Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Playlists are Working, Browsing is Next

I've been able to debug and prove out my playlist code by temporarily replacing the artist selection code with playlist selection, so that's pretty cool. The DAAP server I'm running - mt-daapd - has all kinds of support for iTunes-style smartlists, which are composed on-the-fly based on criteria you provide. If your mp3s (or oggs) have appropriate meta-data, like the year the song was released or the genre, you can include songs in smartlists based on these attributes. There also seems to be a top-level playlist created with the server's name that includes all songs, so that makes some of the work I did earlier redundant. Not that I'm going to complain about that, especially if it means that I get to rip out some code.

Also, I've found some kind of documentation of the "browse" capabilities here, although this seems to be documentation on how to get XML responses from mt-daapd, not actual DAAP output. I'm hoping that similar requests can be made over DAAP. I can't believe they only showed up on the second page of my google search. With any luck this will mean that it should be possible to do album and artist browsing (and other kinds too) without having to suck in details about every song that the DAAP server knows about. If it works wmamp is going to become way more usable.

Labels: