Normaliser v2 in production

26 August 2009 | Matt Perdeaux | Mashups, Technology & applications

After months of neglect, we've finally got round to working on an update to our last.fm normaliser application. We've decided to build the whole thing from the ground up using Python/Django, our new favourite toys. Version two will hopefully include the following improvements:

Proper unicode support.
The ability to find artists & albums that have a blank Musicbrainz ID in last.fm. This will involve users doing an additional search for each artist, but it should vastly improve most people's charts. We will try to make the search process as easy as possible (see screenshots below).
A whizzy new design using gig photos from Flickr.
Updated XML format to mirror v2 of last.fm's data feeds (we will keep the older XML versions available on the same URL).
Hopefully, some form of export code that will allow charts to be shown on user blogs, etc.
We're still scratching our heads trying to think of ways we can make a few quid out of all the work we're putting into this...

Anyway, some work in progress screenshots below.

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