Fwd: URGENT: LyricWiki API changes

[Leo Franchi]

Hey guys,

so. we either need to a) switch from lyricswiki or b) rewrite the  
script to screenscrape :(

thoughts?

leo



Begin forwarded message:

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

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/amarok-devel/attachments/20090803/9e8d0133/attachment.htm