aimInfo

Tuesday, March 20, 2007 Usually on Tuesday I end up checking out the latest iTunes releases, and downloading some new music.  As you can imagine sitting at my desk all day, I listen to a lot of music, and when I first joined AOL back in 1999 I used to listen to Spinner.  In 2005 I started listening to AOL Radio, I thought that they had some really fantastic music programmers, especially on the New Rock First channel.  Over the years, it has driven me crazy that I cannot see the 20 most played songs on AOL Radio channels or the last 10 songs played on a station.  When I miss a song I like, and do not know the title, I miss out, as well as anyone else who I might tell about the song or artist.

Consider the problem solved, well sort of.  Last night I spent navigating my way through AppleScript, and built a simple script that hooks the AOL Radio player on the Mac OS X to log the song title, artist, and album to a text file using a timestamp.  For example you can see what played on New Rock First from about 1130AM to 530PM today.  The lines that are missing song info are times when the player was running an audio ad.

So to generate the song log, you first need to download the AOL Radio for the Mac OS X.  Then install and run the AOL Radio.

Then download my AppleScript and load it in Script Editor.app.  With AOL Radio playing, just run the script, and you will be logging the songs.  Simple as that.  Since the script is in plain text you can see how easy it is to hook the AOL Radio on the Mac.  To view other things you can do with the AOL Radio, use script editor to open the dictionary of AOL Radio.  To do this, choose, File | Open Dictionary, and just choose AOL Radio.app.

I hoping to build this into an AIM plugin for the Mac client that we include as part of the Open AIM SDK.  Remember this will work only for AOL Radio for the Mac for now.


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