Portfolio Assignment 3

Team 5's Last.fm recommendation system is written in C#, and presents a Windows Forms-based front-end for a few useful functions of the Last.fm API. The application lets the user execute three different searches: search for an artist, list albums by an artist, and get similar artists.

(All Lastfm objects and methods mentioned are in the Lastfm.Services namespace.)

The user types the name of an artist and selects "List Artist", "List Album", or "Recommend Artist" from a drop down box. Search results are displayed in the box below.

List Artist performs an ArtistSearch with the user's text as a query, gets the first page of results, represented as a collection of Artist objects, and iterates through them to print a list of artists whose names match the user's input.

List Album, which uses an AlbumSearch to get Album objects, produces a list of the most popular albums by a particular artist (like the artist search, it only lists the first page, so it might not return all of an artist's albums), in order.

Recommend Artist takes an artist's name as input, performs an ArtistSearch and gets the first result to get the Artist object representing that artist, then uses Artist.GetSimilar to list the most similar artists to that artist.

Each search displays a list of artist or album names, but allows the user to access more information using an embedded web browser. If the user double-clicks on an artist result, the artist's name is used to generate an Artist object, then an ArtistBio. Then the "Web Results" tab is selected and navigates to the appropriate page using ArtistBio.GetURL. Double-clicking on an album result (which take the form " - ") splits the result string into the artist name and the album name, gets the Artist by that name, then gets the Album by that artist with the appropriate name, then calls Ablum.GetURL and sends the user to the track listing for that album.


Example:

Suppose I'm looking for recommendations, so I enter in an artist I like -- let's use Iron Maiden -- and select "Recommended Artist":




















The most similar artist I'm not very familiar with is Saxon. I'll search for their most popular albums:




















If I double-click the most popular album listed, I can get a track listing for "Denim And Leather":

So, using this application, I can go from an artist I like to a list of songs I might be interested in.