We’ve been working on improving mashTape for the upcoming Genesis release.  Originally, mashTape was sort of thrown together haphazardly as an “extra-time” project… we finally got some time to give it some true and proper love, and well… it shows.  The new mashTape has been completely re-written from the ground up to be more extensible and flexible than ever.

In the time since the first rev of mashTape was written, we’ve had some other add-ons crop up such as Concerts & LyricMaster which have removed the need to cover those features within mashTape itself.
The new mashTape focuses on 4 types of info:

• Artist Info
• News (via RSS feeds)
• Photos
• Videos (or any sort of Flash-y thing)

This information is presented in tabbed panes, just like before.  The major difference now is that mashTape is now extensible via additional add-ons.  Developers can create new add-ons that add new providers to bring in even more content.  We’ve uploaded Delicious & Vimeo providers as examples of this.

Of course, along with all this work, we’ve expanded the types of information mashTape now delivers.

The Artist Info now shows the artist photo, biography, discography (with cover art), members (if it’s a multi-member act/band), related links, and tags.  By default we use a combination of Last.fm+Wikipedia+Freebase+MusicBrainz to get this info, but we’ve supplied a second provider using Wikipedia Japan as a demo of a single-source provider.

The News tab pulls in information from multiple RSS feeds.  We ship with Digg, Hype Machine, Google News, Yahoo News, Google Blog Search, and MTV providers for this tab.  You get an index view of all the results, and you can click on them to read the excerpt directly in mashTape.  You can then click off to launch the full detail view within Songbird’s browser.

For Photos, we ship with both Flickr & SmugMug providers.  The animation is a lot smoother and less CPU intensive now.  Additionally it now overlays information on each photo.  What’s super cool is that you can now resize the display pane and mashTape will load in higher resolution photos for a more immersive experience.

And lastly, for the Videos tab we ship with YouTube & Yahoo Music providers.  As with the News/RSS tab, you get an index view with thumbnails and title.  You can click them to load them up within mashTape and play them directly.  As with the Photos tab, if you resize the display pane, the video will scale up or down accordingly.

We’re looking to launch mashTape as a “first-run” add-on (meaning included by default) with Genesis; but in the meantime, I’ve uploaded it to the add-ons site for you to download.  However, mashTape requires bleeding-edge bits, due to its dependency on the new Media Core API, as well as the display pane tab header changes.  You must be running a nightly from 2008-09-25 or newer in order to use the new mashTape 0.2.0 builds.