cygweb

In prior entries I've blogged about "WCYG", my streaming radio station. It's a hobby I've had for a while now, and I plan to share more about my methods and code in the future. Well, I've decided to rename the project "ICYG", to reflect the fact that it's an Internet-based station only. It's still a private venture since it's not much more than a script-picked, pleasantly-crossfaded set of songs that I like to tune into while at home and share with my friends. It's fun to select a healthy portion of my digital music and see what algorithms I can make to create a mix that's interesting to listen to. Sharing it with friends also elicits occasional feedback, which is cool.

I try to keep ICYG going all the time, so it made sense for it to be my "now playing" source. I use Foobar2000 and a set of plugins that includes Oddcast to create the stream, which is fed to my Icecast2 server. To produce info about the current song, I installed the HTTP Writer plugin and configured it to output a small HTML file with the artist, title, and album info. Then I set up a cron job on my web-hosting provider's server that sources that text every five minutes and rebuilds my main page. It looks like it's working.

However, the next phase of my plan is the coolest. I'm going to add a "PURCHASE" tag to each of my song files that will be the URL to the current album's page on a Web store, usually Amazon. As I start adding that info the files, the ones that have it will display a "purchase this" link or will just have a hyperlink-enabled album name. Also, I think I'll add an "ARTISTWWW" tag that will hold the URL to the artist's official website. Files that have that tag will probably have an appropriately hyperlinked band name.

I think this is a cool way to give back to the artists I like. Let me know what you think. More methods and madness regarding this project will follow...