Today while sitting in my room (for the first time in a while), I decided to start doing some work on a little project I've been thinking about for a while.
The aim is to create a radio player that blends user generated customizable radio but still retains the on air talent, idents and if required adverts from the radio station.
I've been following the work of Simon Cross over at the BBC and his now playing BBC vs the Web (Beta) has given me the kick I needed to put something into production. I've blogged about this before but haven't had the time to get something started.
Now I know the technology is out there to do this, after all the likes of lastfm, Pandora and AccuTunes have been offering the user generated elements for quite a while.
My biggest challenge is to build something that knows when the music is no longer playing on the station and switches from the music database to the station player stream, without delay or a prolonged buffer time, for the experience to truly be effective a smooth transition is required.
So I started messing about in Flash, using the EPG / Now Playing stream from Heart London to pull in content from other web services, I'm undecided on which service to use at present to acquire music content from, so I'm in the process of testing a few at present, early experiments have been with Audioscrobler Apiand it seems to be the durable, stable and easy to configure.
I've also like Simon considered using Music Brains to acquire other web data, but I feel that this will maybe added in an later build, at present I'm dealing exclusively with audio and maybe some Amazon generated data.
Will keep you guys informed about the progress of this project, I hope to have something to show tomorrow evening depending on how tonights activities go.
If anyone else knows anything about this and can offer any helps and hints then feel free to comment or ping me an email.
