It used to be the case that MSN music had this nice little feature on most albums where you could say "Play sample tracks", and then it would open up the small MSN radio window, and it would play 30 seconds of all tracks on that album in sequence. However, once they revamped the new site, this feature was nowhere to be found, which was something of a nuisance for me.

I suppose one could ask whether there is any merit to the sample tracks idea in the first place, as in whether listening to the sample tracks can give one an idea about whether an album is good or not. I think it can at least give you a rough idea of the style of the album, and let you hear whether it's the sort of thing that sounds ok, or whether it sounds like a tough listen. Ultimately, I consider it to be a supplement to a review, because the words in a review can't really convey everything about the sound of the music. Off the top of my head, if I think about The Ramones, the self-titled debut of The Ramones, I read a few glowing reviews of it but then on listening to sample tracks I decided to defer any prospective purchase of it for a while. This is because I got a much better idea of what the reviewers meant by saying they took rock back to its basics by listening to 30 seconds of tracks like "Hey-Ho, Let's Go"!

So, having convinced myself that these sample tracks are of some use, I thought about what I could about it. And, of course, the first thing that came to mind was to load up C# after something like a year, and use it to make a sample track player for me. So, after playing around with the Windows Media Player OCX, I have a simple app that lets you feed in the URL of the CDUniverse page for your album, and then it plays all the tracks in sequence! Neato, eh? So no more having to manually click on tracks one by one, now I can sit back and let my program do the work for me! These are the sorts of days where I like programming, and how it helps me save lots of time (whether I should be listening to sample tracks instead of, say, studying, is a different matter of course).

Naturally, the reliance on the page being CDUniverse can easily be generalized to include other sites, although I am only worried about having to write a "parser" (if it can be called that; loads of regular expressions would be more accurate) for each site I add support for. AllMusic in particular looks like a fairly complicated beast, unfortunately, but it also has all the album and artist descriptions.