muxtape.com, itunes, perl, and making mixtapes

muxtape.com is a site where you can build mix tapes by uploading mp3 files. You can find other people’s uploads and listen to them. It’s the flea market tape swape of 2008. I like it.

A lot of people seem to be using it (I think) like a very, very high-latency radio station. Once in a while they upload a new song, bumping an old one. That’s cool, but it’s hardly a mix tape. I’d rather put together a collection of songs that play well together, then replace my whole tape with those.

The uploading interface requires that I delete and upload tracks one at a time. It also wants them in reverse order, since new tracks get the first position in the tape. Blech!

What I really want is to build a mix in iTunes, where I can drag things around, preview, and re-think selections. Then, I want to upload that whole playlist at once. I wrote a program to do that. Its source is listed below. The muxtape.com API isn’t published or clearly-defined, so who knows how long this will work.

My new muxtape, the first I uploaded with mux-up, is now online.

use strict;
use warnings;

use WWW::Mechanize;
use Mac::Glue qw(:glue);

my $title = $ARGV[0];

my $iTunes = Mac::Glue->new('iTunes');

my $playlist = $iTunes->obj(
  playlist => whose(name => equals => $title)
);

my @tracks = @{ $playlist->obj('tracks')->get || [] };
die "couldn't find tracks in playlist <$title>" unless @tracks;

die "too many tracks" if @tracks > 12;

for (@tracks) {
  die "track too large" if $_->prop('size')->get > 10_000_000;
}

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new;

$mech->get('http://muxtape.com/login');

$mech->submit_form(
  with_fields => {
    name => 'USERNAME',
    pass => 'PASSWORD',
  },
);

$mech->get('http://muxtape.com/organize');

my @ids = $mech->content =~ m{li id="(song[0-9a-f]{32})"}g;

for my $id (@ids) {
  $id =~ s/^song//;
  print "deleting $id\n";

  $mech->post(
    'http://muxtape.com/organize/ajax',
    Content => "command=delete&args=$id",
  );
}

for my $track (reverse @tracks) {
  $mech->get('http://muxtape.com/upload');
  my $path = $track->prop('location')->get;
  print "uploading $path\n";
  $mech->submit_form(with_fields => { file => $path });
}

my @month = qw(Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec);
my @lt    = localtime;
my $date  = "$month[ $lt[4] ] $lt[3]";

$title =~ s/.+: //;
$mech->post(
  'http://muxtape.com/settings/ajax',
  Content => qq{command=bannercaption&args="none"&banner=$date: $title},
);

print $mech->content;

Written on April 22, 2008