Data Feeds in XML, CSV and SQL

If you want to integrate Magnatune's Creative Commons' by-nc-sa v1.0 licensed music into your web site or application, these links will help you.

WE HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU USE THIS SQLITE DATABASE for your data feed, as the others are all being fazed out and do not have all the metadata that this database file has.

If you're wondering how we'd feel about a specific use of Magnatune's music, feel free to contact us and tell us your thoughts.

Below are the data feeds which can help you. These are continuously updated with the latest data. Contact us if you need something special; we're happy to oblige. To keep these downloads small, we reccomend using the bzip2 files if possible.

Memberships

Magnatune.com offers memberships that lets users enjoy additional benefits. Users can stream the entire Magnatune.com catalog with no speaker interruption at the end at each track and listen to ogg streams in higher quality. The download membership lets users download an unlimited amount of albums at no additional charge. While memberships has to be created at the Magnatune.com site, it is possible to use the memberships from other applications.

To play a membership stream with no speaker interruption, the standard stream url should be modified to point at the correct membership sub-site. Authentication can either be handleded by imnbedding the membership username and password in the url, or by handeling sessions. Also, all speechless streams has _nospeech appended to the filename.

for instance, to transform the url
/all/03--Massassi%20Morning%20Star--Ishwish.mp3"

to a valid stream membership url, could look like this

/all/03--Massassi%20Morning%20Star--Ishwish_nospeech.mp3

The steps neeed for this transformation are:

  • "this server" should be replaced with "your member login on this server". If your programming language's HTTP API doesn't support inline username/passwords in the URL, consult your HTTP API document for how to do HTTP AUTH queries.
  • ".mp3" or ".ogg" should be replaced with "_nospeech.mp3" or "_nospeech.ogg" respectively.
To download albums without having to pay for each one uses an API very similar to the one for making credit card purchases. Both the request and the resulting xml reply are modelled on the purchase API.

To let a download member download an album for free, the following url should be used:
/buy/membership_free_dl_xml

This is a password protected url, so either you will need to handle logging in or pass the username and password in the url.

The following fields are required:

This returns an xml reply that contains the download information for the different formats, simmilar to the reply from a purchase request.

As an example, this i how this url is constructed in Amarok 2:

QString purchaseURL = "http://" + username + ":" + password + "@" + membershipType + ".magnatune.com/buy/membership_free_dl_xml?sku=" + m_currentAlbum->albumCode() + "&id=myId";

Detecting new releases

To detect whether we have any new releases, please download this file:

/info/changed.txt

The changed.txt file contains a single number, which is a CRC of all our releases. When that number changes, this means that all the other data feeds also have new data. You can check this changed.txt file as often as you like, but we recommend no more frequently than every 24h.

Embedded Music Purchasing

Music Purchasing through the API is no longer supported. Apologies for this, but our VISA credit card processor really didn't like this, as it was thoroughly NOT "PCI Compliant" for us to allow this.