Playdar in Action

I realize that trying to explain the concept of content resolution (and Playdar) can be a bit technical for most, so I figured I'd just show you the power behind what is going on with a quick screencast of the latest alpha build in action over at Spiffdar.org.

The project is still in it's early stages, but if you are like me then you head is already spinning on where this could go and what types of experiences it could enable.

Pretty cool, eh?


UPDATE: Screencast Part 2: Retrofit existing sites to support Playar

The Importance of Playdar

One of my most recent posts discussed (and/or ranted about) "content resolution". In that post I mentioned a very compelling new open-source project called Playdar. This project was started by some of the folks from Last.fm, but is rightfully gaining attention of the digital music innovators very quickly. What is it exactly, and why is it so important?

Playdar - About: "

About Playdar

Playdar is designed to solve one problem: given the name of a track, find me a way to listen to it right now.

It will search your local disk (iTunes library, MP3 folder etc.), it will search your home or office network (kinda like searchable iTunes shared libraries) and it will search other sources. You can write plugins for Playdar to enable it to search additional sources. It's fast. If a matching song is within reach, it can start playing in less than a second.

This is called Content Resolution. Playdar is a "Content Resolver" - it will take metadata (artist, album, track names) and resolve them to a location of a matching music file. This might be on your disk, or over the network - regardless, sources are always presented as URLs that point to your local machine. Playdar runs a lightweight webserver on your machine - this is how you talk to it, and it's how other desktop apps and web apps talk to it.

Playdar has an HTTP API that returns JSON. It supports JSONP, so any website that you authorize can use Javascript to talk to the Playdar server on your machine. This means:

• Websites can automatically put play buttons next to songs they reference.
• Streaming services and music blogs can save bandwidth by playing you your own copy of a song instead of streaming it from a central server.
• A lot of interesting web-app mashups are possible. Pull interesting music data from an API, and play people content they already have.
• You could build an iTunes-Genius-like web app using Playdar and the Last.fm API, all in-browser.
• You could build a playlist sharing site that shares playlists, not mp3s. Think muxtape, but it will only play songs found on your machines.
• If you run Playdar on your laptop and desktop on the same network it will take advantage of songs on either machine.
• Music on the web can be marked up so you can always take advantage of local content."
  

Sure, there are other remote access/webserver solutions out there that enable you to access your content (and your friends') remotely - see Simplify Media and Orb. And there are P2P clients and torrents that enable you download virtually any song available. But, what gets me excited about this is the single interface with cascading resolution logic that it enables - and how it can seamlessly integrate the (existing) web with local/network/free-range/streaming service content. In short, it keeps checking sources in priority order until it finds what it's looking for.

It fosters the development of sites and apps that can add value with context (editorial, informational, social) and discovery features without putting them in a position of having to deal with content licensing and streaming costs.

It has the potential to drastically cut costs of existing music services since they wouldn't have to foot the bill (both royalty and bandwidth) to stream content to users that they already have - thereby helping enable more viable economics around music discovery and sharing sites. Or perhaps lets existing music content sites exit the content licensing/streaming business altogether (some speculate that Last.fm's recent moves away from free streaming everywhere but US, UK and Germany are the first step in this direction) and instead focus on adding value *around* the content.

Sites and applications without their own music content could be marked up to support Playdar... adding click-to-play scenarios in Google search results, Facebook, Twitter (site and apps), IM clients, Wikipedia, news articles and more.

It promotes the use of standard markup to identify music content (e.g. hAudio, XSPF, etc.) that enables users to share content (links) and playlists across different service providers. You keep your provider of choice, I keep mine.

It could be extended to support comparison shopping of content across multiple vendors.... e.g. "just give me the cheapest MP3 provided that it is at least 256kbps".

It could tie into your existing social graph, giving you a single view and interface into all of your friends' local/network content. For example, you see in your AIM status that one of your friends is listening to a certain song... you click play. If you have the song, it plays from your machine. If you don't have the song, it streams to you from your friend's machine, if that friend doesn't have a local version of that song then it streams from another friend's machine that does have it. If none of your friends has a local copy of the song, then it finds it on the web. You don't need to know where the song is, Playdar does the work of finding the best source for you.

It could enable the darknet, where you can get access to all of the content on not only your and your friends' machines...but also the friends of friends (of friends). All unmonitorable and untrackable (unlike torrent sites) since each person only accesses content via people they trust - no one in the chain has knowledge of where the content originated from or where it terminated (see OneSwarm for more on this). Taken with the notion of "six degrees of separation"... you theoretically could get access to any file/song from anyone in the worlds in 6 hops or less.

There are a lot of directions this project could be taken and extended, which is the beauty of it being open-source. Have some ideas? Contribute.

In my opinion, this has the potential to be one of the most disruptive music/tech developments we've seen in a long time.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Review: Simplify Media for iPhone (macworld.com)
• ZumoDrive Public Beta Adds iPhone Music Streaming, Cheaper Clouds (gigaom.com)
• idiomag's API goes live (idiomag.com)
• Exploring the Last.fm Web Service API (devx.com)
• Yahoo's Updates API Lets You Extend Your Social Network (programmableweb.com)
• Audio here, there, but not quite everywhere (brendancooper.com)
• Make and Save Playlists at MixTape.me (appscout.com)
• How To Listen To Millions Of Songs For Free On Your Desktop (makeuseof.com)
• Echodio.com - iTunes Meets The Cloud (killerstartups.com)
• Playlist.io Lets You Privately Share Playlists (appscout.com)

Yahoo's New Play(er)

Yahoo just announced their new web player today and released it into the wild for us to play with.



