88nine

88nine Radio Milwaukee

A node library for interacting with 88nine Radio Milwaukee.

npm install --save 88nine

How do I use it?

As a Node.js Module

const {PlaylistStream} = require('88nine')

// create a stream that checks for a new song once every 60 seconds (60,000ms)
var stream = new PlaylistStream(60000)

// this function will be called whenever the stream has data to be read. In this
// case, that's whenever a new song is played.
stream.on('data', (song) => {
  // song is something like:
  // {
  //   album: 'Illinois',
  //   artist: 'Sufjan Stevens',
  //   duration: 520, // the duraiton in seconds
  //   playedAt: new Date('2018-06-11T20:22:11.000Z'),
  //   title: 'Casimir Pulaski Day',
  // }
})

// you can destroy it when you're done using the stream, if you want
stream.destroy()

As a CLI

88nine also includes a simple CLI, which will be available in your shell as 88nine if the module was installed using --global.

$ 88nine --help
usage: 88nine [-h] [-v] [-n INTERVAL]

Library for interacting with 88nine Radio Milwaukee

Optional arguments:
  -h, --help            Show this help message and exit.
  -v, --version         Show program's version number and exit.
  -n INTERVAL, --interval INTERVAL
                        Seconds to wait between updates. Defaults to 60
                        seconds.

When run, it will print out each song that it finds to STDOUT, as they are played on the radio. This will continue running until you kill it. Songs are formatted as newline-delimited JSON.

$ 88nine -n 30
{"album":"Little Neon Limelight","artist":"Houndmouth","duration":202,"playedAt":"2018-06-19T18:00:02.000Z","title":"Say It"}
{"album":"The Hanged Man","artist":"Ted Leo","duration":199,"playedAt":"2018-06-19T18:03:26.000Z","title":"Can't Go Back"}
{"album":"Critical Equation","artist":"Dr. Dog","duration":207,"playedAt":"2018-06-19T18:06:45.000Z","title":"Go Out Fighting"}

Incorrect Songs

We pull data from an XML feed at https://s3.amazonaws.com/radiomilwaukee-playlist/WYMSHIS.XML which is supposed to contain the last 100 songs. So, this package is designed with a streaming interface that would write out the full 100 song history as soon as you start the stream, and then gradually write out songs as they are being played & added to the the XML feed.

However, that's not possible because, as of right now (2018-06-11), the XML feed will return a large number of incorrect songs. These songs are real songs with all the information that you would expect, but they have not actually been played on the radio at the specified times. As far as I can tell, there is no information in the song data that can be used to distinguish these incorrect songs from the songs that do get played.

Even the playedAt times and duration fields of incorrect songs will often match up with a realistic schedule. Attempting to filter out incorrect songs by constructing a schedule and fitting songs in based on their reported start and end times will not work. Based on the reported playedAt times and duration fields, correct songs can overlap by up to 10 seconds and can be separated by gaps of several minutes (for advertising blocks). Given these constraints, incorrect songs still fit into the resulting schedule.

The WYMSHIS.XML feed is updated regularly and it seems like each time it is updated, the first song in the list is the song currently being played, or the last song that was played, followed by 0 or more songs that have not been played. Reading only the first song is the most reliable way of getting correct songs that I have found. Sadly, this means that nothing in the WYMSHIS.XML file, past the first song, can be trusted.

Until this is fixed, the stream won't return any history, it will only contain songs that have been played directly before or shortly after the stream was started.