Rhapsody Web Services

New Webservices Site

Hey everybody!  Check out our new site:

           http://webservices.rhapsody.com/

Sign up as a registered Rhapsody Web Services Developer.  You'll get access to a brand new version of the SDK and discussion forums and all sorts of great stuff.  Once we clean up the design, we'll be switching the main links over to it.  In the meantime, look for more posts about the cool new web services we've been adding.

-LPD

Album Slide Shows for Your Site from Slide.com

A friend pointed me to Slide.com, which is a great free service for sharing photos on MySpace, blogs, or wherever you want to express yourself.  The slide shows have an elegant, slick design, which I find very appealing.  But the best part is one of their relatively unpublicized services: an RSS-to-slide-show converter, which allows us to dump in our album listening history feeds and get this slide show. The album covers of the music you're listening to just float on by.  When a visitor is curious about the album he can mouse over to see the album info and click to play the album.  You can mod it by changing variables such as size, scrolling direction, etc.

To set up your slide show, do the following:

1. Create a Slide.com account
2. Locate and copy your Album listening history feed
3. Submit your feed on Slide.com 
4. Once the slide show is generated, grab the code and add it to your web site or MySpace page

Kudos to Slide.com for creating such a cool service.

All hail the orange buttons!

Check out Rhapsody.com.  Look down at the bottom each page.  On the right side.  There it is.  Orange RSS buttons at the bottom of each page.  Rhapsody's RSS feeds are officially open to the public.  It's not just for blog-readers anymore.

That's all.

-LPD

Disambiguating RCIDs

As we expand the scope of Rhapsody Web Services, we've come to realize that the single numeric space that we've been using to identify content isn't broad enough for all the kinds of data that we use.  And it's been confusing to boot.  For example, artists, albums and tracks have all shared one numeric space, but genres have had their own space. We've got an answer that will let us grow far into the future, but unfortunately it might require a few code changes for existing applications.

RCID values take the following format: an alphanumeric string moniker followed by a period and then an identifier which is unique within the namespace defined by that moniker.  How about a few examples?

• g.5 is Rock/Pop
• g.299 is Jazz
• g.407 is Country

The "g." identifies it as a genre and the numeric portion identifies which genre.  How about artists?  They start with "art."

• art.153 is U2
• art.299 is Redman
• art.44068 is Neil Young

Note that 299 can be either the rapper Redman or the genre Jazz depending on the moniker.  For example:

http://www.rhapsody.com/artist?artistId=art.299 redirects to http://www.rhapsody.com/redman

and

http://www.rhapsody.com/genre?genreId=g.299 redirects to http://www.rhapsody.com/jazz

As I've said, albums, artists and tracks share a namespace and won't collide, but with the new system you really won't notice.  For completeness, here's a list of monikers you'll be seeing:

• alb. refers to an album
• art. refers to an artist
• g. refers to a genre
• tra. refers to a track

You'll be seeing more of these as we expand the scope of the API.  But for now that's all we need.  These new RCID types are now live across the site.  Enjoy!

-LPD

RSS vs XSPF

Why does the world need XSPF?  Playlists are linear lists of items.  I think RSS covers this need pretty well, and is already supported by a huge range of apps.  Especially when you consider the custom data fields in RSS 2.0, what is the value of XSPF?  Are these extra metadata so important that we need a whole new XML format?  Can't we just standardize on some extra RSS tags?  What do you think?

Rhapsody Alarm Clock Mashup

Check out this awesome mashup that Adam Phillabaum made combining Rhapsody Web Services and Google Calendar:

http://borrowr.com/~adam/mashup/ 

You can book music to listen to in your google calendar.  Pick an artist and an album and make a calendar entry and open this mashup.  It can work as an alarm clock with any music you want.  Now all it needs is a pretty javascript clock and a snooze button.  Note that v1 is firefox only.

Featured on programmable web as the mashup of the day.  Keep 'em coming!

