In this post, I want to share a new Scratch extension I made today.
It uses the iTunes Search API to let you search for songs, and play 30 second previews of them, in your Scratch projects.
The blocks are simple, and hopefully self-explanatory, but here is a short demo of them in action if it’s not obvious.
I’ve added this extension to the version of Scratch I host for Machine Learning for Kids, so you’ll need to go there to try it out. (To access the extensions library, click on the extensions button in the bottom left.)
This was very quick to create, because it’s a revival of an extension I created using Spotify’s API. I added that to my fork of Scratch in 2022, but I had to remove it after Spotify withdrew their API at the end of 2024.
My motivation for using Spotify in the first place was because of the range of weird and interesting metadata they have for tracks, which made for some really fun Scratch projects. You can see a few of my examples in a blog post I wrote at the time, but I saw so many more cool examples that students created. iTunes’ API doesn’t really have any of that, so the blocks in this newer extension are a much simpler subset.
Is that still useful? I’m not sure… but I thought I’d share it and see whether anyone uses it. Let me know what you think!
Tags: mlforkids-tech, scratch