rapgenius.rb

What does this do?

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

In pre-1.0.0 versions, this gem used Nokogiri to scrape Rap Genius's pages, but no more. The new Genius iOS app uses a private API, which this gem makes use of.

Installation

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

gem "rapgenius", "~> 1.0.5"

Usage

The best way to get a decent idea of the attributes available on Song and the other objects is by looking through the files in lib/rapgenius.

Searching

You can search for songs by various fields. All of these methods return an array of Song objects...:

RapGenius.search("Versace")
RapGenius.search_by_title("Versace")
RapGenius.search_by_artist("Migos")
RapGenius.search_by_lyrics("medusa")

If more than 20 results are returned, you won't be able to get access to records beyond the 20th. There doesn't appear to be any pagination support in the API.

Songs

Songs on Rap Genius have unique identifiers. They're not especially easy to find, but if you hover over the "pyong" button near the top of the page, you'll see the song's ID in the URL. Once you have an ID, you can load a song via the API:

require 'rapgenius'

song = RapGenius::Song.find(176872)
song.title # => "Versace"
song.artists.map(&:name) # => ["Migos", "Drake", "Zaytoven"]

Once you've found the song you're seeking, there's plenty of other useful details you can access:

song.title
# => "Versace"

song.url
# => "http://rapgenius.com/Migos-versace-lyrics""

song.pyongs
# => 22

song.description
# => "Released in June 2013, not only did they take the beat from Soulja Boy’s OMG part 2 but they absolutely killed it."

Lines

Once you've got a song, you can then go through its "lines", which includes annotated and unannotated parts of the content.

line = song.lines[1]

line.lyric
# => Versace, Versace, Medusa head on me like I'm 'luminati

line.annotations
# => ["Read about how this collaboration came to pass here..."]

line.song
# => #<RapGenius::Song:0x007fccdba50a50 @id=176872...

Media

Rap Genius provides great access to media like MP3s on Soundcloud or videos on YouTube direct from songs.

media = song.media.first

media.type
# => "audio"

media.provider
# => "soundcloud"

media.url
# => "https://soundcloud.com/mixtapemechaniks/migos-ft-drake-versace-remix"

Artist

You can navigate from a song to its artist, and then to other songs by that artist. Magic, huh?!

artist = song.artist # or song.artists, song.featured_artists or song.producer_artists

artist.name
# => "Migos"

artist.type
# => :primary

artist.url
# => "http://rapgenius.com/artists/Migos"

artist.description
# => "Migos are an American hip-hop group from Atlanta, Georgia..."

artist.songs
# => [#<RapGenius::Song:0x007fccdb884398...]

# Songs for an artist load in pages of 25
artist.songs(page: 2)
# => [#<RapGenius::Song:0x007fccdb884398...]

Examples

I've built a game called "Guess The Track" using the gem - find out more, grab the source or play for yourself here.

Contributing

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

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

artem-a/rapgenius