RadioKit

Retrieve radio stations last played tracks with RadioKit.

Installation

Simply drag RadioKit folder into your project source folder.

Dependencies

• XMLDictionary (https://github.com/nicklockwood/XMLDictionary)
• AFNetworking (https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking)

Initial step - determine all necessary informations

In order to query last played tracks for a given radio station, you will have to identify mandatory informations such as :

• the request URL
• the HTTP response format (usually JSON or XML)
• the response artist and title key-path (this part will be explain below)
• the track order (last played track is on top or bottom of the HTTP response)

In mostly all radio stations website, you can find a module telling you which track is currently playing. By analyzing HTTP request (with Firebug for example), you could easily retrieve the HTTP request URL for this module.

Once you have found it, you will have to analyze the HTTP response. Example :

curl http://www.voltage.fr/rcs/playing.xml
<xml>
	<info>
		<artiste>EMINEM</artiste>
		<chanson>Rap God</chanson>
	</info>
</xml>

With that, you should be able to deduce the artist key-path which is info.artiste and the title key-path which is info.chanson in this case (xml root element is ignored by RadioKit). You should also easily deduce the track order by comparing the response with the web module output.

Requesting last played tracks with RadioKit

Now you have gathered all you need, you can start using RadioKit by creating a ROKRadio object using the following method :

+ (instancetype)radioWithRequestURL:(NSString *)requestURL
                     responseFormat:(ROKRequestResponseFormat)responseFormat
                         trackOrder:(ROKRadioTrackOrder)trackOrder
                       titleKeyPath:(NSString *)titleKeyPath
                      artistKeyPath:(NSString *)artistKeyPath;

Then, simply use the following method to fetch last played tracks :

- (void)lastTracks:(ROKRadioLastTracksBlock)completion;

Results will be send as a block parameter and will be an array of ROKTrack objects. Example :

ROKRadio *voltage = [ROKRadio radioWithRequestURL:@"http://www.voltage.fr/rcs/playing.xml"
                                   responseFormat:ROKRequestResponseFormatXML
                                       trackOrder:ROKRadioTrackOrderAsc
                                     titleKeyPath:@"info.chanson"
                                    artistKeyPath:@"info.artiste"];
[voltage lastTracks:^(ROKRequest *request, NSArray *tracks, NSError *error) {
    NSLog(@"%@", request);
    NSLog(@"%@", tracks);
    NSLog(@"%@", error);
}];

NB : Behind the scene, ROKRadio works with a ROKRequest object which is the real one performing requests.

Object mapping

RadioKit provides you the capability to specify custom objects type as your query results. You only have to set the mappingClass property of a ROKRadio object. The only condition is that your custom class conforms to the ROKTrack protocol. Setting mappingClass property of a ROKRadio object is actually a proxy and will set the mappingClass of the backed ROKRequest object.

Track comparison

ROKTrack class provides methods to compare track using the Levenshtein algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance). ROKTrack comparison methods need a 85% of matching in order to consider two tracks as the same.

- (BOOL)compareTrackWithTitle:(NSString *)title artist:(NSString *)artist;
- (BOOL)compareTrack:(ROKTrack *)track;

Release notes

Version 1.0

• Initial release