Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

I spent a bit of time yesterday writing a XSPF playlist resolver web service.  The playlist resolver will take a playlist in XSPF format and return a new playlist that has been augmented with a MusicBrainz identifier and has the various other fields adjusted to a canonical form. 

 Here's an example using a playlist from Oscar Celma:

 <playlist version="1" xmlns= "http://foafing-the-music.iua.upf.edu">
  <trackList>
    <track>
      <location>http://mtgdb.iua.upf.edu/total/audio/mp3/w/wilco/the_spongebob_squarepants_movie_/03-just_a_kid.mp3</location>
      <image>http://foafing-the-music.iua.upf.edu/services/AWS?display=image&amp;keywords=U2</image>
      <info>http://www.mp3.com/search.php?stype=artist&amp;query=U2&amp;action=Search</info>
      <title>With o without yu</title>
      <creator>U2</creator>
      <album>Josua tre</album>
   </track>
 </tracklist>
</playlist> 

And here's the same playlist after canonicalizing it:

<playlist xmlns="http://foafing-the-music.iua.upf.edu" version="1">
  <trackList>
    <track>
      <location>http://mtgdb.iua.upf.edu/total/audio/mp3/w/wilco/the_spongebob_squarepants_movie_/03-just_a_kid.mp3</location>
      <image>http://foafing-the-music.iua.upf.edu/services/AWS?display=image&amp;keywords=U2</image>
      <info>http://www.mp3.com/search.php?stype=artist&amp;query=U2&amp;action=Search</info>
      <creator>U2</creator>
      <identifier>http://musicbrainz.org/track/6b9a509f-6907-4a6e-9345-2f12da09ba4b.html</identifier>
      <title>With or Without You</title>
      <album>The Joshua Tree</album>
   </track>
 </tracklist>
</playlist> 

 The key is the addition of the MusicBrainz identifier. This makes it easy to tie a track to all of the metadata that describes the track.  Lucas Gonze (of WebJay fame), writes more about it on his blog:  Content Resolver Mashup.