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XRT Playlist Generator: A Project I Thought Would Be Cool But Actually Wasn’t

Posted by Jonathan, December 18th, 2011

Back when I lived in Chicago, my favorite radio station was XRT. They played all the interesting, undiscovered bands. Sadly, all the radio stations in Iowa are owned by clear channel, so they only play the latest corporate-approved megastar. XRT’s website has a list of all the songs they’ve played in the last day. So I created a program which takes that list, finds those songs somewhere out on the internet, and generates a playlist of it all. To try it, paste the url http://www.jonathankoomjian.com/projects/xrt/playlist.m3u into your computer’s music player.

After I finished this project, I discovered XRT has gone all baby boomer on me – now they mostly play The Police and Natalie Merchant 🙁

The one saving grace of the whole endeavor is that sometimes the program gets random covers of the song it was aiming for. And it turns out the covers are way more interesting than the originals. Here are some of my favorites:

Hey Jude performed by a marching band:
http://anchorbaybands.org/music/Marching%20Band/CBML_HJ_BMBS_Live.mp3
The cranberries song in korean
http://lapulce.freeflux.net/files/audio/01-faye-wong-dream-person-cantonese-.mp3
Diana Ross sung by by 2 Japanese ladies who don’t know any English:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTvVMjnBePM

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