-LPD

How to Skin the Player?

Something's running through my head that I'd like a little feedback on from the community.  At some point we want to give you the ability to customize the look and feel of the Rhapsody Web Player.  I see a couple of different technologies that can enable this.  I'm wondering what folks think gives the best balance of power and ease of use.

One way is put all colors and images and layout information into CSS and enable devs to override our CSS with their own.  This would let you change colors, adjust fonts and sizes, replace images, move parts around, and even hide components that you don't want.  But the hidden components would still have all the code overhead of maintaining them -- our js code would still update them, but the user just wouldn't see them.  Certainly not the end of the world, but a little slower than it needs to be.  But computers are fast, right?  I see this way offering a great deal of flexibility while staying accessible to a large number of web developers.

A more powerful way is to build the player display components in DHTML entirely in javascript.  Start with a blank page with a bunch of empty <div> tags  with appropriate names like "albumart" and "volumecontrol" and "playbutton".  Then our js code would find the divs and fill them with display/control UI as appropriate using the DOM or .innerHTML.  Devs could move the <div> tags around on the page or omit ones that they didn't need.  The reason I see this as more powerful is that we'd set up each class of js code to render a display  component so that it could be sub-classed and replaced by your own control which not only looks different but behaves completely differently as well.  This is arguably slower to load than a straight HTML version.  Another distinct advantage is that this way you can actually remove display components that you don't want, as opposed to just hiding them.  Harder to do, but ultimately more flexible. 

Comments?

-LPD

Instant Playlist URLs

I'd like to take this opportunity to offer our friends at Napster a musical welcome to the World Wide Web.  At the same time I'll introduce a new web services technology that I expect many of you will find useful.

We have a simple URL format that lets you create instant playlist pages from a list of RCID values for tracks.  This is the URL equivalent of calling the simple.js function RhapsodyPlayer.playTrack(...) with an array of tracks.  It allows you to publish and share Rhapsody playlists without having to write the playlist into our database.  I think one sample URL will explain everything about how it works:

http://play.rhapsody.com/playlistcentral/playlistdetail ?title=Welcome+to+the+World+Wide+Web%2C+Napster &tracks=1916251+1868547+2153455+10158546+5080342+1937406+2005852

Which opens this playlist:

• Welcome To The Jungle   (Guns N' Roses)
• Hit Me With Your Best Shot   (Pat Benatar)
• Try Just A Little Bit Harder   (Janis Joplin)
• Catch Me If You Can   (Hugo Duncan)
• Good Luck   (Basement Jaxx)
• Don't Give Up   (Peter Gabriel)
• See You On The Other Side   (Ozzy Osbourne)

Welcome to the World Wide Web, Napster.  We're glad you're here.

-LPD

Seattle Mindcamp 2.0

I spent the weekend at Seattle Mindcamp 2.0 and had a blast!   Props out to Andru and Stuart and everybody else who helped make it happen.  This was much better than the first one and I can't wait for 3.0.

It was great to get a chance to meet and talk to a bunch of smart creative passionate geeks about music web services.  People who get it.  People who care.  People who want to put music on their websites but are frustrated by legal and logistical restrictions.  I met a lot of people like this who understood how Rhapsody Web Services can solve their problems.  Of course they had questions and concerns, and I just hope that I was able to address them satisfactorily.  If not, y'all know how to get a hold of me.

We had some great discussions about mashups.  We talked about mashing Rhapsody Web Services up against flickr, craigslist, del.icio.us, ticketmaster, S3, laszlo, even skype and google talk.  My favorite idea though was a Rhapsody/Google Calendar mashup to build an alarm clock that plays your favorite music at a specified time.  I'm really looking forward to that going live.

Also thanks to Dave Winer for opening my eyes to how we could use OPML for exposing meta-data.

Looking forward to Mindcamp 3.0...

-Leo Parker Dirac