Rhapsody Web Services

Greasemonkey Script for Firefox

Leo Dirac wrote a firefox extension using Greasemonkey that lets you listen to Rhapsody music from any web page.  It scans web pages for the names of popular artists and converts them to Rhaplinks.  You can also read more about the computer science of regular expressions in javascript in an earlier post about how the script was developed. 

The script is still being tweaked, but feedback is welcome.  Instructions for installation are here.  If you find any issues with it, please let us know in the mashup discussion forum.

Pitchfork/Rhapsody Mashup

I saw this a couple of months ago, but didn't blog about it.  Brian Greenbaum did a great mashup that matches Pitchfork's fine reviews with Rhapsody playback.  The site contains a list of more than 1700 albums with links to the pitchfork review and to Rhapsody.com to play it.

It appears that the site either looks up the album using data.xml or simply builds the Play Link, and verifies that it resolves to a playable album.  Either way, very cool.

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.

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

Location Mashup: Rhapsody + GoogleMaps + Concerts

Posted by Dave:

So Leo and I are having a debate with some folks here about the usefulness of location-based services.  In a nutshell, we proposed the following APIs and mashups:

Rhapsody would make the following data available in APIs:

1. Artist hometown in formats useful to Google Maps, GPS, e911, etc.
2. Recent playback by region, state, city (IP lookup), with queries for genre, etc.

Then I can see one of you bright folks doing:

1. So Hot Right Now: Google Maps or Google Earth mashup, featuring top tracks in my area.  Go to the place that loves Radiohead the most,  Google Earth tour east cost towns who prefer west coast rap/hip hop. 
2. Artists beloved in this town: Again, Google Maps tour, GPS trivia game, whatever.  Where is 311 really from?  (Nebraska? Never.)
3. Try before you buy concerts: Pollstar + Google Maps + Rhapsody top tracks by artist.  See concerts around town, listen to their top tracks and decide if it's worth your time. 
4. Me vs You: What is the music zeitgeist in my area?  How does it compare?  Cali vs Georgia popular Pop bands.
5. Trendy: Where did the growth of Panic! at the Disco really start?  Vegas, LA, New York?  Where do trends peak first?  Which towns just can't give up The Smiths.
6. Getting Mobile: I just landed in Austin, what do these people listen to?  Or, what punk bands are from Austin?  What's playing near where I'm at?  Play some of those tracks.  Play me the top track from each of bands playing within 50 miles of me this weekend.  Country only please

Let us know if you want to develop something, and we'll see if we can't get this data available sooner rather than later.