I am really rather a geek. I should be spending my bank holiday weekend playing football or darts or taking the girlfriend out for lunch or even just watching whatever Bond film they have on the telly. Instead I have got inspired by a simple XML format.
XSPF is the XML format for sharing music playlists. So what eh?!
We the reason it has got me inspired is that it lets you share playlists and the music within that playlist does not have to be local to your computer.
If you are a musician then you can share all your tracks (once you have uploaded then somewhere - like the box.net which gives you 1GB free space) by just sending a flat file playlist. This playlist is then parsed through a compatible player which can either be web based or local to your machine.
I, as a web developer, am most interested in web based music players. The best open source players are the perfunctory titled XSPF music player or the XSPF jukebox both of which can be embedded directly in to your website.
So what are the benefits:
+ No need to host your own music - Therefore no bandwidth or web space issues
+ Embeddable in to your own website, facebook, myspace etc
+ XSPF playlists can be shared and are very small. You can distribute music very simply and quickly
+ Perfectly legally grey - you don’t host any music therefore aren’t liable to any potential copyright issues. XSPF just points to where the music is hosted.
+ Music search engines such as seeqpod and skreemr have API’s which can output searches as playlists. i.e. search for artist and get a playlist of artist songs returned.
The Project
I though I would spend the weekend stretching my design legs and pumping my XML/XSL muscles. I am going to try and build a simple radio station that uses XSPF to create playlists of some of my favourite tunes, create a weekly podcast of them and finally create a widget that allows the user to create a randomised playlist of all tunes in my virtual library.
Hope fully by the end of Monday it will be live for preview.
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