Resources from Hackday 2009

see also Resources2010

 

This is where participating organizations and individuals can list tools, platforms, APIs and other resources that might be useful for Music Hack Day, as well as contact info for any representatives at the event. If more than a few sentences or links are necessary to describe it, create a new wiki page, otherwise link to it directly here.

 

Workshop APIs & Platforms / Participating Organizations 2009

 

The Echo Nest API

The Echo Nest offers an API for music search, discovery, recommendations, news, reviews, blogs, audio, video, analytics, content analysis and remixing.  To get started, register for an API Key,  browse the API documentation then check out our resources page for code examples and to find a client library in your favorite language.  You can view the slides for the Echo Nest API workshop presentation. For more info contact Paul@echonest.com

 

SoundCloud API 

The API exposes the full range of SoundCloud functionality. Developers can upload tracks, access comments & tracks, edit metadata and more. Here's some specific information with project ideas put together for Music Hack Day in London. More formal documentation here. And for more info contact eric@soundcloud.com

 

Last.fm API

A REST API with various output formats, and clients in lots of languages. Provides accesss to all our catalogue metadata, charts, tags, biographies, images, events, scrobble history and some private user data (recommendations), via authentication. Grab an API key and check out the documentation, for questions or requests contact davids@last.fm 

 

Playdar HTTP API and JavaScript library

Playdar is an HTTP server that runs on your local machine and speaks JSON. It lets you search for music, catalogued on your hard drives or on the LAN, and has a plugin architecture that allows you to scour the web for other sources of music. Come to the Saturday morning workshop for a demo of the API and to find out how to build web apps on top of it.

 

Songkick Live Music API

 

Songkick is a site for live music fans, to find upcoming gigs, and share experiences of gigs they've been to. Live music fans on Songkick have built a database of 1,200,000 concerts, from 1960 to 2010, adding thousands of setlists, concert photos, posters, videos and reviews. Songkick's API enables you to pull upcoming and past tour information and link to tickets (we share the commission from sales with you).

 

You can also pull your personal concert data, the gigs you've been to and the gigs you're going to, the setlists from those gigs etc. For the first time at music hack day boston we're releasing an API into our setlist data, which we hope will be a bridge between recorded and live music APIs. There are approximately 50,000 setlists in our database right now with hundreds added daily.

 

NPR Story API

 

NPR's Story API is a comprehensive API providing access to hundreds of thousands of NPR stories and to almost half-a-million audio files.  This API includes access to all music content.  The API provides a comprehensive way to access stories by more than 6,500 different categories while allowing further query-ability through date ranges, search terms, and more.  The API also enables results to be returned through eight different output formats, including NPRML (our custom XML structure), RSS, MediaRSS, PodcastRSS, Atom, JSON,and JavaScript and HTML Widgets.  Finally, let our Query Generator help you build your queries instead of digging through our comprehensive API Documentation.

 

NPR also has a comprehensive Transcript API which includes more than 80,000 transcripts, as well as a Station Finder API to help users identify stations that air NPR programming.

 

Musicbrainz API 

 

MusicBrainz provides a catalog of music metadata.  Its API  provides a method of searching for and retreiving this data.  For more information take a look at our hack day page

 

 

Tourfilter Feeds

Tourfilter searches thousands of small and large venues for concerts and makes 100% of its listing data available freely via RSS, ICal, JSON and formattable javascript/document.write(). No API key, registration, etc. are required. Lightning-fast, pre-cached feeds are provided for dozens of US+UK cities, thousands of venues and tens of thousands of artists.

 

All attendees will get a FREE copy of the APress book "Google Maps Mashups with Google Mapplets", written by Michael Young of the New York Times, which walks the reader, in 6 chapters, through the process of creating a concert map using tourfilter's RSS feeds and Google's Mapplets API. 

 

Aviary application API

Our api allows you to launch any of our applications from your website, and edit images/audio online. You can supply callbacks so that data created/saved is sent back to you for storage in your file system / database. Using the callbacks, your users can re-open and continue editing their projects later from your site. 

 

Standingwave Flash Audio Engine (Noteflight)

Noteflight's Standingwave audio engine is available separately as an open source ActionScript 3 library.  You can use it freely outside the Noteflight platform to create Flash-based applications that generate their own dynamically synthesized audio.  The goal of StandingWave is to encapsulate the following kinds of objects, permitting them to be easily chained together and combined to produce complex, dynamic audio output:

• audio sources (algorithmic sound generators, MP3 or WAV files...)
• audio filters (echo, envelope shaping, equalization...)
• timed sequences of audio sources, which may be hierarchically composed

  Contact: joe [at] noteflight [dot] com

 

Noteflight Client Embedding API  (username: musichacker / password: micronerd)

For this event, Noteflight is providing an early alpha version of a client-side JavaScript API for its embedded interactive music notation editor/viewer.  Symbolic music data can be injected into and extracted from a Noteflight instance in the page, and user interactions with the view can be detected and handled.  Currently the API is only enabled when the enclosing page is served from localhost or from a noteflight.com subdomain.  Contact: joe [at] noteflight [dot] com

