[Playlist] xspf over json

[Chris Anderson]

On 4/28/07, Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves <justivo at gmail.com> wrote:
> It seems JSPF would be used on this Grab.it project, but I don't
> understand exactly what it is.  I requested an invitation to try it,
> though.  Is it something like musicbrainz or last.fm?  What purpose
> does it exactly serve?  The web site is unfortunately much unclear on
> that aspect.
>

The version of Grabb.it that is live is an old prototype from when I
was learning Ruby on Rails. The new version (also in Rails) will
hopefully deploy very soon. At its heart Grabb.it is an mp3 index,
that allows its users to listen to any mp3s they find on the web. We
chose xspf as our native format for playlists, because it allows us to
use all the various xspf players so that people can post Grabb.it
playlists to myspace etc. The main Grabb.it player is DHTML, so I
wrote the xspf parser to interface with our xspf.

Once I realize that the javascript objects generated by the parser
required less resources to render and serve than xspf, as well as
requiring no client-side parser, it was a no brainer to start serving
them directly, and leave the xspf parser library out of the client.

Hopefully our pending launch will clear all this up. I'm quite excited
to see how it does. You guys will be among the first to hear of the
launch, so go easy on it. We're deploying on one little Mac Mini. :)


-- 
Chris Anderson
http://jchris.mfdz.com