Script to use the lastFM API
Written by: Hubert Léveillé Gauvin
Date: 27 December 2017, last revised: 29 December 2017

To use the lastFM API, you first need to create an API account at:

https://www.last.fm/api/account/create

Use your regular lastFM username and password to create your developper app. The app can be called anything.

Open ./lastfmAPI.sh and modify the file by entering your lastFM developper information, including your lastFM API key. You can also modify default options, like the the page number to fetch, the number of results per page, and the format (json or xml). Once this is done, save the file.

Make lastfmAPI.sh executable

chmod +x ./lastfmAPI.sh

Every time you use this script, your client key is used to send a request to the lastFM API. This is done silently but can sometimes take a few seconds.

Choose one of the API methods and enter the required information as prompted. For more information about the different methods, visit: https://www.last.fm/api

The MORE option allows you to manually enter a URL. This can be useful if the method your are looking for is not available from the list, want to search using mbid, or if you want to momentarily change the format rom json to xml (or vice versa).

The results of your last query are automatically saved in a file called lastOutput.json or lastOutput.xml. To retrieve specific info from your last query, you can use cat lastOutput.json | jq '<YOURCOMMAND>' , or cat lastOutput.xml

Example:

cat lastOutput.json | jq '.tempo'

For more info about jq, visit: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/

1. Create a csv file with songs and artists based on a tag

  method=tag.getTopTracks
  tag=Disco
  
  jq '.tracks.track | .[] | [.name, .artist.name] | @csv' lastOutput.json | sed 's/^"//g' | sed 's/"$//g' | sed s'/\\//g'

2. Create a csv with the most popular tags and their count for for a specific song

	method=track.getTopTags
	artist=The Beatles
	track=Michelle

	jq '.toptags.tag | .[] | [.name, .count] | @csv' lastOutput.json | sed 's/^"//g' | sed 's/"$//g' | sed s'/\\//g'