When you view a soundtrack, you get loads of little dots to indicate if you have the track in your library or not. If you click on the little dot, you should now get taken to the song in the iTunes Store (assuming you have iTunes and the song is in the store). It currently takes you to the UK store, which wont be so much use for people in the US, but I think you can still preview the song. I’ll try adding the US store next.

There aren’t any APIs to the iTunes store, or their affiliate programme (which is so complicated I gave up worrying about if it’ll even work). So it’s done in the mother of all hacky ways, screen scraping two different sites and merging the results to a browser redirect. I’m surprised it ever worked, it makes me shiver just thinking about it, but I just couldn’t see an alternative.

Next task is to work out the songs that aren’t in the library BEFORE they get displayed, stop those annoying “Sorry, couldn’t find the song in the store” messages.

• the tall one will be pleased.

  Comment by kellysmack — September 18, 2007 @ 5:15 am

• screen scraping rules! hmm maybe i should write a screen scrape alert library that warns you when the rule your relying on breaks.

  Comment by Rob — September 19, 2007 @ 12:12 am

• I wonder how many things on the Internet are relying on screen scraping. The whole Internet could be teetering on the edge of disaster.

  Comment by Darren Shaw — September 19, 2007 @ 8:12 am

• I promise to try it tonight :o)
  I have some good ideas for my Eid soundtrack too

  Comment by Hanan — September 21, 2007 @ 11:02 am

• Thanks Hanan. A few people (Mike and Rob) have found other sites that do something similar. I’ve been spending time trying them out, but they really don’t do what I want to do, so I’m thinking I may get busy and make it really useful.

  Other sites worth looking at:

  • http://www.fiql.com
  • http://www.podplaylist.com
  • http://www.soundflavor.com
  Comment by Darren Shaw — September 21, 2007 @ 11:16 am

• I did it … my first soundtrack is on there now!
  It’s a Ramadan / Eid 2007 soundtrack …. lots of reference to food, praying, heaven and partying :o)

  Comment by Hanan — September 30, 2007 @ 10:43 pm

• Hehe thanks Hanan, that’s a great soundtrack.

  Comment by Darren Shaw — October 1, 2007 @ 7:28 am