The iPhone SDK and Music Apps
Everyone is excited that Apple will be releasing an SDK for the iPhone in February. This could potentially open up many avenues for new types of interfaces to interact with one's music collection. Imagine Ishkur's Guide to Dance music on your phone, or one of Masataka's and/or Elias's fantastic interfaces like MusicReam, MusicRainbow or MusicSun, or Frederic Vavrille's Musicovery, or our own Search Inside the Music.
My worry is that the when it comes to the music the iPhone SDK will be crippled - that the SDK will not provide for basic manipulation of the music queue and that we won't be able to write new music apps. We will all know for sure in February, but in the mean time I want to make sure that Apple knows what it should include in the API to support music apps. Here's the absolute minimum:
- Basic Player controls
- Start playing a song
- Stop playing
- Volume up/down
- Pause/Resume
- Player events:
- Song Started
- Song Finished
- User skipped, user pause/resume
- User volume up, volume down
- Basic Now Playing Queue controls
- Enqueue a song
- Dequeue a song
- Next song
- Previous song
- Song database info
- Get info for a song including:
- title, artist, album, genre, composter
- track number, year of release, length
- playcount, skipcount, rating, BPM
- bitrate, last played, format
- album art
- Get all artists
- Get all albums
- Get all tracks
- by genre
- by artist
- by album
- Add a track to the database
- Playlist manipulation
- Get all playlists
- Create a playlist
- Delete a playlist
- Get tracks in a playlist
- Add tracks to a playlist
With
this minimal SDK support for music we should see some really
interesting apps for exploring our personal music collection.
These apps will help prevent our iPod / iPhone from becoming the music
graveyard - the place that our music goes to die.
Let's hope Apple listens!
Posted by Kurt J on November 06, 2007 at 07:25 AM EST #
Hey paul,
Have you ever browsed the iTunes API? Basically, I'm hoping they offer a similar API for iTunes on the iPhone/iPod.
I'd love to be able to port my (proof-of-concept) iTunes/Last.fm similar artist playlisting mash-up to the iPhone.
http://labs.demuxdigital.com/itunes/
Posted by dan on November 06, 2007 at 08:14 AM EST #
Does the iPhone currently allow you to create playlists on the go? Or do you have to define them in iTunes and then sync? I do not have one, but friends often complain about this issue on their iPods.
I find your API too optimistic, I wish I'm wrong
Posted by luis on November 06, 2007 at 02:51 PM EST #
Paul,
The existing browser-based Javascript Quicktime API would be sufficient for managing most of the features you list (although it doesn't allow for access to song files in the phone's iTunes library.) I've written a complete music playlist application based on Quicktime in the browser (Grabb.it can be configured to use Quicktime instead of Flash), and was excited to port it to iPhone when it first came out.
Sadly, Apple does not support the (small but sufficient) Quicktime Javascript API on the iPhone. My blog on what can be accomplished with the iPhone Quicktime API here: http://jchris.mfdz.com/code/2007/8/unsupported___hacking_quicktime
The ease of adding support for the full Quicktime API, and the fact that they skipped it, indicates to me that Apple is not excited about having music competition on the iPhone.
Posted by Chris Anderson on November 06, 2007 at 03:50 PM EST #
luis,
yes, you can define playlists "on-the-go" on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Posted by dan on November 07, 2007 at 09:20 AM EST #