Re: MusicBrainz integration (and by extension other music search APIs)

[Yoni Rabkin]

Daniel Semyonov <daniel@dsemy.com> writes:

>>>>>> Yoni Rabkin writes:
>
>     > 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.
>
> What prevents performing a single search for releases (or release groups)?
> According to https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_API/Search#Release_Group
> it should be possible to use the 'artist' or 'artistname' field instead
> of 'arid'.

>From my limited experimentation with it, if you put "David Bowie" in the
artist/artistname field of a release-group search (as opposed to using
an arid), you'll get every single artist name which includes the string
"David Bowie" anywhere in it, along with all of their releases. If that
includes tribute/cover bands, then the song names will be the same as
well. You'd have to potentially wade through a lot of dross first.

The same would happen if the artist you are interested in has a
relatively common name like "John Smith".

In comparison, identifying the arid first allows you to narrow all
subsequent searches to the right artist.

However, I'm interested in actually implementing more of the API and
experimenting with it in order to see if this is the problem in practice
that I think it is.

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