Image by teamstickergiant via Flickr
A few weeks ago I spent the weekend up in Boston at the first stateside "Music Hackday". It was a fantastic event all-around... the organization, the facilities, the people, the panels (even though I was on the panel about "The Future of Music") and the hacks.
For me, the highlight was really just spending time hanging out with other music tech geeks (metabrew, toby, jwheare, __lucas, lucas_gonze, dankantor, plamere, fascinated, theineke, bwhitman and many more)... bouncing ideas off of each other, and collaboratively building interesting things.
Why wife, somewhat famously, referred to it as like "a dungeons and dragons conference from music geeks".
Being in the same room with all of these other folks meant that I could not-so-subtly plant ideas for other people's hacks that would support some use cases that I am interested in. Toby Padilla appeased me (thanks Toby!) by adding some support to his great Playgrub app to support scraping artist and track metadata from Twitter so that the content could be resolved using Playdar (or more specifically by the content resolver plug-ins for Playdar that I have installed).
Not sure what I am talking about? Maybe it's easier just to watch. Want to try it yourself?
Just tweet:
★ artist name ♫ track name #playtapus (or any other hashtag/playlist name)
Then use the Playgrub bookmarklet and let Playdar to do the rest.
In short, we are just dealing with extracting and moving song metadata around and handing it off to Playdar (which runs on your local machine). Playdar takes it from there and figures out the best place to source the content from and fulfills the link/play action.
Definitely check out Playgrub (and all of the other sites it supports), as well as the other excellent Playdar-powered web apps like Playlick (by James Wheare), PlaydarTunes (by Dan Kantor) and iTunesAirBridge (by Lucas Hrabrovsky).
Read more about it...
http://musicmachinery.com/2009/12/01/boston-music-hack-day-is-in-the-can/
http://blog.hypem.com/2009/11/music-hack-day-boston-wrap-up/
http://notes.variogr.am/post/255966005/music-hack-day-boston
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/11/music_hack_day_boston.html
http://www.grantcerny.com/blog/2009/11/22/music-hackday-boston/
http://savetherobot.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/boston-music-hackday-links-round-up/
Last, but not least, big thanks to Dave Haynes, Jon Pierce and Paul Lamere for making the whole thing a reality. When's the next one in the U.S.?! :-)