Comments on: Announcing IndieRock

Question: Announcing IndieRock

Asparagirl — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 18:12:36 -0800

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.

By: cbrody

cbrody — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 18:27:16 -0800

What was your question again?

By: Mayor Curley

Mayor Curley — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 18:30:59 -0800

Why would anyone care about my music playlist? I would have to be incredibly self-important to think that mattered.

By: Asparagirl

Asparagirl — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 18:33:44 -0800

incredibly self-important

That's kind of the point of blogging. :-)

By: Mayor Curley

Mayor Curley — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 18:40:44 -0800

That was a first draft and I didn't mean to post it even though I thought it. My apologies.

By: dg

dg — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 18:45:14 -0800

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.

By: timyang

timyang — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 19:13:21 -0800

Nice!

But we need a non-windows version.

By: me3dia

me3dia — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 19:20:07 -0800

Very cool! (and what timyang said.)_

By: mathowie

mathowie — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 19:27:52 -0800

Non-windows version? Why that's so last year (thanks to kindall for coding that for me)

By: muckster

muckster — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 20:01:43 -0800

Cool.

So, how do I do this with WinAmp?

By: brool

brool — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 20:17:53 -0800

Hacky Perl version here (self link).

By: mathowie

mathowie — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 20:24:53 -0800

Here's how I did it with winamp.

By: vraxoin

vraxoin — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 05:56:24 -0800

Rawk! That is a very cool story.

By: adamrice

adamrice — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 07:03:28 -0800

Mac users also might be interested in kung tunes

By: terrapin

terrapin — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 07:26:06 -0800

We don't need a non-windows version so much as a non-MT version. ;)

By: Asparagirl

Asparagirl — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 08:54:49 -0800

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!)

By: muckster

muckster — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 10:26:23 -0800

Thanks Matt! Took me 30 rather than 10 minutes, but I did get it to work.

By: krunk

krunk — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 10:31:03 -0800

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!

By: carter

carter — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 10:54:21 -0800

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*

By: sixdifferentways

sixdifferentways — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 02:17:19 -0800

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.