The Playlist Resolver

This is a playlist resolver. It will take a playlist in XSPF format and generate a new version of the playlist. Right now the playlist resolver only does a couple of things. It will look at the track information and attempt to find information about the track at MusicBrainz, and fix or augment this information. This may include:

The MusicBrainz identifier
The track name
The album name
The artist name
Link to album art

Optionally, the playlist can be resolved against a music service provider - allowing the playlist to be played using the music from the provider. Currently an XSPF can be resolved against the following providers:

Napster

Give it a try

Enter a URL to your favorite XSPF list, select the type of conversion and press [[convert]] to resolve the playlist, or [[display]] to pretty print the resolved playlist.

The Web API

There is a WEB API that you can use:

        http://research.sun.com:8080/SpiffyContentResolver/convert?input=URL-to-XSPF-Playlist

This converts the given playlist to it's canonical form.

        http://research.sun.com:8080/SpiffyContentResolver/display?input=URL-to-XSPF-Playlist

This converts the given playlist to it's canonical form and returns a pretty-printed html version of the playlist.

        http://research.sun.com:8080/SpiffyContentResolver/napsterize?input=URL-to-XSPF-Playlist

This converts the given playlist to it's canonical form, resolves the tracks to the Napster catalog and returns a pretty-printed html version of the playlist.

Some examples:

Some of my recent tracks	Original	Canonical	Display	Napsterize
Kevin Smiths's Playlist	Original	Canonical	Display	Napsterize
Foafing the music	Original	Canonical	Display	Napsterize
MusicMobs	Original	Canonical	Display	Napsterize
Last.FM indie	Original	Canonical	Display	Napsterize
Last.FM metal	Original	Canonical	Display	Napsterize
Last.FM nerd	Original	Canonical	Display	Napsterize

Note that these requests can take several tens of seconds, since a playlist with 100 tracks will result in 200 calls being made to MusicBrainz to do the track resolution. Napsterizing adds even more time. With the current implementation it may take 2 seconds more to resolve each track. Also, note that we are at the whim of the various web apis, sometimes they are down, sometimes they respond very slowly. What can you do?

Some non-working examples:

Plurn	Original	Canonical	Plurn puts the name of the MP3 in the title field.
Webjay	Original	Canonical	Webjay lists are XSPF version 0, we support only version 1

Statistics

There are some statistics on the usage of this web service here: Content Resolver stats

The To Do List

There are lots of things to do - some that come to mind:

Selectable resolution - the caller should be able to specify which resolutions should be performed (identifier, albumart etc)
Improve performance
Resolve against other catalogs such as Rhapsody

Version History

V.04 January 4, 2007
- Added a "Napster" resolution - An XSPF playlist can be resolved againsts the napster catalog.
V.03 November 22, 2006
- If a track is missing album art, will add a link to the Amazon artwork for the release.
- Added a display mode that will attempt to pretty print an XSPF
V.02 November 21, 2006
- Fixed some bugs, added edit form
- Work around MusicBrainz query bug
- Added query/search cache
V.01 November 20, 2006 - Initial revision - supports minimal playlist resolution.

Powered by XSPF, MusicBrainz, and Sun Microsystems inc.
Inspired by Toby, Robert and Lucas. Kevin Smith playlist courtesy of Nathan Freitas of Cruxy.com
Send feedback to Paul.Lamere@sun.com