I’ve been working on a side project called “SongBoxx” over the last few weeks. It’s a meta search engine that searches several of the cheapest music sites out there simultaneously and produces results that are easily sortable in your browser, so you can quickly find that track or album you’ve been looking for. Not only is it a time saver, but you can also find out about music sites that you might not have known even existed – and probably find any obscure track you can think of.

I’m hoping to improve the search results over the next few weeks and add more sites to the search engine. Currently it searches over 4,000,000,000 tracks, 300,000 albums, and 162,000 artists – by far the largest search of its kind. Those numbers will probably double over the next month or so.

My goal is to search as many sites as possible so that people can quickly locate exactly what they want without having to go to ten different places to find it. The way it works is simple: you type in what you want (artist name, album name, or track name) and then it searches all of the music sites at once, compares the results for duplicates, and puts the results into a sortable table. When you next click on an artist, for example, you get all of the albums (from all websites) related to that artist. If you then click on an album you get the tracklist, the album cover image, and a list of websites that have it and how much it costs at each website. You can follow the links from the album page directly to the store that sells it.

While developing SongBoxx I’ve had the pleasure of sharpening up some python skills, learning a bit about mod_python and apache interaction (specifically the unusual caching behavior that occurs), and basically the issues you have to deal with when developing a meta search engine. I also tried some simple AJAX bits for the first time ever. AJAX is actually a lot simpler than the hype makes it out to be, and it’s certainly nothing new.

Check the site out right here.