I made a post some time ago about the podcast thing I created on the site. I’ve been using it quite much since then and bumped into one a bit larger problem with it. Luckily I was able to find a simple solution to the problem and I thought I’d share it here with you.
So first the problem: The people who have been testing the system have probably noticed that the Beatport releases don’t have anything in the url to identify the track, which makes purchasing them a bit, well, difficult. There still is a way to find the track from Beatport by using the id number on the url. This id is the last number in the url before the ‘LOFI.mp3′ part. When you concatenate this with the url ’http://www.beatport.com/en-US/html/content/track/detail/‘ you get the url for the release that track is on. Here is an example to clarify what I mean:
Let’s take the url ‘http://ak-samples.beatport.com/items/volumes/volume2/items/1000000/0/70000/8000/700/70/1078779.LOFI.mp3‘ as an example. Here the id is ’1078779′. Now add that number after the aforementioned url and you get: ‘http://www.beatport.com/en-US/html/content/track/detail/1078779‘.
But why stop here? Manual labor is always tedious 
. So how to make this more automated? If you are like me and value a good browser, you too are probably already using Google Chrome. If not, go grab it now. Anyway, Chrome has this nice support for custom search engines. This support is actually so good that it isn’t constrained only to search engines. So how can this feature be used in this case? Here’s how:
In Chrome click the monkey wrench icon in the toolbar right of the address bar. Select options from the menu that opens. Open the Basics tab from the Options dialog. Click the Manage button next to the default search engine drop down. Click ‘Add..’- or the ‘+’-button and type in these values:
Name: Beatport Releases (or whatever you like)
Keyword: bpr
URL: http://www.beatport.com/en-US/html/content/track/detail/%s
Now when you click ‘Add’ and close the opened dialogs and go to the address bar of the browser you can just type ‘bpr’ + the release number you are looking for, and Chrome opens the info page of this release in Beatport (e.g. for the aforementioned release type ‘bpr 1078779′ (without the hyphens)).
