Nicholas Pike

Long story: My iPod touch notifies a website called Last.FM when I listen to music. If your not familiar with LastFM here’s a quick run down: Last.FM allows you to “scrobble” the names/artist of songs you listen to, and share this information with anyone an the internet. So if you go here you can see what music I have recently listened to on my iPod/computer.

So being the huge geek I am, I wrote a quick C# application that watches Last.FM for updates to my “Recently Played Tracks”, once it finds a change, it notifies me on my work desktop in a nice little bubble (see picture above).

The bubble is done with a program called Snarl, which aims to replicate GROWL functionality (an OSX notification subsystem) on Windows. (This is very hit or miss, mostly miss.)

So why did I do this? Too lazy to look at the iPod to see what the track names are ;-)

Below is the source code for the quick and dirty C# application, that makes use of external process launching to send messages to snarl, and WebClient to retrieve updates from Last.FM

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.IO; 

namespace snarl_lastfm_test
{
	class Program
	{
		/**
		 * Send a message to snarl
		 */
		public static void sendMessage(string title, string message) {
			//Sending message to snarl
			executeCommand("snarl_command.exe /M \""+title+"\" \""+message+"\" /T 10", 800);
		}

		/**
		 * Execute a command via cmd.exe
		 */
		 public static int executeCommand(string cmd, int millsecTimeOut) {
			    System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo processStartInfo =
			       new System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo("CMD.exe", "/C "+cmd);
			    processStartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
			    processStartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
			    System.Diagnostics.Process process =
			       System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(processStartInfo);
			    //wait for timeout before asking for return code
			    process.WaitForExit(millsecTimeOut);
			    int exitCode = process.ExitCode;
			    process.Close();

			    return exitCode;
 	}

		public static void Main(string[] args)
		{
			Console.WriteLine("Listening for last.fm updates...");

			string lastSong = "";
			while (true) {
				// check url for last played song
				// Address of URL
				string URL = "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/npike/recenttracks.txt";
				string str = "";
				WebClient client = null;
				try
				{
				// Get HTML data
				client = new WebClient();
				Stream data = client.OpenRead(URL);
				StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(data);

				str = reader.ReadLine();

				data.Close();
				}
				catch(WebException exp)
				{
				MessageBox.Show(exp.Message, "Exception");
				}

				// is last played song different then the last recorded one?
				// clean up last played song entry

				//1197581437,Puscifer – Rev 22'20 (Dry Martini Mix)

				if (str != null) {
					int pos = str.IndexOf(",");
					str = str.Substring(pos+1);

					// song is different, send snarl message and update
					if (lastSong != str) {
						lastSong = str;
						sendMessage("snarl_lastfm_test", "Just Listened To: "+lastSong);
						Console.WriteLine("    Song changed: "+lastSong);
					}
				} else {
					Console.WriteLine("   Null message received from Last.FM");
				}

				System.Console.WriteLine(System.DateTime.Now);
				System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(40000);
			}
		}
	}
}