iTunes store

[arthurgiroux]

get the data from iTunes

Assignees :

• Abdessalam
• Amine

[abdessalam-ouaazki]

Unfortunately, we did not find a ready dataset for iTunes, but here is what we found:

iTunes API provides webservices that allow users to lookup terms by sending Http requests precising a term to search for. You can try "https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=rihanna" on your browser to get a primary idea about the API.

Each API call returns a Json object that contains exactly 50 results, which is not good for us, as we will be receiving only 50 results for each query we make, and hence we need a huge number of queries to gather a reasonably big dataset for the project.

Amine and I are trying to find a dataset with the names of artists, albums, songs, etc, and iterate on it, sending each time a request to iTunes services and storing the responses. This seems a plausible solution to gather datasets. However, it may take a lot of time to gather data with a size of the magnitude we want.

We will start on this track and by tomorrow, we will have a rough idea about the feasibility of this approach.

Please let us know what you think about this.

[micaste]

Hum, before doing all that, can you try to look it we can gather relevant data from that API ? Because in the result I had from the query, I think I only saw informations about the song (maybe am I mistaken), but no information that might interest us, social features like the popularity, number of comments, rating, etc…

On Mar 15, 2014, at 20:46, Abdessalam Ouaazki notifications@github.com wrote:

Unfortunately, we did not find a ready dataset for iTunes, but here is what we found:

iTunes API provides webservices that allow users to lookup terms by sending Http requests precising a term to search for. You can try "https://itunes.apple.com/search?term=rihanna" on your browser to get a primary idea about the API.

Each API call returns a Json object that contains exactly 50 results, which is not good for us, as we will be receiving only 50 results for each query we make, and hence we need a huge number of queries to gather a reasonably big dataset for the project.

Amine and I are trying to find a dataset with the names of artists, albums, songs, etc, and iterate on it, sending each time a request to iTunes services and storing the responses. This seems a plausible solution to gather datasets. However, it may take a lot of time to gather data with a size of the magnitude we want.

We will start on this track and by tomorrow, we will have a rough idea about the feasibility of this approach.

Please let us know what you think about this.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[abdessalam-ouaazki]

Unfortunately, those are the only elements we can get from the API, as stated in this iTUnes web service search API: http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentation/itunes-store-web-service-search-api.html

We'll do more research on if we can get more data (or not).

[micaste]

Ok. I might be a no go for iTunes then.. :(

On Mar 15, 2014, at 21:01, Abdessalam Ouaazki notifications@github.com wrote:

Unfortunately, those are the only elements we can get from the API, as stated in this iTUnes web service search API: http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentation/itunes-store-web-service-search-api.html

We'll do more research on if we can get more data (or not).

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[valentinmatter]

Maybe you can take a look at last fm instead (http://www.lastfm.fr/api/intro)