CBC Radio 2 Concerts on Demand

CBC Radio 2 has an excellent Concerts on Demand feature on its website. Unfortunately it’s rendered as a set of web pages that makes easy browsing of the entire canon cumbersome, and because the links to tracks are trapped inside ASX files it’s harder for non-Windows users to get at the music itself (every time I tried to listen to a concert in Firefox on my Mac about 25 empty tabs would inexplicably spring open).

To help expose this resource to a wider audience, I’ve hacked together one big page that lists every concert and every track, in reverse chronological order.

This isn’t intended to be a pretty page, but rather a dead simple one. It’s intended to make using players like MPlayer and VideoLAN to listen to the concerts easier. It doesn’t actually do anything other than index the files on the CBC media server differently.

For the technically-minded among you, the key to the whole process is http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/cod/ajax.php, a handy URL that returns JSON about the concerts. It’s not optimized for use as an external API, so there’s some post-processing of the chunks of HTML table code that it returns, but the data is structured enough so that this isn’t arduous.