Last.Fm API

Last.fm has made available their new API two weeks ago — and it’s a big step forward. I did apply for a preview to update my Wordpress plugin Last.Fm Records before the API hit the streets, but alas. So the last few evenings I’ve written version 1.4.

Version 1.3 had a really ugly parseHTML function to parse the HTML pages requested on last.fm. Now that the API returns relatively clean XML, the first thing I did was to update the XML parsing to the functionality available in PHP5, which means I no longer support PHP4. All the Amazon and Musicbrainz requests have been replaced by requests to the new API. Great news is that almost all relevant feeds in the new API include urls for cd covers: only user.getWeeklyAlbumChart (cds you listened to last week) is lacking those: why?

Thanks to the new API the plugin is much faster, finds more images than the previous version, and is now in beta. If you want to test drive it, let me know in the comments. I’ll release this new version after testing it thoroughly. I’ll be listening to songs with single quotes and ampersands in the title!

Oh, and yes, the request (by a human being) for a fallback option has been implemented: when the period you set in the options returns not enough cds, the plugin requests more info from longer ago.