Title: I collect records. I rarely buy anything blindly by name or label; I like to discover new stuff by listening to it first. I usually do this by spending hours in grimy bins with a record player but I also found that sometimes Ebay sellers post sound clips of their records. Specifically, what I noticed is that sellers are more inclined to make the effort of posting a sound clip if the record is rare -- i.e. you can&#x27;t find a clip elsewhere -- and the record sounds really interesting. It helps them make a sale.<p>So I made an Ebay API spider that gets all the sound clips and record release data. It&#x27;s been running like a dream since 2007 and I currently have 89,830 sound clips of rare records (probably some dupes in there). I used to watch the feed all the time but I kept finding really cool records and was spending a lot of money! I got busy. I had a good test suite so anytime there was a Unicode error or some bug I patched it pretty quick.<p>I steadily accumulated a pretty amazing collection of sound clips seeded by these search terms: soul, funk, reggae, ska, country, breaks, disco, psych, afrobeat, jazz, rocksteady, garage, indie, library (as in library music), new wave, electronic, brazilian, and boogie.<p>I made a frontend for listening to clips all Ajaxy-like and got it working on mobile phones and major browsers. I was sort of happy with it but ran into some database bottlenecks and got busy again so I never launched it. It was too slow to be usable.<p>What should I do? I don&#x27;t really have time or money to finish it out but I&#x27;d like people to use it to discover music. Since the clips are short and will link to music for purchase, either MP3 (if it exists) or original vinyl on Ebay&#x2F;Discogs, there shouldn&#x27;t be any copyright problems. It&#x27;s fair use to promote music for sale with a clip.<p>You can comment here or reach me by email: kumar.mcmillan@gmail.com
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