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November 04, 2005

iMix via RSS - Finally

After all of the recent exciting news regarding iTunes and the iPod, the lowly iMix seems to get little or no attention. First introduced a few years ago, the iMix has since been sitting comfortably in the left hand column of the iTunes Music Store front page.

I think iMixes are pretty cool. If you are not aware of what they are, and iMix is a user-submitted "mix" of songs that resides locally in their iTunes. I may have a playlist of songs I use for background music while I write code, and I could submit it as an iMix entitled "The Best Coding Music in the World." Users of the iTunes Music Store could then vote on the iMix and buy the songs listed in the iMix.

As of this writing, there are currently 332,560 iMixes, and over 1.3 million votes cast on those iMixes.

How does RSS fit into this? Well, Apple was an early adopter of RSS, and they have a page on their site dedicated to RSS, which is far more than most companies today. But since introducing RSS support a few years ago, Apple has done little to expand their offerings of content available via RSS.

A little over a year ago, while writing for Lockergnome, I wrote a piece asking Apple to make more iTunes content available via RSS.

As you can guess, not much happened. So what does any self-respecting hacker with free time do? Working with another developer, we hacked together a Perl script that gets the iMix information from the iTunes Music Store and reformats it as RSS.

I've had this code sitting around for a while now, and finally decided to make it public. So without further ado, here are the links:

Most Recent iMixes -

Featured iMixes -

Top Rated iMixes -

*Disclosure* - these feeds include my iTunes affiliate information in them, so if you use them to buy a song, I will get a cut of the sale - very similar to the Amazon affiliate program. Hey - I'm unemployed and doing freelance work. I can use all the cash I can get.

These feeds are updated every 15 minutes, and are actually only a subset of the iMix data. I found that the three main iMix lists are too big for RSS. For example, the Most Recent lists the 100 most recently submitted iMixes. If all this information is parsed into RSS, the resulting RSS file is at least 1.5 MB! Way too big for RSS. And way too costly for my bandwidth. And, in what was the deciding factor to limit the number of new items, FeedBurner does not allow a feed to be more than 250 KB.

So each feed updates every 15 minutes with the 9 most recent iMixes as RSS items. The Most Recent feed updates the most often, followed by the Top Rated feed, and the Featured feed updates far less frequently. I think Apple must manually update that one.

If there is enough interest, I will post the code and make it freely available. Just let me know. And I will probably put up links that do not include the affiliate information. Or you can just use my code to make your own. Just give me some time to clean the scripts up a little.

Posted by Phil at November 4, 2005 10:23 AM

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Comments

I, for one, am very interested in this code. Can you please post it? Thanks!!!

Posted by: celerityfm [TypeKey Profile Page] at February 6, 2006 07:38 AM

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