NewMusicRadio: MP3 Playlist Generator

• What is NewMusicRadio?
• Download
• Installation
• Updates and information
• To-do

It's a little CGI perl script that I knocked up to make it easier to listen to all the new music that arrives on my computer. Basically, it generates an m3u playlist for you, choosing the songs randomly from a list that you provide. Put like that, I'm not sure why it took me any time to write...

newmusicradio.pl. That's it. All nicely self-contained in a single perl file.

You might also want a look at the script I use to download the latest tunes from a collection of MP3 blogs I subscribe to, and to build the list of recently changed files. It's an extended version of what Jeffrey Veen suggested recently.

1. Download the newmusicradio.pl script.
2. Configure the script:
   • If you don't have MP3::Tag installed on your system, set $mp3_tag_available to 0
   • Change $mp3list to point to the list of mp3s that NewMusicRadio will choose from. This is just a text file of full filenames (i.e. path and filename, like "/home/musicfiles/song.mp3"), with one filename to a line.
   • Set $deleteList to point to a file which will be used to keep a list of files which will be excluded from playlists
3. Install it as you would any other CGI script on your web server. It's only been tested with Apache on Linux, 'cos that's what I'm using
4. Point your browser at it!

Updates And Information

Any changes and updates will be trumpeted on my blog here.

To-do

• Finish my script to generate ID3 tags for MP3s which don't have them
• Strengthen the links to the MP3 blogs I've downloaded from. Not sure how I'll do this; it'd be good to have the permalink for a track embedded in the ID3 info of the MP3, but to begin with I'm going to overwrite the album info with the blog name so I can see in my media player which blog it came from.