gently

I complained too loudly in the last installment about the difficulty of mashing up web audio in static pages. Ian Gilman got me back on track with the simple Rdio player hosted on his site. That page uses the Rdio API without unwelcome branding. It also works in Safari and Mobile Safari without Flash!

Ian has got another project, Fathom, that I haven't really looked at. I did notice that he has a link to still another project, Anthm, on his blog. You'll simply have to forgive these hipsters their vowel blindness.

Anthm has since been renamed Jukio. A fitting vowel penance.

In Douglas Adams' post-Hitchhiker's novel 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency', Fathom is the name of Michael Wenton-Weakes' loss-making magazine. Good name for a startup project. Anthem also appears in Dirk as a fabulous new form of spreadsheet software that converts ledgers to music. This modern version of Anthem hopefully does just the opposite. Are Fathom and Anthm secretly related? Stay tuned for next week's installment of 'Least Interesting Internet Conspiracy Theory'.

I tried copying Ian's simple app into my Google Drive storage and using my OAUTH 1.0 developer credential. No dice. The default credentials handed out by Rdio don't allow use of this Flashless API.

I complained that API users would resort to hosting to protect a secret key needed for accessing the API. That's true for Grooveshark, but not for Rdio. Rdio application keys do come with some limits (10 requests per second, 15000 per day) and several web apps leave the necessary client app credential embedded directly in the page they furnish to end users. This is the intended design, but this is not smart. It takes only one mean spirited soul to consume the entire resource grant that you got from Rdio.

I requested access to the beta program for the flashless API and I got a credential, from Ian, less than a day later. Thanks, Rdio! It took me about an hour to port an existing HTML5 audio web app to the Rdio interface. I was able to turn around and have the whole app running out of Google Drive moments later. This porting is unnecessary for my own use, but essential for sharing the app.

I promised to not make any public comments about the beta API and I can comply happily. I like it just fine, but I'm not done complaining about the authentication.

I take no position on the merits of OAUTH, Rdio's choice, as an authentication protocol. If you want to be on the right side of history, you should probably get on board with same sex marriage, the end of capital punishment, the metric system, Major Leauge Soccer and Dippin Dots. You would probably also be on the right side of history if you said that the OAUTH protocol schemes, like most protocols built on Earth, are irretrievably broken. That's not my problem.

My problem with the authentication is that the supporting machinery is far out of scale for a system that protects essentially no secrets or valuable treasures. A Rdio membership that lets you listen to as much as you want on an iPad costs $9.99 per month. If I listen for four hours a day and an average track lasts three minutes, then a track play is worth about four tenths of a cent. I don't know if this is a fair price for music or not. I do think that it's close to that long-ago ideal for nuclear electric power -- too cheap to meter. Why do I need an API key at all?

I don't need access to your Rdio playlists or account information to let you check out a little mashup that plays Flaming Lips' 'Fight Test' and Cat Stevens' 'Father and Son' back to back. I don't need to know who you are. I don't need to know if you're paid up with all the right people. I just need a way to give you an indirect pointer to some tunes that you can decide to pay for or not. I don't need you to get my mashup from my site. I would be happy for you to get my wares as Free Software capable of working out of the box with nothing but your existing streaming account.

Some writers favor 'one' over 'you'. Here's the rule at reograph: if a piece of prescriptive guidance is intended for a reasonable person, then we use 'you'. You should eat leafy green vegetables, drink lots of water, and read reograph. If guidance is for an unreasonable person, then we use 'one'. If one must set off in one's hovercraft, then one simply must! The guidance for 'you' at reograph is often actually meant for me. If you are looking for a shareable audio service, try to find one that will let you use the service without requiring a separate, discretionary API credential grant.

I haven't found this perfect service yet. I'm picking on Rdio an awful lot but they are as close to right as I can find. They seem to have the first system worth programming at all. If you unspooled an entire Maxell XLII-S CrO2 cassette tape, it wouldn't be long enough to reach from Rdio back to their next most programmable competitor.

Much of what Rdio lacks is beyond their API to provide. Their terms of service specifically forbid you, as a developer, from building a web page that lets a user arrange a slide show with music. Connecting the 'The Wizard of Oz' with 'The Dark Side of the Moon' is right out. That would be tricky anyway. Netflix dropped Wizard and seem to have discontinued their API for all but those able to fill shipping containers with cheap set top boxes and related Christmas cheer. I bet the guys at Rdio HQ find the terms imposed on them by Big Media as silly as I find the 'no slideshow' rule.

Before I get a lot of helpful comments highlighting my total ignorance of the fine points of copyright mining -- derivitave works, mechanical rights, and so on -- I thought I'd bring up the case of CleanFlicks. CleanFlicks bought commercial DVDs and produced edited copies that carefully trimmed sex and foul language away from violent movies. That's copyright no-no.

Rival firm ClearPlay runs a similar racket but they keep their play in-bounds. ClearPlay doesn't distribute movies. They distribute patch files for movies that consenting adults can apply the privacy of their own homes. ClearPlay's edit list appears comprehensive for this summer's 'Man of Steel'. It mutes all fifteen profanities while leaving the rest of the violent masterpiece almost untouched. ClearPlay's 'Lawrence of Arabia' Lawrence is merely flamboyant. I looked for ClearPlay versions of 'Brokeback Mountain'. I got no results except a quote at the bottom 'I find your lack of faith disturbing -- Darth Vader'. Brokeback won the Academy Award for best director. I searched for 'Baraka' and I got the quote 'You must unlearn what you have learned -- Yoda'. I believe that enough searches for troublesome films on their site could reveal the entire hidden George Lucas plan to draw you back to Christ. ClearPlay's site preserves the Vader quote above but their edit list for Star Wars elides the accompanying throttling. I have no idea if Han shoots first in their version.

If ClearPlay can do this, then is a web page that mashes up a song and a picture really such a threat to Western civilization? Is it about 'irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression' -- the argument made against CleanFlicks -- or is it about money?

I also complained recently about the Blogsy blogger app for iOS. It spammed an earlier post of mine with a useless 'Posted with Blogsy' footer. Blogsy can be brought to heel and the footer removed. Irritating but reversible. I think I understand the confusion. Apple has inserted a footer in iOS email for six years. The difference is that the Apple footer is offered to recipients as a kind of apology -- meaning 'the above message is short, composed while driving, and full of hilarious auto-correct substitutions'. I recall that BlackBerries offer a similar apology by default. Blogsy doesn't really have that much to apologize for and so the footer is unnecessary.