About

We Rage is a project that collates the last 12 years of playlists from ABC's Rage music show and combines them with video from YouTube. What this really means is you get to watch an online recreation of any past Rage broadcast. You can search any of the bands and songs that have appeared on the show and create your own custom playlists.

RageMatch

We Rage contains some experimental code to calculate song relationships by looking the frequency and proximity songs are programmed in relation to each other (excluding top 50 lists). The results of this can be seen on any of the song pages. It's not always accurate, but generally gives some interesting suggestions.

Dodgy Videos

Videos are sometimes missing, incorrect or simply static photos, cover art or lyrics tickers. We Rage searches YouTube for the band and song name and plays the first embeddable result found. Some labels and bands do not allow their videos to be embedded so unfortunately we must skip these. Occasionally you'll see a flat-out wrong video.

Soon there'll be a system where you can select the best video from the results returned by YouTube. Through a voting system the highest voted video will then become the default one played.

Flash, HTML5 & the full-screen player

We Rage uses YouTube's beta embed code so if you're on an iPad/iPhone or an HTML5 compatible browser and haved opted-in to their HTML5 Beta program videos should appear in the HTML5 video element when available. Currently our full-screen player is Flash-only but hope to provide a non-Flash version as soon as YouTube provide an HTML5 player API.

The full-screen player is great for parties, especially using a browser that supports full-screen mode. At the time of writing the best option seems to be Chrome.

Data & Download

We Rage was put together using a bunch of Perl scripts and many regular expressions to parse out band and song names, collate playlists, correlate bands etc. The data isn't perfect, not least of all because many of the playlists (if not all) are hand-typed by Rage staff so typos or missing articles can cause a band to appear under a few different names. Feel free to point out any errors you see.

You can download an export of the latest version of the playlist data in CSV format as a GZipped Tar archive: werage.tar.gz [1.5MB].

Acknowledgements

I gotta give props to @pamelafox for her RageTube mash-up which was one of the inspirations for getting this project finished and live. Thanks also must go to Rage and YouTube for the data and APIs.