Hi there, Back at Hackday 07 the radio guys released some feeds that give the now playing data for Radio 1, 2, 6music and 1xtra. They are located at http://bbc-hackday.dyndns.org/tracks/
You also publish now playing data to last.fm, and this is available via the last.fm recent tracks feeds, located at: http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/bbcradio1/recenttracks.rss http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/bbcradio2/recenttracks.rss http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/bbc1xtra/recenttracks.rss http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/bbc6music/recenttracks.rss Now whilst I understand you've previously said these feeds aren't actively supported by the BBC, I still find them a great source of data, and am currently building a small mashup using this data, last.fm, and the new BBC Music site (an improvment to my other mashup that already uses this data: http://cgriley.com/nowplaying/) Through use of these feeds I've found that the bbc-hackday.dyndns.orgversion is flaky at best, and currently hasn't been updated since 19th July. So I've stopped using that for my app as I've since worked out that the last.fm feeds seem to be supported a bit more. However, these aren't perfect and I've noticed large gaps in the data (several hours or days, during the daytime schedules when the tracks are able to be published via VCS.) For example, at the time of writing I noticed the last.fm Radio 1 feed was down between 10am and 12pm (approx) today (I'm assuming it was off between 9am and 10am as Chris Moyles does the Golden Hour then and presumably plays things off CDs, or turns off track information to stop people cheating when guessing the tracks), and similarly 1xtra and 6music hadn't been updated for a day or so until they cam back to life around 12 today. And the Radio 2 feed hasn't been updated since 18th July! So, I guess question number 1 is how supported is the publishing of now playing data to last.fm? Is it something that the BBC will provide their own supported feed for as part of the new music site (especially as you are showing playcount data as part of artist pages now?) or is it to remain something you push to last.fm only. If you don't plan to support them anymore than you alreday do can I understand a bit more about how they work to understand what I see. For example how are the feeds published? I get that they must be hooked into VCS (your playout system), but why do some radio stations work, whilst others are broken? Why does the link to last.fm continue to work whilst the hack day feeds die? I do hope you can provide a supported version of these feeds from the new music site, in the meantime I'll continue to work with the last.fm feed, and hope that you'll keep kicking the box when you notice it not working ;o) And of course I'll let you know when I have something to show you. Cheers, Chris
