Developer Toby Padilla was one of the first to defend music content resolver Playdar when it was released to developers. Since then Padilla has contributed more than just his morale support. The former VP of Desktop and Client Software at Last.fm has since built Playgrub - a bookmarklet that scrapes supported sites for music metadata in order to create playlists.
View Full Screen Padilla's Playgrub is one of the missing pieces in the Playdar puzzle. In early November we wrote about Playdar - a project created by former Last.fm founder Richard Jones and XSPF music playlist format creator Lucas Gonze. Rather than automatically playing a music file via a streaming service, Playdar finds matching local files and plays those first. From there you can listen to music through Playdar-based players including Playlick and Spiffdar. The piece between finding the music and playing it, is Padilla's Playgrub. By installing the Playgrub bookmarking tool, users can create playlists from listed songs on Last.fm, Songkick, the iTunes charts, MusicBrainz and Grooveshark. While many would question the legality of Playgrub, the service does not scrape music from these sites, just the lists. From here Playdar detects any files that exist on your local hard drive and you're free to play the songs you own in the order listed on your favorite music site. While so many services concentrate on serving and selling new music to listeners, Playgrub is helping us set the tone with our own rediscovered tracks. To test Playgrub, install the bookmarklet and check playdar.com/download to install the universal content resolver.