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Information: about Magnatune
Dashboard Widgets

Song of the Day

Changes every day to display the current song-of-the-day, so you can listen and download a new song, for free, every day.

Click here to download the "song of the day" dashboard widget. Only works on Mac OSX 10.4.0 and newer.

Magnatune for Small Screens

A miniature browser of the magnatune catalog, for small-screen devices that want to listen to our music (such as cell phones, palm and WinCE devices). There are several small-screen interfaces to Magnatune available at these urls:

  • http://magnatune.com/microbrowse/
  • http://magnatune.com/minibrowse/
  • http://magnatune.com/browse/

    This is also a handy music browser if you want to keep Magnatune up on the screen at all times in a small browser window.

    Magnatune Mini Browser

    A mini-browser of the magnatune library, which can be embedded on your own web pages:

    You can add the Magnatune Mini Browser to your site for example, to:

    1. Google Personalized Homepage
    2. Live.com
    3. Netvibes
    4. Pageflakes
    5. TypePad
    6. YouOS
    7. XIN
    The general idea is that someone browsing your web site, can also listen to magnatune music while they read.

    Or, if you have a personal home page you use as your "launch pad", you can put the "Magnatune Mini Browser" on your page, so you always can listen to Magnatune.

    If you're interested in having the Magnatune Mini Browser on your own web page, click here.

    Magnatune RSS feeds

    RSS feed to Buckman's Magnatune Blog
    http://blogs.magnatune.com/buckman/index.rdf

    Data Feeds in XML, CSV and SQL

    If you want to integrate Magnatune's Creative Commons' license music into your web site or application, these links will help you.

    All the 128k mp3s at Magnatune are licensed with the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, so that you may use these mp3s if you meet the Creative Commons license restrictions.

    For instance, Webjay helps people listen to and publish web playlists, while iRate radio is a collaborative filtering system for music. These are the kinds of things we at Magnatune love and want to promote.

    We only ask that you do not upload our MP3s to Kazaa, or other peer-to-peer services, as we don't consider them to be ethical businesses and do not want to support them. 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.

    • Song-by-song XML file. Every 128k mp3 at Magnatune described, with each mp3 file (ie, each song) fully described. This file is for uses that are more single-mp3 oriented. A simplified version of this file is also available.
      These files are also available in a number of compressed formats:
      Song-by-song XML file: zip, gzip, bzip2
      simplified version: zip, gzip, bzip2

    • Song-by-song MYSQL table dump. Every 128k mp3 at Magnatune described, with each mp3 file (ie, each song) fully described, loadable directly into your MYSQL database. Creates a "magnatune_song_info" table.

    • Song-by-song CSV file. Every 128k mp3 at Magnatune described, with each mp3 file (ie, each song) fully described, the comma-separated-value (CSV) format which imports directly into most database programs and Microsoft Excel.
      This file is also available in a number of compressed formats: zip, gzip, bzip2

    • Albums and songs XML file Every album and song described, with each song grouped into the album it belongs to. This provides more information, and is useful for uses that are more album oriented.
      This file is also available in a number of compressed formats: zip, gzip, bzip2

    To keep these downloads small, we reccomend using the bzip2 files if possible.

    Embedded Music Purchasing

    This url procedure allows your software to purchase music directly from magnatune, and receive all the download information back as an XML document. This is useful if you are embedding the Magnatune catalog inside your application, and would like to let people purchase music directly from within your application. If you so wish, your application can also download the purchased music on the person's behalf.

    Point your web browser toward:
    http://magnatune.com/buy/buy_dl_cc_xml

    or if you can support https: in your application:
    https://magnatune.com/buy/buy_dl_cc_xml

    an instruction document in XML will appear, displaying this help:

    The following fields are required:

    • sku= field, which is the album's sku code
    • amount= field, which is how much is being paid for this album in US Dollars
    • For a credit card charge:
      • cc= field, which is a Credit card number (VISA/MASTERCARD only)
      • yy= field, which is a two digit year of the credit card expiration date (zero padded)
      • mm= field, which is a two digit month of the credit card expiration date (zero padded)
    • For a Gift Card purchase:
      • gc= field, which is a Magnatune gift card number
    • name= field, which is the name of the buyer (if you want it to be blank, send "name=")
    • email= field, which is the email address of the buyer, so they can retrieve their purchases later if they lose the download info (if you want it to be blank, send "email=")
    • id= field, which is your partner id. Contact john to obtain one (there is no cost).
    Sample URL

    Memberships ( not yet launched )

    Magnatune.com offers 2 types of memberships that lets users enjoy aditional benefits. A 'stream' membership, lets users 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 aditional charge. While memberships has to be created at the Magnatune.com site, it is possible to use the memberships from other applications. The download membership also includes the benefits of the stream membership.

    Stream membership

    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 "http://he3.magnatune.com/all/03--Massassi%20Morning%20Star--Ishwish.mp3" to a valid stream mebership url, could look like this

    http://username:password@stream.magnatune.com/all/03--Massassi%20Morning%20Star--Ishwish_noospeech.mp3

    The steps neeed for this transformation are:

    • "http://he3" should be replaced with either "http://username:password@membership_type" or "http://membership_type"
    • ".mp3" or ".ogg" should be replaced with "_nospeech.mp3" or "_nospeech.ogg" respectively.

    Download membership

    To download albums without having to pay for each one uses an API very simmilar to the one for making credit card purchases. Both the request and the resulting xml reply are moddeled on the purchase API.

    To let a download member download an album for free, the following url should be used:
    http://_membership_type_.magnatune.com/buy/buy_dl_cc_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:

    • sku= field, which is the album's sku code
    • id= field, which is your partner id. Contact john to obtain one (there is no cost).
    This returns an xml reply that contains the download information for the different formats, simmilar to the reply from a purchase request.
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