Basically, it works as follows:

Here's what it does:

1. Link to MP3s in your web page. These can be anywhere on the web.
2. Add a line of code to insert our Javascript library. We host this, so you just have to point to our URL.
3. Working play buttons appear next to MP3s.
   

More information can be found here:

http://yahoomediaplayer.wikia.com
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/01/post.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/08/yahoo-releases-browser-based-mp3-player/

My first impressions are very positive. As a blogger it will make my life easier since I just embed the player code once into the body of my page, and then just drop the MP3 links anywhere on the page and they automagically get a play icon (and get playlisted).

It also is supporting some open standards (under the covers) in the form of XSPF playlists - I assume in a future release I will be able to hit a page that uses this player and download the XSPF playlist file to take with me - where I can then decide to either have it continue to resolve to the original source files or to a catalog of my choice (e.g. a subscription catalog, my local library, etc.). Check out the work going on at OpenMediaWeb that Yahoo is also heavily involved in and this previous conversation around playlist portability.

Yahoo gets their piece by linking off to a Yahoo Search based on the metadata keywords.

All-in-all, it strikes me as a web-based client version of Foxytunes. I've always been a fan of Foxytunes, and you can see my previous coverage of them here. In fact, I would not be surprised to see Yahoo Search evolve to have "artist pages" that suck in related content from the artist from all over the web - photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube, free-range MP3s (similar to the way AOL just starting doing), Wikipedia-based bios, etc. very much like FoxyTunes Planet.

The downside? Well, if you are "playing a page" you are basically tied to that page as long as you want to keep listening. The easy way around that is to open a new tab instead of refreshing the current page you are on. Not a huge deal, but you may often find yourself accidentally turning the music off if you follow another link on the page that you are playing (if that link doesn't target a new browser window/tab). The other downside that I noticed when I first implemented it, is that in a heavily widgetized page, you may have to wait a while for the javascript to load.

I speculated about 6 months ago that Yahoo was up to something based on the previous Webjay work of Lucas Gonze. It looks to have evolved a bit since then, but I think understand where the are going and I applaud it.

In honor of this new player, I've got a new Song of the Day to share too.
Thanks to Redboy I just discovered The Big Sleep. This song is off their soon-to-be-released album, and I'm diggin' it.

Pinkies - The Big Sleep

Also check out one of the instrumental tracks from their previous album.

You Can't Touch the Untouchable - The Big Sleep

Roundtable: Portable Playlists & Catalog Resolution

One of my MyStrands partners-in-crime, Scott Kveton, was on a panel this past week about data portability, microformats and standards with respect to media. Others on the panel included Lucas Gonze, Tom Conrad and Tantek Celic.

Scott Kveton · Portable Playlist and other POSH-ibilities Meetup: "Before the panel both Tom and I were chatting about how there is really only one big problem that both Pandora and MyStrands face: catalog resolution. This is a huge problem that consumes quite a bit of developer time in both of our camps. Unfortunately, every playlist format out there simply punts on this problem. They point at some “resource” that is the catalog entry. Now, from a portability standpoint that’s great and I can appreciate the why’s of why you’d do that."

Follow the link to the full post, and then you can follow it up with Lucas Gonze's (creator of Webjay, author of XSPF and now part of Yahoo Music) post too.

the Wordpress of Lucas Gonze: "Or is the real problem still economic and not technical? Are there features which it would be profitable to support which entail portability? The problem isn’t how to enable portability, it’s why a business would want that. The status quo is lack of portability, with each music service an island. This sector as a whole hasn’t developed into a collective ecosystem, and businesses which do invest in portable identifiers don’t stand to gain any value until other businesses join them."

Also check out the comment threads on both posts too... the conversation continues there.

Hands On: Critical Metrics

I stumbled across Critical Metrics a couple of weeks ago, quickly tagged it as a a music review aggegrator (similar to MetaCritic, Elbo.ws or Parsefork). I came back to it this week, and realized it had a lot more going on that I had originally given it credit for.

Music review aggregation is a, if not *the* major component of the service - but from major publications like NME, Rolling Stone, Blender & Spin - in addition to major music blogs like Stereogum). But, it is also part MP3 aggegator (like The Hype Machine), part YouTube mashup and part playlisting site (like Fiql).

Here's how it works:

• they filter all recommendations and all reviews ranked four stars or greater during the user selected time period, displaying the "most highly rated, diversely recommended, broadly circulated and recent results first"
• users can filter by review source or category (e.g. "hip hop publications")
• next to every song is a list of the relevant review snippets and their sources - with links back to the source publication (click the expand button to open the listing to see more)

• as a nice bonus, they will pull in music videos for the song from YouTube if available
• coming soon is the ability to deep-link to any number of music stores/service providers to buy/download the song
• you can play the song (in-page) via a simple and slick little flash interface
• quickly add songs to one or more playlists
• also in development is the ability to export these playlists into other services (like Rhapsody and eMusic)
• share you playlists via custom URLs that bring others pack to their site - I assume they will soon have embeddable players too, but don't appear to have them yet

http://criticalmetrics.com/playlist/81784

One of my issues with in-page playback is that you essentially get "trapped" on a page, if you follow any of the links the song you are listening to stops playing. It looks like they are remedying that by including an pop-up player (based on the open source XSPF Web Player) although it seems buggy right now and wouldn't load the playlists.

There is also no notion of community, users are annonymous (which is nice in some ways since there is no registration required - but this cookie-based way of identifying me means that the playlists I create on this machine aren't available to me on my work machine (unless I email or post the share link somewhere I can get to it). It also means that comments I leave on songs have no attribution, but I'm guessing that is in the works.

But, all-in-all, Critical Metrics is a very slick site and service with a lot of potential. I'll see if it sticks as part of my daily routine.