[Playlist] Kevin Smith’s Rejected Playlist Reborn as XSPF

[Nathan Freitas]

  Here's some fun work I just posted to my blog: 
http://openvision.tv/blog/?p=102
If you want to just skip ahead to the payoff, you can go here: 
https://www.cruxy.com/lab/xspfview/

***************


      Kevin Smith’s Rejected Playlist Reborn!
      <http://openvision.tv/blog/?p=102>

Earlier tonight, I read Kevin Smith’s account 
<http://silentbobspeaks.com/?p=293> of how Apple rejected his celebrity 
playlist because it was too descriptive. After looking through the 
tracks he chose and what he wrote about them, I realized this was a real 
shame as it was a *great* playlist. It seemed ridiculous that the iTunes 
playlisting support was so limited that it could only support 
two-sentence descriptions.

And so, in came XSPF <http://xspf.org>, the open-source XML playlisting 
format that we are big fans of here at Cruxy. If fact, you can search 
our entire catalog via XSPF 
(http://www.cruxy.com/syndication/searchXSPF.jsp?type=audio&term=jazz 
<http://www.cruxy.com/syndication/searchXSPF.jsp?type=audio&term=jazz>), 
as well as get individual playlists for each artist 
(http://nat.cruxy.com/xspf for example is mine).

With that experience, I figured I would try to create the ultimate XSPF 
playlist by turning the great work of art Mr. Smith had created into a 
compliant, validating and very rich XSPF playlist. I looked up album art 
using Last.fm <http://last.fm>, found 30-second mp3 previews from those 
russian pirates at allofmp3.com (finally good for something!), and used 
Google’s music search tools 
<http://www.google.com/musics?lid=HRR9yoOVz6E&aid=XiVH7CT7g1I&sid=LfL1D77oo0D> 
to come up with a suitable permalink for each track. It ended up being a 
bit of a mashup monster, but it mostly came together after some grueling 
work. If I had a few more hours, I assure you, it would shine…

Regardless, you can see the resulting (almost perfect) playlist here: 
http://www.cruxy.com/lab/xspfview/KevinSmithNonCelebrityPlaylist.xspf
(I wasn’t able to find a suitable preview for the Full Force track, and 
the George Carlin track is from another album….)

Now those of you not versed in reading XML may not think much of that 
file. So, instead I’ve built a fancy XSPF renderer combining some XSPF 
parsing code we had lying around and Jeroen Wijering’s amazing flash mp3 
player <http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Flash_MP3_Player>.

Check it out, and enjoy Kevin Smith’s Non-Celebrity Playlist as it was 
meant to be (almost): Kevin Smith’s playlist via Cruxy XSPFView 
<https://www.cruxy.com/lab/xspfview>! (https://www.cruxy.com/lab/xspfview/)

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