The second primary step in
putting my iTunes Library Online was to add album cover art and a link to the album's details page on Amazon. Linking to iTunes wasn't going to happen because Apple provides no API to iTunes and even if I were to link to the album in iTunes I wasn't about to force visitors to have the iTunes client installed as Apple mandates. No, I'd stick with Amazon's Open Services Model, thank you.
...which was the second interesting aspect of putting my iTunes Library Online: using Amazon's Web Services. I hadn't yet used Amazon Web Services and wanted an excuse to use them. (The first interesting aspect of this project was putting the iTunes Library.XML into SQL Server,
described here.) There are several very useful packages out there to help you get started using AMZN Web Services in .NET, primary among them is
AmazonECS.NET. I loaded up AmazonECS.NET in VS2005. It worked beautifully and there was much to explore. But I wanted to spend some quality time with Roy Osherove's
Amazoner VS2005 Windows Forms application, which is what I ended-up using to add the album cover and link to the album's details page in my
online iTunes Library.
Roy's VB.NET code was a pleasure to use. I really liked how Roy used VS2005's DataBindingSource to an ItemResult Class, the object holding the returned query from the Amazon Web Service. A good snapshot of the datagrid BindingSource-to-ItemResult object is in
this debugging screenshot.
The Amazoner captures book data only, and only to the clipboard, so I modified the app to search and capture album data both by album name and by ASIN. To pull the images from Amazon and dynamically build the links from the album record, I added a "Save to Database" menu option. I customized the app slightly with a bit of DBVT salt-n-pepper and added
a fun image I blogged about recently, but since the Amazoner was so well designed by Roy my modifications were easy to make.
I'll be firing up my DBVT version of Roy's Amazoner to add the album artist, title, Amazon image URL and details page link for any new albums I add to my iTunes library in the future. The process should take around 23 seconds per album with the Amazoner mod. Here's my
mod source to Roy's excellent Amazoner app supporting search by Album and ASIN and to save to SQL Server.
Technorati Tags: Amazon, iTunes