iTMS link generator API

I set about looking for an API that utilizes the iTunes Music Store link maker, thinking they would be all over the place (deep links that is, and includes referral program ids). Five minutes of half-hearted googling didn't get me anywhere I needed to be, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. (Note: either I am a crappy googler, or the Apple legal team keeps these things off the air. Seriously, this code must have already been written 10 or 12 times now.)

A bit of poking around revealed that Apple (edgesuite, linkshare, linksynergy, whoever!) uses GET for their search forms. This makes writing a scraper API as complicated as parsing HTML, which is pretty easy in this day and age. I decided to use python, because I'm learning it by forcing myself to use it for all my extra-curricular projects.

I've released the source code under the code section at my website. The license is, uh... liberal. So don't be afraid to use it if you find it useful. It depends on the excellent BeautifulSoup library to do the heavy HTML lifting.

Here is some iTunes deep-linky goodness for you. These are the top 5 most played songs in my library. Buy them:
1. New Slang, by The Shins
2. Valley Winter Song, by Fountains of Wayne
3. Dreams Anymore, by The Magnetic Fields
4. Trust, by Gravenhurst
5. Saint Simon, by The Shins

BTW, I've resurrected Tagfriendly as the mp3 blog aggregator I've been working on, soon to have iTMS referral links. It isn't much, but I'm adding features all the time.

(Tagfriendly was, at one time, an automatic ID3 editing tool I created that mostly worked.)