Yahoo Pipe: New Releases

I don’t know about you, but I have far more artists in my music library than I can keep track of. Every once in a while I’ll be listening to a song and think, “I wonder if they have anything new out.” Then I look and find I’m two or three albums behind. When I heard about Last.fm and their data feeds I thought there should be a way to use that. Then when Yahoo Pipes came out, I knew there was. So over the last couple of days I spent my free time throwing together my New Releases Pipe.

New Releases takes the artists from your Last.fm recent tracks feed and searches for them in iTunes New Releases feed. The hardest part was wrapping my head around the “For Each” operators in Yahoo Pipes. What I wanted to do was filter one feed using text from another feed. “For Each” is how you do that. You have to create another pipe (in this case, Find New Releases) that does a search of the feed based on a text input. When you drop that Pipe into the “For Each” module, you can link that text input to a data field coming from the other feed.

Now, some caveats:

• Searching based on an exact text match always, always, makes me nervous. This really depends on Last.fm and iTunes using the exact same name for the artist — spaces, punctuation, everything. Because of that, expect this to miss some things.

• This is really hit or miss, anyway, because it’s matching your last 10 tracks from last.fm to iTunes 100 new releases. To improve your odds of finding albums, set your feed reader to update fairly often (probably an hour, although every 30 minutes would be ideal) and listen to music constantly.

• To get the artist name from the Last.fm feed with the least amount of trouble I’m running regular expressions against the artist URL in the description field. This requires, among other things, replacing all the plus signs with spaces. Yahoo Pipes doesn’t have a “replace all” function yet, so I’m just replacing one plus sign several times to try to catch them all. Because of this, you might miss releases from “…And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead.” You’re welcome.

Anyway, try it out, and if you have recommendations for improvements post them in the comments. I have some ideas of my own, and I will be posting them when they’re done.