BBC Audio & Music Interactive at Hackday

This is a comprehensive data set covering all appearances on and episodes of Top of the Tops until the year 2000. TOTP was a long-running chart countdown on BBC television. All tracks and artists featured are, where possible, linked to MusicBrainz.

This data is presented in a Rails application which is easily scrapeable. The application and the data are also available to download separately.

Code: Michael Smethurst
Thanks to: Rob Cooper and Kim Plowright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Top of the Pops application
Download data
Download code

2274 artists, 30 festive 50s and 3976 sessions.

This is a comprehensive data set covering all the Peel Sessions and all the Festive 50s from arguably the greatest radio DJ of all time, John Peel [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Peel].

This data is presented in a Ruby application which is easily scrapeable. The application and the data are also available to download separately.

Code: Michael Smethurst
Thanks to: The Peel family and Dan Heaf in Radio 1

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

John Peel application
Download data
Download application

We are providing a number of alternative mechanisms for finding out what track is now playing on our radio networks (see Clickable Tracklistings).

RSS feeds

RSS feeds

Last.fm feeds

Our now playing (and previously played) data is also on last.fm. Some of these feeds go back, intermittently, for 3 years.

BBC Radio 1 last.fm page
BBC Radio 2 last.fm page
BBC 1Xtra last.fm page
BBC 6 Music last.fm page

We've got some live feeds of approximately how many users are currently on our sites. They're based on Flash widgets that are on some of our pages so obviously they aren't completely accurate. Each feed is a small XML file with a timestamp and the current number of users, they are updated every 5 minutes.

Thanks to: Monterosa

All the feeds are here (note that some of these aren't in use):
The most accurate and useful feed is the Radio 1 homepage

LiveText is the live, updating, scrolling text featured on all our radio networks on DAB and digital TV. For Hackday we have created some JSON feeds for this data.

You can see LiveText in action here
This uses the JSON livetext feed from http://bbc-hackday.dyndns.org:8000/text/NETWORK

where NETWORK is "all", "dab", "rds", or a list of network numbers joined with "+", eg "101+201".

The DAB network numbers are:

• 101 BBC Radio 1
• 151 BBC 1Xtra
• 201 BBC Radio 2
• 301 BBC Radio 3
• 401 BBC Radio 4
• 471 BBC 7
• 501 BBC Radio 5 Live
• 551 BBC Five Live Sports Extra
• 601 BBC 6 Music
• 901 BBC Radio Scotland
• 1001 BBC World Service
• 1101 Asian Network

And the RDS network numbers are:

• 100 BBC Radio 1
• 200 BBC Radio 2
• 300 BBC Radio 3
• 400 BBC Radio 4
• 900 BBC Radio Scotland

The response will look like this:

([1181664133.3313041, [{'t': 'On air now: Scott Mills', 'n': 101}]])

or more generally:

([timestamp, [result, result, ...]])

Each "result" is a hash with two keys:

• n: the network number
• t: the text

If you append ?last=timestamp (where timestamp comes from an earlier result) the HTTP GET will hang until there's a new result.

You can also add a "callback" query value, like

http://developer.yahoo.com/common/json.html#callbackparam

which will prefix the result with the given string, eg

http://bbc-hackday.dyndns.org:8000/text/101?callback=foo

would give you something like:

foo([1181664133.1, [{'t': 'On air now: Scott Mills', 'n': 101}]])