RIAA Radar has a website that will let you search for artists, albums, keywords, etc and it will give you information as to whether or not an album was released under the RIAA.

So I did a view-source on their search page and determined that there are only three variables that you need to POST in order to search: searchtype, keyword, and submit.

I can use wget to grab the file, like so:
wget http://www.riaaradar.com/search.asp --post-data "searchtype=ArtistSearch&keyword=Audioslave&submit=Go\!" -O Audioslave

This saves the file as Audioslave. Audioslave IS represented by the RIAA, by the way.

Now, how do I take my ripped albums and compare them to the RIAA Radar site?

In my album collection, all of the albums are formatted the same: Artist – Album Name
This little bit of effort a long time ago makes it easy for me to separate these now.
I simply cd into my albums directory and do the following:
ls|awk '{FS="-"};{ print $1}'|uniq >> artists

I now have a file called artists in my album collection that contains unique artist names for every album in the collection.

Now, to find out if they’re represented by the RIAA:

cat artists|tr " " "+"|xargs -i wget http://www.riaaradar.com/search.asp --post-data "searchtype=ArtistSearch&keyword={}&submit=Go\!" -O radarresults{}.html

This will pull down the search result for every artist in my album list, and save it in a file formatted the way I want.
For instance, Jimi Hendrix would be saved as radarresultsJimi+Hendrix.html

I browse this with lynx and see that the text “Warning!” would be pretty good to search on.

grep Warning! radarresults*|sed -e 's/<[^<>]*>//g'|tr "+" " "|cut -c 13-|uniq|awk '{FS=".html"};{print $1}' >> riaapunks.txt

Explanation: grep searches the files for Warning!, then sed strips out the html. tr converts those + signs to spaces, cut trims off the radarresults portion of the output, uniq filters out duplicates, awk cuts off everything after and including .html, then it all gets dumped to a file.

Now I’ve got a nice list of everyone who is represented by the RIAA, in a file called riaapunks.txt

Now I get to have fun with it!
cat riaapunks.txt|xargs --verbose -i find ./ -name *{}*

Output looks good. Now for the coup de grace:
cat riaapunks.txt|xargs --verbose -i find ./ -name *{}* -delete

Buh-bye RIAA music!

Thankfully, www.ilovejackdaniels.com has a cheat sheet I don’t mind having. It’s more thorough than the others I’ve found and it comes in PDF and PNG formats. I had to print the PNG one, since evince printed the greys as solid black in the PDF version.

Anyway, check it out here.

I’ve been using regexps so much lately that I contemplated taping it over my second monitor. I settled for hanging it from the cube wall right next to it.

Until next time!

-LightningCrash