Music on Rails

I spent the weekend updating the database and cleaning up some visual issues. Some lessons learned:

• When redeploying - I must kill old fastcgi processes.
• I use caching for the top two levels of the website - the results are the same for every page and don’t change over time. The third level data is small and fast enough to let be. However for every cosmetic change I make, the cached pages need to be regenerated. I have placed cache pages in a separate directory for easier management, but don’t want the first user on each cached page to wait. One option is to generate them all on my staging site and then symlink. That doesn’t work because the internal links that rails generated are absolute not relative. I ended up writing a script that make requests for all the pages
• Not many have visited so far - the search engines have not indexed it yet. I am getting some traffic from The Real Book Listening Guide and got some in the last couple of days from Happycodr a website for Rails applications.
• I’ve added some more data to the site, the tables are getting quite big - I need to do some optimizing of database access.

Napster has a webservice that seems to be unpublished, but it is used in their website to get information on artists, albums and tracks. This is what I have discovered about the API which I use for Song-list.net.

I’ll detail the query language and not the results as they are in XML and self documenting. The data provided is quite rich.

• Artist: http://www.napster.com/searchXML/artist/herbie hancock
• Album: http://www.napster.com/searchXML/album/road escondido
• Track: http://www.napster.com/searchXML/track/beautiful love

Artists, albums and tracks all have 8 digit IDs that can be used to query the particular item.

• Basic information by ID:
• http://www.napster.com/searchXML/artist/10429542
• http://www.napster.com/searchXML/album/10499404
• http://www.napster.com/searchXML/track/10063400

• All albums or tracks by Herbie Hancock:
• http://www.napster.com/searchXML/artist/10429542/albums
• http://www.napster.com/searchXML/artist/10429542/tracks

• All tracks on “Thriller”:
• http://www.napster.com/searchXML/album/10499404/tracks

You can use the the informatin gathered to play the music through a browser:

• http://www.napster.com/player/tracks/10063400

Let me know if you discover more features.