MusicBrainz integration (and by extension other music search APIs)

[Yoni Rabkin]

I have a working MusicBrainz API for Emms in a local branch, in the
sense that I can send a request and get a response which is then
processed into SEXP form.

The question now becomes: how do we start to integrate that information
into Emms?

Identifying a specific artist, recording, or release is
non-trivial. Each album can have multiple releases. For example: ones
issued for the Japanese/European/U.S. market, an extended re-release, a
digitized version of the original vinyl release, a remastered release,
the 40-year anniversary remaster, etc.

With MusicBrainz specifically, the process needs to start with an API
call to correctly identify the artist, then the recording, then the
release-group, and finally the release.

For illustration purpose, I'll present information from MusicBrainz
about David Bowie:

Searching for "David Bowie" as an artist returns over 14,000 results!
Assuming we choose the right one (and not, for instance "Woody
Woodmansey's Holy Holy, a David Bowie tribute band"), we will get the
MusicBrainz artist ID for David Bowie.

We can then effectively do a search for terms in the specific release we
have at hand using the artist ID. We could then search for "Heathen" and
get the MusicBrainz release-group of 21 releases for that recording. We
can finally examine one of those releases to see the track list for that
specific release and match it to the files we have to hand.

I propose that to begin with, we put together an interface which allows
the user navigate this hierarchy, in that order (artist, release-groups,
releases/tracks). The user could then match that information up with
what they have in hand and manually edit or correct their tags (or just
learn more about the artist and other albums they have).

If that is successful and useful, I would then add features on top of
that which say "please copy these track names to this Emms entry, and
write the tags to the files"

What are your thoughts on this?

-- 
   "Cut your own wood and it will warm you twice"