[Banshee-List] Simple Magnatune Addin

["Max Battcher" <me worldmaker net>]

Greetings!

I'm a C# developer and as a quick diversion/learning experience I
hacked together a very simple Magnatune "radio" addin, as a fan of
both Banshee and Magnatune (the "not evil" internet-based music
label).  This addin provides a simple "branded" source that lists the
various genres at Magnatune and initiates a stream.  It also includes
the key feature that it is "Magnatune membership aware" and it has the
code to use the nicer ad-less versions of streams when a membership
login is provided.  (Which doesn't work yet, see below.)  This has
been a very quick hack (spare time over 2-days with a lot of time
spent hunting for answers in code and in the chat room) for me, and
coming in to it I didn't have much experience with things like Gtk#.
(Much of this has been built from examining and borrowing code from
the Podcasting and Last.fm addins.)

Here's a screenshot of how it looks:

http://ox.slug.louisville.edu/~mjbatt01/banshee_addin.png

Right now anyone interested in trying it can grab it in source form
(MonoDevelop solution):

darcs get http://repos.worldmaker.net/magnatune/main/ magnatune

My Patch/Issue tracker is at http://magnatune.code.worldmaker.net/

I can create a Release build of the .dll shortly if anyone just wants
a binary to play with.

I learned several things about Banshee Streaming in the course of this:

* There seems to be no way to seek through a stream currently.  (I'm
assuming a Stream Playlist Queue is in the works...?)
* Banshee refuses to load stream playlists with URIs of the form
http://user:pass server/play.m3u, which means that this addin's
membership awareness is currently for naught since Banshee won't
actually play member streams

This addin is only the first phase in a "full" Magnatune addin.  The
next step would be to add in a full database-backed source (pulling
from the XML feed from Magnatune) to do a full catalog browser of
Magnatune with support for album browsing/searching and "Buy Album"
and "Download Album" (for Magnatune "Download Members") actions.
Right now I'm not planning to build such a thing myself, but this
addin should provide a reasonable stepping stone to someone interested
in doing that.  On the other hand, I might pick up the challenge the
next chance I get something of a "hack week".

Anyway, I'd appreciate any feedback or patches that y'all might have.

Regards,

-- 
--Max Battcher--
http://www.worldmaker.net/