...after hearing a few references to Magnatunes here, I decided
to check it out. Cool idea, surprisingly good music. I was
about to work on parsing their WWW pages to extra playlists when
I realized _they'd already done the hard work_ and supply
xml/csv lists of all their music. Wow.
Yup, Magnatune is run by one remarkably enlightened dude, John Buckman. As far as I can tell, it's a one-man operation. He participates in the Magnatune forums quite regularly, if you're interested.
Parsing these lists and creating groups of related playlists is
fairly easy (I just did it for a much grosser radio1234 file),
but I figured I'd see if anyone else has already tried this.
So - anyone played with Magnatunes and automatic playlist
generation?
I just grabbed his .m3u playlists, massaged them a bit with Perl and stuffed them into my playlist directory. I also grabbed his Shoutcast streams; he currently has 6 of them for different genres. I actually find myself listening mostly to these streams, and then going on his site when I hear something I like. His ultimate goal *is* to get you to buy an occasional album, to help cover his streaming costs.
One thing that seems to be missing from m3u and pls formats is
the ability to have comments or information about the tracks.
Sure, I can crank out 100s of playlists, even sort them by
genre, but that's not as handy is understanding that "Phebe
Craig and Katherine Westine" feature harpsichord duets and not
the Ukranian Children's Choir. Try fitting that on the slim
display...I just wonder if anyone has come up with a smart(er)
way to do this.
I don't think so. I did notice that his playlist entries are URLs with file names that just give the track #, artist and song, no album, year or comment. But if you suck them into iTunes and quickly click on each one, iTunes will grab the MP3 tags from the stream and display them in the library window. I haven't run Slimserver on the machine with iTunes, so I don't know if Slimserver can pick this data out of the iTunes database and display it on the Squeezebox. But even if it doesn't, the Slimserver ought to extract and display the MP3 tags when you actually play the track.
Phil _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
