<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>Hey guys,</div><div><br></div><div>so. we either need to a) switch from lyricswiki or b) rewrite the script to screenscrape :(</div><div><br></div><div>thoughts?</div><div><br></div><div>leo</div><div><br></div><br><div><br><div>Begin forwarded message:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>From: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Sean Colombo <<a href="mailto:sean@lyricwiki.org">sean@lyricwiki.org</a>></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>Date: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">August 2, 2009 9:18:02 PM EDT</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>To: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">LyricWiki API Developers <<a href="mailto:lyricwiki-api@googlegroups.com">lyricwiki-api@googlegroups.com</a>></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>Subject: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><b>URGENT: LyricWiki API changes</b></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" color="#000000" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; color: #000000"><b>Reply-To: </b></font><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica"><a href="mailto:lyricwiki-api@googlegroups.com">lyricwiki-api@googlegroups.com</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div> </div><div><br>Dear LyricWiki API Developers,<br>It has been a great run, and I have seen some fantastic and<br>interesting applications come from all of your skills and hard work.<br><br>Unfortunately, licensing agreements with the biggest publishers in the<br>music industry require us to no longer offer the ability for<br>programmatic access to LyricWiki's collection of lyrics.<br><br>We tried to arrange some way to let API Developers license through us,<br>but this was not possible.<br><br>While this is not something we are happy about, it is a necessity in<br>order to finally secure licensing for LyricWiki from the major<br>publishers which will allow the project to survive indefinitely.<br><br>== What can the API do now? ==<br>Everything it used to be able to do except for display lyrics. This<br>amounts to primarily two things: viewing discographies and matching a<br>single song to a corresponding LyricWiki URL so that users can be<br>linked to it.<br><br>The API has always employed a number of tricks to match song-titles<br>from music files to the corresponding page on LyricWiki, so we will be<br>keeping that functionality. The matching has become fairly good over<br>the many months that the API has been around and this matching has<br>been contributed to by several API developers (thanks guys!).<br><br>== What about our apps? ==<br>Unfortunately, a some apps will be left out in the cold by this<br>requirement. However, we do have some suggestions for various types<br>of apps.<br><br>Media players:<br>If possible, use the API to make your normal getSong() request. If a<br>match is found, open the 'url' field from the result in an HTML pane<br>so that the whole page is displayed.<br><br>Web sites:<br>Discography display can remain the same. Replace the direct display<br>of the lyrics with a link to the 'url' returned by the API.<br><br>iPhone Apps:<br>There doesn't appear to be a good answer here. Perhaps you could<br>pursue getting licensing of your own, but in my experience this<br>requires an extremely large amount of financing up front. Hopefully,<br>your results may vary. If you are able to innovate and find another<br>solution that I have not thought of, I encourage you to share it with<br>the community.<br><br>== The Future ==<br>While I don't anticipate that the major publishers will ever change<br>their mind to allow us to provide lyrics through our API (even for a<br>fee), hopefully some publishers will explicitly grant us permission to<br>do so. It is doubtful that this will occur any time in the near<br>future though.<br><br>== Feedback ==<br>If you have any questions about this development, inevitable<br>frustration-venting, or there is some way in which I could be of help<br>in the process of updating your applications - feel free to contact<br>me.<br><br>As always, you can leave a message on my talk page at<br><a href="http://lyricwiki.org/User_talk:Sean_Colombo">http://lyricwiki.org/User_talk:Sean_Colombo</a> or send me an email<br>through <a href="http://lyricwiki.org/Special:EmailUser/Sean_Colombo">http://lyricwiki.org/Special:EmailUser/Sean_Colombo</a><br><br>I also spend a decent amount of time in the IRC channel #lyricwiki on<br>quakenet ( irc://irc.quakenet.org/LyricWiki ), but due to the expected<br>volume of communications, I would recommend one of the asynchronous<br>methods above to increase the odds that I don't lose track of your<br>messages.<br><br>Thank you all for your great applications and innovations so far which<br>have made many end-users happy. This is not the path I would have<br>preferred for the API, but hopefully we can work with the current<br>situation and still help our users as much as possible.<br><br>I am sorry for the obvious inconveniences this will cause,<br> - Sean Colombo<br> LyricWiki.org<br>--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~<br>You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "LyricWiki API Developers" group.<br>To post to this group, send email to <a href="mailto:lyricwiki-api@googlegroups.com">lyricwiki-api@googlegroups.com</a><br>To unsubscribe from this group, send email to <a href="mailto:lyricwiki-api+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com">lyricwiki-api+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com</a><br>For more options, visit this group at <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/lyricwiki-api?hl=en">http://groups.google.com/group/lyricwiki-api?hl=en</a><br>-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---<br><br></div></blockquote></div><br></body></html>