[station 8] vic’s mid-life crisis music

In our last installment, I embedded a playlist in the post through Apple Music. That playlist was the ninth of nine playlists created for a memorial service in 2013. I didn’t create the playlists, just the listenting stations. The listening stations still work but there hasn’t been a good way to recreate the experience and share it without dealing with a streaming service that’s probably also not long for this world.

When I surveyed the landscape in 2014, Rdio seemed like it had the best API. They promptly went out of business. Today we’ll try YouTube. Here’s the simplest example of the youtube embedded player. You’ll probably have to watch an ad before it plays — acceptable here in a way that would not have been for the actual memorial service. This way we leave it to Liberty Mutual or whoever to sponsor our remembrance of Vic.

An embedded player seems like an opaque blob, but it turns out that the early-to-middle web was built by some programmers who thought about things like this. It’s the real object oriented future you were promised. We can totally script that thing with HTML5 postMessage. Not only that, there is documentation. I don’t know if you remember what documentation was like but it was basically like StackExchange where all the questions you were going to ask were already answered and then organized together into a kind of a document. Kind of like Terminator, where the AI travels back into the past to prevent something bad from happening, like you being confused about an API or the modern savior of humanity being born.

Here’s a version of the embedded player for the same playlist created with the API (and without any developer account). The simple buttons should do simple things by scripting the subordinate iframe.

We pay a price here for the ability to create these easy, scriptable players — we had to load a lump of code from Google into our frame. That’s not the future we were promised. So what’s in there, anyway? We’ll look at that in the next playlist.