Shortly after I joined the VS Languages team, we had a morale event that included a Rock Band tournament. I didn’t play that day in the tournament since I had never played before, but I was hooked just the same. I got Rock Band for my birthday, Rock Band 2 shortly after it came out in September and I’m hoping to get the AC/DC Track Pack for Christmas.
There are lots of songs available for Rock Band – 461 currently available between on-disc and downloadable tracks – with more added every week. Frankly, there’s lots of music on that list that I don’t recognize. Luckily, I’m also a Zune Pass subscriber, so I can go out and download all the Rock Band tracks and listen to them on my Zune. But who has time to manually search for 461 songs? Not me. So I wrote a little Python app to download the list of Rock Band songs and save it as a Zune playlist.
I ended up use Linq to XML very heavily in this project. Zune playlists use the same XML format as Windows playlists, Zune exposes the backend music catalog via a Atom feeds and I used Chris Lovett’s SgmlReader to expose the HTML list of Rock Band songs as XML. I realize Linq to XML wasn’t on “the list”, but I had a specific need so it got bumped to the head of the line.
BTW, for those who just want the playlist, I stuck it on my Skydrive. Unfortunately, there’s no Skydrive API right now, so I can’t automate uploading the new playlist every week. If anyone has alternative suggestions or a way to programmatically upload files to SkyDrive, let me know.