August 4, 2005

Audio Search

I'm thrilled to announce the launch of APIs for our new Audio Search platform. Not just because it's another API for you folks to play with, but also because it's the first API we designed independently from what the interface designers did with the frontend pages. That's right -- you can do things with the API that you can't do on the audio search pages, as you're going directly to the data layer.

We built this to be a structured search, and the names of the primary functions - artistSearch, albumSearch, songSearch - both indicate the type of data you'll be getting back from that search and suggest a logical progression from the most general information to more specific details. Your options for searching become much more flexible as you move down the chain. For example, when doing an artist search, you can only search by string (e.g. 'madonna') and artist ID. By the time you get to songSearch, you can search by artist ID, artist string, album ID, album string, song ID or song string, or any combination of them.

Once you've narrowed down the song you want, songDownloadLocation will show you where to find it online, including which major song services have it available. podcastSearch lets you go hunting on the web for audio podcast files.

I'm just scratching the surface of what these APIs can do (think thumbnails, tracklists, consistent artist/album/song ids among other items), so head over to the documentation pages and... give them a spin.

Toby Elliott
Yahoo! Webservices

Posted at August 4, 2005 11:30 AM

Comments

Posted by: 杨飞 at August 7, 2005 8:43 PM

Posted by: Alex Choo at August 7, 2005 9:55 PM