized that this post could have been justifiably posted to the blue, the grey, or the green: the blue because it's a cool new thingie on the web to look at and play with, the grey because it's partly Meta MeFi, and the green because it's an answer to a previous AskMeFi thread. Kinda multi-functional.

posted by Asparagirl to computers & internet (19 answers total)

What was your question again?
posted by cbrody at 6:27 PM on March 29, 2004

Why would anyone care about my music playlist? I would have to be incredibly self-important to think that mattered.
posted by Mayor Curley at 6:30 PM on March 29, 2004

incredibly self-important

That's kind of the point of blogging. :-)
posted by Asparagirl at 6:33 PM on March 29, 2004 [1 favorite]

That was a first draft and I didn't mean to post it even though I thought it. My apologies.
posted by Mayor Curley at 6:40 PM on March 29, 2004

No need to apologise - most likely, everyone had the same thought, including those who will rush out and implement it.

[this is good] Also, an excellent answer to a question.
posted by dg at 6:45 PM on March 29, 2004

Nice!

But we need a non-windows version.
posted by timyang at 7:13 PM on March 29, 2004

Very cool! (and what timyang said.)_
posted by me3dia at 7:20 PM on March 29, 2004

Non-windows version? Why that's so last year (thanks to kindall for coding that for me)
posted by mathowie at 7:27 PM on March 29, 2004

Cool.

So, how do I do this with WinAmp?
posted by muckster at 8:01 PM on March 29, 2004

Hacky Perl version here (self link).
posted by brool at 8:17 PM on March 29, 2004

Here's how I did it with winamp.
posted by mathowie at 8:24 PM on March 29, 2004

Rawk! That is a very cool story.
posted by vraxoin at 5:56 AM on March 30, 2004

Mac users also might be interested in kung tunes
posted by adamrice at 7:03 AM on March 30, 2004

We don't need a non-windows version so much as a non-MT version. ;)
posted by terrapin at 7:26 AM on March 30, 2004

You don't need to pull in the indierock.txt file with MT, y'know. :-)

(And Kung-Tunes was linked in the original post, you silly Mac people!)
posted by Asparagirl at 8:54 AM on March 30, 2004

Thanks Matt! Took me 30 rather than 10 minutes, but I did get it to work.
posted by muckster at 10:26 AM on March 30, 2004

Thanks for your compliments, Asparagirl!

If anyone wants to work out a way to incorporate Amazon.com linking with this, please be my guest. I don't have much time right now to tinker with the Amazon PHP API.

Cheers!
posted by krunk at 10:31 AM on March 30, 2004

Although I have no idea what you are all talking about, it all sounds very cool ;)

*ponders whether an askme post about the best clothes for cold weather will result in receipt of hats and gloves knitted by mefi members*
posted by carter at 10:54 AM on March 30, 2004

I've been doing the same thing with an Audioscrobbler plugin (in my case iTunes for Windows.) Audioscrobbler offers an RSS feed of your last 10 songs. I just wrote a script that parses the feed, turns the songs into links (in my case to the Audioscrobbler entry for the song), and then just did a PHP include to have it on my weblog. One drawback: this method is dependent on the Audioscrobbler server - which is down this week for a planned hardware upgrade. Another slight drawback is the plugin works by sending cached data - so there is a slight lag of 5-10 minutes, if anyone cares about that.
posted by sixdifferentways at 2:17 AM on March 31, 2004