Resources


This is where participating organizations and individuals can list tools, platforms, APIs and other resources that might be useful for Music Hack Day, as well as contact info for any representatives at the event. If more than a few sentences or links are necessary to describe it, create a new wiki page, otherwise link to it directly here.

 

Workshop APIs & Platforms / Participating Organizations

 

The Echo Nest API

The Echo Nest offers an API for music search, discovery, recommendations, news, reviews, blogs, audio, video, analytics, content analysis and remixing.  To get started, register for an API Key,  browse the API documentation then check out our resources page for code examples and to find a client library in your favorite language.  You can view the slides for the Echo Nest API workshop presentation. For more info contact Paul@echonest.com

 

The SoundCloud API 

Our API exposes the full range of SoundCloud functionality. Developers can upload tracks, stream tracks, access comments, edit metadata and much more. Check out our App Gallery to see examples! Here's some specific information with project ideas put together for Music Hack Day in London. The API documentation can be found here together with some more ideas for what you can build. If you want to discuss ideas or have questions: api@soundcloud.com

 

Last.fm API

A REST API with various output formats, and clients in lots of languages. Provides accesss to all our catalogue metadata, charts, tags, biographies, images, events, scrobble history and some private user data (recommendations), via authentication. Grab an API key and check out the documentation, for questions or requests contact davids@last.fm 

 

Playdar HTTP API and JavaScript library

Playdar is an HTTP server that runs on your local machine and speaks JSON. It lets you search for music, catalogued on your hard drives or on the LAN, and has a plugin architecture that allows you to scour the web for other sources of music. Come to the Saturday morning workshop for a demo of the API and to find out how to build web apps on top of it.

 

Songkick Live Music API

Songkick is a site for live music fans, to find upcoming gigs, and share experiences of gigs they've been to. Live music fans on Songkick have built a database of 1,500,000 concerts, from 1960 to 2011, adding thousands of setlists, concert photos, posters, videos and reviews. Songkick's API enables you to pull upcoming and past tour information and link to tickets (we share the commission from sales with you).

 

You can also pull your personal concert data, the gigs you've been to and the gigs you're going to, the setlists from those gigs etc. We have released an API into our setlist data, which we hope will be a bridge between recorded and live music APIs. There are approximately 100,000 setlists in our database right now with hundreds added daily.  

 

 

Bandsintown Concert Ticket API

A concert ticket API and revenue share program. Displaying concert information and sell tickets within your music application and make 50% of all commissions from over 60 ticketing marketplaces. Lookup by artist, location, date, or recommended shows. Link directly to the ticket seller.

phil or biz at bandsintown com

 

 

Yahoo! YQL 

The Yahoo! Query Language is an expressive, extensible SQL-like language to query, filter, and join data across Web services. At its simplest, it provides consistent abstraction over different webservices, but its real power is in combining APIs; filtering one datasource by the result of another, rolling batch queries together in sub-selects statements, scraping page content, writing data back into APIs… The web is your database. YQL provides tables to access most Yahoo! APIs (Social contacts, Flickr, Delicious, Yahoo! Music), and APIs from all over the through Community Open Tables (Last.FM, Google, Facebook, Wordpress, Dopplr, Twitter, The Guardian, and more hosted on GitHub). You can add read and write support for any REST API to YQL with a simple XML mapping file. Contact Ben Ward, or read the documentation

 

7digital API

7digital.com is an online high quality MP3 store operating in over 16 countries. 7digital API will give you access to licensed catalogue of over 9m tracks, videos and audiobooks with: catalogue browsing & searching, recommendations, preview clips, album artwork and up to 5% commission on sales that derive from traffic you send to us.

For access details during MHD San Francisco, links to full documentation, exmples, etc please visit 7digital.com/musichackday.

If you have any questions please join the newly set up 7digital API google group or email us at musichackday@7digital.com.

 

Fairtilizer.com allows you to host and distribute music from one place. We have recently completed our API for beta release just for use @ Music Hack Day SF. In order to get your API key and compete for the $500 prize [best hack of the weekend using the new Fairtilizer API] please email your Fairtilizer login to: Antoine Marguerie or Ben Colon.

 

 

RadioWeave API and Recording Clients

A REST JSON API, lets you input your audio, to be mashed with audio from many other sources, then extract a playlist (and related audio) for a variety show format.  Of particular use to live-music or found-sound fans are the recording tools with mini-editors built in. We're interested in blending more types of content from y'all, because we love variety.  Quick intro and more ideas at our RW Music Hack Day page.

 

ccMixter API

One of the first legal remix communities, with one of the largest collection of high quality acapella samples (2000+), the ccMixter API gives you access to the full collection of content, searching by user and a large body of tags, remix history, and descriptions, many of which contain lyrics with compelling content relevant to remix culture & larger social issues. The API was used to create dig.ccmixter, which provides the best of the collection in different areas such as for commercial use and instrumentals for videos & podcasts.  The opportunity with ccMixter API is in the content, such as mashing via tags with relevant images and video from social media, or doing a great visualization of remix history. You can see a quick summary of stats at http://ccmixter.org/stats

 

Non-workshop APIs & Platforms / Participating & Remote Organizations

 

The Playlistify.org API

Playlistify is the site for baking, sharing and discovering playlists. Its in superbeta as we recently launched for the public. A first working draft of the API is live. You can search all available playlists via the API and all individual playlists are exposed in JSONP manner. Note: first api's are up and running and due to it's early beta nature you don't need an API key. However if you intend to use the API's please submit your details via the form on the API documentation site

 

MuseScore Music Notation software

MuseScore is an open source C++/Qt music notation software available on Mac, Windows and Linux. MIDI input, internal soundfont based synth, Jack audio and midi out. MuseScore also provides a plugin framework. We are currently building a sharing website for scores created with MuseScore : MuseScore.com.

MuseScore.com provides an alpha API to access score files (PNG, MIDI, MusicXML, mp3 and syncho information). Contact us if you want to hack with it. (@musescore, @thomasbonte, @lasconic)

 

MusicXML

MusicXML is a symbolic music format from Recordare for representing musical semantics, such as found in sheet music and tablature. It is supported by over 120 programs, including commercial programs like Finale and Sibelius and open-source programs like MuseScore. MusicXML is available under a royalty-free license. Recordare's founder and MusicXML inventor, Michael Good (@MichaelDGood) , will be attending Music Hack Day on Saturday afternoon/evening and Sunday. Contact us for more information, including mailing list signup.

 

Other Tools, Platforms and APIs

 

Processing

An open source programming language and visualization toolkit for creating images, animations and interactions. A JavaScript port is also available here.

 

Arduino

An open source electronics prototyping and physical computing platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software.