Welcome to the Playtapus Project.
I've decided to create a wiki where I can share, and others can contribute, to some of the digital music mashups and science projects that I've been working on. You can see the history and evolution of this project at www.globallistic.com.
So far, most of the backend mashing has been done using Yahoo Pipes and using the open APIs provided by many of the other existing music services including Last.fm, iLike, Imeem, Rhapsody, Lala, Hype Machine and others.
Yes, "Playtapus" is a combination of "play", "tap" and "us"... but really more a play on the fugly yet lovable platypus. No one is quite sure what it's place in evolutionary history is, but if nothing else... it's at least interesting. Really all this project aspires to be...
Disclaimer: This project was begn by someone that doesn't really know how to write any code (me: Jason Herskowitz). Therefore, most of this is extremely brute-force and I would be shocked if there aren't far better ways to implement virtually every piece of it.
What's done so far:
- Play Data Aggregator: Will aggregate a user's play history from all of the services mentioned above into a single, holistic, stream of data that can be used to inform a number of other services (e.g. recommender, lifestreaming application, blog sidebar, etc.). Currently integrated with the content resolver.
- Content Resolver: Based on the play data collected above (or XSPF playlist), each track can be attempted to resolve to one of a number of catalog sources. Whenever a track is resolved, the link to that hosted track is inserted into the returned XML feed.
- FriendP3: Given a Last.fm account name, it will collect a list of all songs played by all of that user's friends on Last.fm, find free-range MP3s for any and all tracks it can find on the web, and deliver the results as a Podcast feed that can published and/or subscribed to in iTunes or other "podcatching" client.
- meP3: A combination of the play data aggregator and MP3 content resolver
- URL Shortener Integration: For MP3s that are resolved, an optional URL shortener (currently using is.gd) can be implemented on the MP3 URL - ideal for Twitter and other "status" platforms.
- Manual Search & Post to Twitter: Basic interface that lets user enter song name, artist name, playlist name (optional) and Twitter credentials. If a MP3 link is found for that track, then it will format the result, shorten the URL and post to your Twitter account.
- PlayTwitter Support: Formats results into a form in which playTwitter understands them - thereby supporting the bookmarklet player.
- Twitter Integration: Not very elegant at this point, but the ability to feed results (either actively or passively) to a Twitter account is currently possible using other 3rd party services like TwitAbit, PingVine and TwitterFeed.
- Collaborative Playlists: Simply leveraging hastags, collaborative playlists are possible via Twitter.
- AppleScript "Client" (mac only): Provides a "one click" methodology for posting a link to Twitter of the song you are currently listening to in iTunes.
Some things that are needed/desired:
- A nice front-end for the web application(s)
- A Twitter client that natively supports any/all MP3 links that have been tweeted (e.g. An AIR client with a small flash player built into it)
- More content resolvers and/or integration with Playdar project.
- Integration with Facebook Connect
- Productized version of current AppleScript client - for multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, Android, etc.)
- More Feature Requests
Example Uses:
- FriendP3.com (entering the FriendP3 feed for "jherskowitz" into a Soup.io powered site)
- @friendP3 (entering the FriendP3 feed for "jherskowitz" into a Twitter account - a sort of "group station" that is passively programmed by my friends)
- @ambientsignal (a "twitter station" that is passively programmed by @jherskowitz's aggregated listening behaviors across multiple music sites)
- @zprocketradio (another "twitter station" passively programmed by @zprocket)
- FriendFeed/jherskowitz (my "meP3" feed added to my FriendFeed lifestream)
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