URGENT: LyricWiki API changes

[Casey Link]

Personally I find the look of webpages embedded in Desktop apps tacky
(I'm looking at you songbird).

So, IMHO, screenscraping is the best way to go. We've done it before..
no reason why we can't do it again.

Since the lyricwiki script is just that - a script - if the page
layout changes we can update the script and republish on kde apps, so
users don't have to wait for a minor release just for the fix.

Casey

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Bart Cerneels<bart.cerneels at kde.org> wrote:
> How about using a QWebView in an applet showing the lyrics frame
> directly from the site? Perhaps a use case for a scriptable widget.
>
> In the best scenario we work together with Lyrcswiki so they keep
> their content suited for a custom CSS.
>
> Bart
>
> On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 15:00, Leo Franchi<lfranchi at kde.org> wrote:
>> 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
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>>
>>
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