how to...

[mysticmerlin07]

hey guys....i just had a quick question

i want to make a prog that allows the user to type in a band name...and then the program searches and retrieves a list of songs (or more specifically the entire album listing) from a site like amazon.com

sure this can be done manually but its very time consuming...so is there any way to go about doing this? I dont have much experience using any code to access the net...and in my advanced programming class we're starting Java and HTML...so i prob wont learn for a while

would i just use the internet explorer browser control thingy to let it access the net? how would i go about specifiying the site is uses to search? and how would i allow it just to display the text instead of the entire webpage?

thanks guys

[conipto]

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerwork...fTACT=105AGX75

Amazon has a web service you can query, but I would know nothing about it. It's run by IBM, from what I saw.

Bill

[jmcilhinney]

I'm no Web expert but I would think to do something like that you would need to consume a Web service from that site. If you knew the structure of their query strings you could construct a URL and send that, but you'd still just get back a Web page of results that you'd have to parse yourself. Either way these are not trivial exersises. If you do a Google search for +amazon +"web service" you'll get several hits about consuming the Amazon.com Web service.

[mysticmerlin07]

conipto...thank you for the link but that is compiling in JAVA (which as of this point i do not know...)

jmcilhinney thank you for the reply but you sorta confused me....

it seems that i might have confused you guys in my original post.....basically what i want to do is make a program with a simple search function.....and out of this search function it will search a webpage for those specific keywords...and display only those keywords .... i.e. if you type "AC/DC" into the prog it will search the specified page for AC/DC and display the relevant results...and i want to program this with VB or VB.NET....

[gigemboy]

www.freedb.org - this is a free web music database, found it when using Exact Audio Copy, which the prog uses to query the cd that you put in your comp in order to automatically grab the tracks to the albums....

[conipto]

Hmm, how about this starter project for .NET from Microsoft
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/ex...lt.aspx#amazon

It's for a movie collection, but it should give you the how-to for connecting to Amazon, and from there, some small amount of research should get you in the right direction..

Bill

[mysticmerlin07]

gigemboy thank you very much for that link.....i'll look into it and see if it works....hopefully if it does this will save me MUCH time renaming 400+ songs on my computer

conipto thank you again for the link...i will look into it ... will the code also work on VB6? (cuz i dont feel like installing .NET)...or will it work on the Visual Basic 2005 version as well?

see the thing is i havent gotten around to learning winsock at all....and noone has the patience (or the time it seems) to teach me....

thanks for the posts guys....i'll try working on the project and let you guys know how it went

[gigemboy]

Well.. as far as songs that are already on your comp, I don't believe that freedb would help, unless you use it just to manually look up the album and track info, because it uses the commercial cd's disk ID in order to look it up (at least in the case of the Exact Audio Copy)... and each album can also have multiple ids, depending on how many times they print a new batch... Popular albums can have 10 ids or more...

[mysticmerlin07]

ahh see thats the prob.....ok so instead of me making my own program.....is there any program commercially available that would basically rename ALL the songs on my comp? basically an ID3 tag editor but i need something user friendly (and hopefully open source so i can see how to make one)

but it looks like i should consult google before i ask.....ill let u guys know if i find anything good....thanks for your replies

[gigemboy]

Windows Media Player allows you to edit all your mp3 tags.... just add them to your library... and in your list, you can even select multiple mp3's and edit the same tag value for each of them... like 20 songs by "Elvis", you highlight them all, right click under artist, choose Elvis, then all 20 of your selected songs have "Elvis" as the artist..

Aint nothing in the world going to automatically go out and pull the correct name and artist for a random MP3 that you downloaded... all it has to go by is the time length of the song... cant go by filesize since mp3's have all sorts of different bitrates.. only way to do it is to pull it using the original source cd and write the tags found in a database when you rip it , which is the feature available in many audio ripping programs...

[mysticmerlin07]

oh...i see...heh well thanks for getting that idea out of my head...yea ive been using WMP a good bit but i honestly have TOOOOOO MANY songs! 500+ (not all downloaded)...a few i burned from my friends CD's and i label them as i rip them...like CD-EX lets you type in an artist and album field and when u rip it it creates it in that folder....

alright well ill hopefully find time during my 5 day thanksgiving break to do somethin or another .... thanks guy