The Sound of Scraping
posted at 22:30 on 2009.04.03
After sitting on my CBC Radio 3 metadata for just over a week, I finally got around to throwing together a decent downloading script. Actually, the scraper/downloader is a loose federation of scripts, deliberately kept in separate modules so as to allow nice things like, say, running multiple copies thereof concurrently. I'll post a link to the source in the near future, along with a few words of explanation. Maybe I'll even write a README - after all, although CBC Radio 3 is afloat for now, there's no telling how long it will survive the budget axes of doom.

(And, to prevent the inevitable smartasses from chiming in with "you forgot wget, n00b" - nope, it's in there somewhere. That said, I think you'll find these scripts go a tiny bit further...)
2017 Songs and Counting
posted at 07:45 on 2009.03.26
Your guess as to what this does:

#!/bin/bash
for i in `seq 0 25`; do
echo "http://radio3.cbc.ca/nmc/artists.aspx?offset=${i}"
done | tee -a artists.log |\
./url-dumper 1.0 |\
egrep -o "/bands/[^\"]*" | uniq |
while read line; do
b=`basename "$line"`
echo "/play/band/${b}"
done | uniq | tee -a bands.log | ./cbc3-get-music-info 1.0

(Yes, I've left out some details - like what exactly those scripts do under the covers. I'll post about that when it's finished!)

Better make that 3156 songs. And counting.