Unnaturally Long Attention Span

AvatarA blog about Grad School at Stanford, Working in a Silicon Valley Internet Company, and Statistical Machine Learning. mike AT ai.stanford.edu

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Behind MusicSearch

Some people have been asking me how MusicSearch works and where the songs come from. Well, you know those embedded flash players that people put in their xanga/livejournal/myspaces that blast embarassing music everytime you try to visit your buddie's page in a library or coffeeshop? I took a look at the code for one of the popular ones, radio.blog. It turns out that the sound files are stored in an obvious, public directory. So, the MusicSearch that I wrote is just a simplified interface on the radio.blog search engine, which makes the public path to the audio file more explicit. The sound files are typically radio broadcast quality, 64kbps or lower, but give you a good sense of the song.
Posted by Mike at 8:29 AM 8 comments
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