 

Collecta Developers Platform http://developer.collecta.com/

Collecta provides both an XMPP and REST API for querying a Real-time stream of information from a wide variety of sources.

zisk at collecta dot com 

To obtain a Collecta API Key simply send an email to api@collecta.com with the following information:

• A valid email address where we will email your API key. (Required)
• Enter a name you want to use to identify your application. (Optional)
• Please tell us whether you plan to use the HTTP API or XMPP API and how you plan to use the API, in as much detail as you like. (Required)

Any questions, please ask at http://groups.google.com/group/collecta-developer

 

Bandsintown Concert Ticket API

A concert ticket API and revenue share program. Displaying concert information and sell tickets within your music application and make 50% of all commissions from over 60 ticketing marketplaces. Lookup by artist, location, date, or recommended shows. Link directly to the ticket seller.

phil or biz at bandsintown com

 

8tracks API

8tracks provides a simple, legal way for people to create and share an online mix -- a handcrafted, radio-style playlist that's at least 30 minutes (8 tracks) in length.  Developers can use the 8tracks API to allow listeners to find and play any of over 50,000 available mixes.   The API supports XML and JSON.  On Saturday morning, we'll demonstrate how you can create your own 8tracks player.  We look forward to seeing how 8tracks can be creatively integrated with other services. http://developer.8tracks.com

 

Yahoo! YQL 

The Yahoo! Query Language is an expressive, extensible SQL-like language to query, filter, and join data across Web services. At its simplest, it provides consistent abstraction over different webservices, but its real power is in combining APIs; filtering one datasource by the result of another, rolling batch queries together in sub-selects statements, scraping page content, writing data back into APIs… The web is your database. YQL provides tables to access most Yahoo! APIs (Social contacts, Flickr, Delicious, Yahoo! Music), and APIs from all over the through Community Open Tables (Last.FM, Google, Facebook, Wordpress, Dopplr, Twitter, The Guardian, and more hosted on GitHub). You can add read and write support for any REST API to YQL with a simple XML mapping file. Contact Ben Ward, or read the documentation.

 

 

Napster API

 

Presentation PDF

 

The soon-to-be-released Napster API provides for REST-style access to the Napster catalog of 8 million+ songs from all the majors and thousands of indies, including special editorial collections like Napster radio stations, playlists and Billboard charts going back to 1955.  Info like full discography, related artists, album artwork is available. We’re making the API specially available for Hack Day this weekend to get your feedback.  Here's this weekend's API key: SSHvRhrPsvDwVodGkPUw.  To get started, read the beta documentation.  Note that this key will expire next week, but please talk to us about getting a unique key to keep your application live on the Napster service.  Contact mark.reeder@napster.com or wanbar@napster.com for more info/questions/etc!

 

 

Non-workshop APIs & Platforms / Participating & Remote Organizations

 

Gruvr local concerts and tour map geoRSS feeds

Grüvr music map offers dead simple ways to get upcoming concert listings for most any location world-wide, and instant tourmap feeds, map, or widget for over 300K bands worldwide, with typically 300-650K upcoming events tracked. Data is geocoded and distributed in all geo-web microformats including KML, geoRSS, ICBM and geotags for consumption by hyper-local apps or blogs.  Just give /feed= any location name or band name as parameter; the feed composes on demand. Also available: many ways to customize, and contextual feeds as seen on http://music.alltop.com/  

 

7digital API

7digital.com is an online high quality MP3 store operating in over 16 countries. 7digital API will give you access to licensed catalogue of over 8m tracks, videos and audiobooks with: catalogue browsing & searching, recommendations, preview clips, album artwork and up to 5% commission on sales that derive from traffic you send to us.

Full 7digital API documentation; temporary API access key for MHD Boston: musichackday

An example call: http://api.7digital.com/1.2/release/details?releaseid=792&country=us&oauth_consumer_key=musichackday

If you have any questions please join the newly set up 7digital API google group or email us at musichackday@7digital.com.

Mobile Fan Clubs API

Adva Mobile provides a free Mobile Fan Club service for artists. Our API enables businesses serving artists to add Mobile Fan Club functionality to their offering while keeping their branding, and make money while at it. A few highlights of our service features include promotion tools like keyword & shortcode, rich-media mobile websites, social network integrations, mobile monetization solution for content, tickets and merchandise, reporting and more.

To view one of our artists checkout Tonic Sol-Fa's mobile website.

 

If you are interested in accessing our API, write to us: musichackday (at) advamobile (dot) com

 

 

Other Tools, Platforms and APIs

 

Processing

An open source programming language and visualization toolkit for creating images, animations and interactions. A JavaScript port is also available here.

 

Arduino

An open source electronics prototyping and physical computing platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software.

 

Stratus Security

Stratus offers a hosted API management platform that allows you to easily deploy, manage and monetize your API without the need for custom built in-house solutions. Stratus is pleased to be supporting the launch of the 8tracks API here at Music Hack Day Boston.