Yay, pandas!

The other day I was making a mix cd for jamie, putting the cd together wasn’t a problem but I never know what to put on the top. Typically I take a sharpie and try to cram the playlist onto the top of the cd. So that is what I did, but I was trying to think of a better solution. I was thinking that if I could parse the playlist and get the artist info out of the track names I could use the flickr api to find interesting photos with that artists name as a tag. Then I could make a block out of the interesting images and print it on the top of a mix cd. It mostly worked…
It turned out I couldn’t find any decent piece of code to parse the playlists so I kinda hacked around that problem. I think if you don’t keep your mp3’s in an Artists/Album/Tracks hierarchy it  will fail miserably. The other issue is tag overlap. For example: There is a panda bear named Bright Eyes, there is also an Artist named Bright Eyes, if you look here you will see some musicians and a bunch of pandas.

I’ll follow up with more details. Ideally my next step is to export this to a template I can print, rather than a screenshot. Mike suggested I may be able to integrate this into serpentine, it would be much nicer to work in python rather than php. *shudder*