rapgenius

What does this do?

It's a Ruby gem for accessing lyrics and explanations on Rap Genius.

They very sadly don't have an API so I decided to replicate one for myself with a nice bit of screen scraping with Nokogiri, much like my amex, ucas and lloydstsb gems.

Installation

Install the gem, and you're ready to go. Simply add the following to your Gemfile:

gem "rapgenius", "~> 0.1.0"

Usage

Songs on Rap Genius don't have numeric identifiers as far as I can tell - they're identified by a URL slug featuring the artist and song name, for instance "Big-sean-control-lyrics". We use this to fetch a particular track, like so:

require 'rapgenius'
song = RapGenius::Song.find("Big-sean-control-lyrics")

Once you've got the song, you can easily load details about it. This uses Nokogiri to fetch the song's page and then parse it:

song.title
# => "Control"

song.artist
# => "Big Sean"

song.full_artist
# => "Big Sean (Ft. Jay Electronica & Kendrick Lamar)"

song.images
# => ["http://s3.amazonaws.com/rapgenius/1376434983_jay-electronica.jpg", "http://s3.amazonaws.com/rapgenius/1375029260_Big%20Sean.png", "http://s3.amazonaws.com/rapgenius/Kendrick-Lamar-1024x680.jpg"]

song.description
# => "The non-album cut from Sean that basically blew up the Internet due to a world-beating verse by Kendrick Lamar...

The #annotations accessor on a Song returns an array of RapGenius::Annotation objects corresponding to different annotated lines of the song, identified by their id.

You can look these up manually using RapGenius::Annotation.find("id"). You can grab the ID for a lyric from a RapGenius page by right clicking on an annotation, copying the shortcut and then finding the number after "http://rapgenius.com".

song.annotations
# => [<RapGenius::Annotation>, <RapGenius::Annotation>...]

annotation = song.annotations[99]

annotation.lyric
# => "And that goes for Jermaine Cole, Big KRIT, Wale\nPusha T, Meek Millz, A$AP Rocky, Drake\nBig Sean, Jay Electron', Tyler, Mac Miller"

annotation.explanation
# => "Kendrick calls out some of the biggest names in present day Hip-hop...""

annotation.song == song # You can get back to the song from the annotation...
# => true

annotation.id
# => "2093001"

annotation2 = RapGenius::Annotation.find("2093001") # Fetching directly...

annotation == annotations2
# => true

You can search for songs by artist and/or title.

results = RapGenius::Song.search("Big Sean Control")
# => [#<RapGenius::Song:0x007fbe4b9195e0
#  @artist="Big Sean (Ft. Jay Electronica & Kendrick Lamar)",
#  @title="Control",
#  @url="http://rapgenius.com/Big-sean-control-lyrics">,
# #<RapGenius::Song:0x007fbe4b920f70
#  @artist="Big Sean (Ft. Jay Electronica & Kendrick Lamar)",
#  @title="Control (French Version)",
#  @url="http://rapgenius.com/Big-sean-control-french-version-lyrics">,
# #<RapGenius::Song:0x007fbe4b920958
#  @artist="Big Sean (Ft. Crobar, Jay Electronica & Kendrick Lamar)",
#  @title="Control (Remix) [Kendrick Diss]",
#  @url="http://rapgenius.com/Big-sean-control-remix-kendrick-diss-lyrics">,
# #<RapGenius::Song:0x007fbe4b920250
#  @artist=
#   "Sa-roc (Ft. Big Sean - No I.D., Jay Electronica, Kendrick Lamar & Sa-roc)",
#  @title="CONTROL",
#  @url="http://rapgenius.com/Sa-roc-control-lyrics">,
# #<RapGenius::Song:0x007fbe4b91ff30
#  @artist="C3",
#  @title=
#   "Control ( Disses Kendrick Lamar , Jay-Z, Tyler The Creator, Big Sean, Meek Mill & More )",
#  @url=
#   "http://rapgenius.com/C3-control-disses-kendrick-lamar-jay-z-tyler-the-creator-big-sean-meek-mill-and-more-lyrics">]

results[0].description
# => "The non-album cut from Sean that basically blew up the Internet due to a world-beating verse by Kendrick Lamar...

Contributing

After the last few contributions, there's one core thing I'd like to add to the gem:

Support for *Genius - Rap Genius also have other sites on subdomains like News Genius and Poetry Genius. These could very easily be supported, since theyre identical in terms of markup.

If you'd like to contribute anything else, go ahead or better still, make an issue and we can talk it over and spec it out! A few quick tips:

Don't update the version numbers before your pull request - I'll sort that part out for you!
Make sure you write specs, then run them with $ bundle exec rake
Update this README.md file so I, and users, know how your changes work

Copyright

Get in touch

timrogers and tsigo are the gem's primary contributors.

Any questions, thoughts or comments? Email me at me+rapgenius@timrogers.co.uk or create an issue.