Dense Dead

If there is some interest, I'll publish something longer on this. In the meantime, I threw together a quick script that takes a link to one of the wonderful Grateful Dead shows available to stream from the Internet Archive and edits out the least dense of Dead songs, Drums and Space, so that when I am listening to the Dead and working, I don't need to skip them.

The result is DenseDead.com and a chrome extension that will rewrite Grateful Dead Internet Archive pages to push the m3u files through Dense Dead.

For example, to hear a slightly denser version of The Grateful Dead's last show, the Internet Archive URL would be:
https://archive.org/details/gd1995-07-09.127735.nick.flac16/gd95-07-09d1t01.flac
the streaming URL on that page is:
https://archive.org/download/gd1995-07-09.127735.nick.flac16/gd1995-07-09.127735.nick.flac16_vbr.m3u
and the DenseDead URL would be:
http://densedead.com/https://archive.org/download/gd1995-07-09.127735.nick.flac16/gd1995-07-09.127735.nick.flac16_vbr.m3u
If you visit the Internet Archive URL for the show with the Dense Dead chrome extension installed, clicking on the VBR Stream Playlist link will automagically give you the denser m3u file even though the page itself still shows the full show.

If you find shows where Dense Dead doesn't work, hit me up on Twitter @amac and I'll see if I can fix it. If you want to know more about how I did this, also shoot me an @reply over on Twitter and I'll consider writing more.

Public domain image of skull from An Illustrated System of Human Anatomy: Special, General and Microscopic,
Samuel George Morton (1849) scanned by Google Books from Oxford University Library