CD Collection Browser Mashup is basically done

Although I’m not happy with the track listing portion. I wanted to get previews of the songs on the album and I thought I could get this information from Amazon Product API, I even found an example of what needed to be done, but I couldn’t get it to work. I asked for some help on their forum, but no one replied. Eventually I moved on to using a variety of other APIs.

Sometimes I can get previews or link to a page with an audio preview or even the whole song, but sometimes I can’t even find a track listing. I also discovered, even with a fair amount of caching, going from fetching information about an artist or an album, to fetching information about the tracks on the album, increases the number of API calls by a factor of ten or more. So I may revisit that, maybe just have a preview of the first track.

In the mean time check out my CD Collection Browser Mashup. It isn’t that interactive, that area of PHP isn’t one I know much about, I suspect I need to use some JavaScript. Since I’m still unemployed, I plan to build another mashup or two. My PHP class representing a collection of albums is working alright, though it relies on a variety of other API accessing code in PHP which isn’t always flawless, I’ve had to extend, debug, and add to most of the code I’ve downloaded off the net for this project. This means anyone who wants to use my code, would have to go through a similar headache. Not sure if there is a solution to this, other than cloning my installation.

I plan to make a subclass as my main class has gotten fairly large, it works just like a crate of records. You can pick up the first record, the last record, or a random record in the crate, pull it out, read the tracks, look at the album cover, maybe a brief review or an artist bio. The class works just like a real record collection, that is abstraction or Object Oriented Programming or something. I used a lot different techniques from recursion to refactoring to probably some design patterns. I ended up writing a lot more code than I originally planned when I set out to build my CD Cover Gallery, but after seeing the state of PHP code that is being advocated as a solution to accessing the Amazon Product API, well I decided I would show people how it was done.

This mashup and my class uses the following APIs and code by the following people:

• Amazon API by Sameer Borate
• Signed AWS Request by Ulrich Mierendorff
• Last.fm API by Matt Oakes
• Facebook PHP SDK
• FacebookLib by Vadim Gabriel
• MusicBrainz.org
• phpBrainz by Jeff Sherlock
• Twitter’s Tweet This Button
• Facebook Open Graph
• Facebook Like Button
• iTunes Store Search API

Late last night while testing this, I chanced upon the Hype Machine as it has tight Last.fm integration, so I plan to explore that website some today. I also should really tell people about what I’ve been building, well beyond the dozen or so semi-loyal blog readers I have.

I eventually wrote more code and made more mashups, the code is available for download, but the more APIs I used the more headaches it likely caused to anyone wishing to use just a little of the code. It also needs updating, but right now I’m updating old blog posts and looking for a new job. I never set out to write so much PHP code, but you’re welcome to try it, make sure you read up on open source licensing too.

This entry was originaly posted on October 14th, 2010, it was last edited on March 9th, 2019 and is filed under: Information Technology and tagged: Amazon, API, iTunes, Last.fm, PHP.