So GrooveShark shut down a few days ago.

I haven't really followed them much since I took over the original GrooveBot codebase sometime in 2011.

But now GrooveBot's namesake is gone, which marks a neat sort of milestone for the project. It has now outlived its inspiration.

In any case, that isn't what I really want to talk about today. Instead of talking about the loss of GrooveShark, let me tell you about what GrooveBot has gained.

When I was last fiddling with GrooveBot sometime in 2014, I came to a sudden realization. If I wanted to subject the people of the FOSSBox to the mad fever dream of Smash Mouth mashups that is Neil Cicierega's Mouth Sounds, I would have to add some form of SoundCloud integration [1].

At the time, I was busy working on one of the issues that had been annoying me (and others) since the bot's early beginnings, namely the lack of a permanent queue that persisted through crashes (and live-coding restarts). Along with that came some architectural updates that should make it easier to one day support multiple backends at the same time, which is another longstanding issue that I would dearly like to fix one day. Point being, I had a lot of other things I wanted to accomplish, and not a lot of percieved benefit to stopping that and dropping in a new backend instead.

Fast-forward to PyCon 2015 sprints, and Neil Cicierega has not only made another ridiculous mashup album with Mouth Silence, but has also been posting a number of not-yet-albumized music to SoundCloud individually. So, I took a look through SoundCloud's API, and went through some of GrooveBot's less atrophied backends [2], and put together a new version that supports SoundCloud.

And then I proceeded to play Bustin' on repeat for a while.

[1]

Well, I mean, I could use the mpd backend, but without multiple backend support, the pool of music would get stale quickly, and as much as this is a project to force my musical tastes onto others, it is important to me to let them do the same to me in return.

[2]

The 2014 changes I mentioned were actually pretty deep in scope, and while I am happier with where the bot is now, for a while Spotify was the only supported backend because it was the only one in use, and the only one that made the switch. Obviously now SoundCloud works, and I think MPD should be working, but Pandora has been broken for years, and GrooveShark never worked in the first place.

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Before this summer, Groovebot 'worked' on Spotify, and also had a fairly useful but under-tested MPD backend that worked for me when …

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