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

[Petteri Hintsanen]

Yoni Rabkin <yoni@rabkins.net> writes:

> What are your thoughts on this?

I don't have anything concrete to suggest to Emacs interface at this
time.

But it may be good to check MusicBrainz Picard if you haven't done that
already.  Namely, you don't necessarily need to implement a database
browsing mechanism at all, but you could delegate that to a web browser
instead.

Picard does this kind of delegation by opening a local http server and
supplying its port in MusicBrainz "tag lookup" query parameter.  This
causes special "Tagger" links to appear in the search results.  By
clicking such link the web browser relays the corresponding MusicBrainz
release identifier back to Picard via the local port.  Picard will then
download the tag data for the selected release and lets the user
associate that with her files.  I've been using Picard for years and can
attest that this workflow works well.

I guess you could utilize the same query mechanism if you wish.  That
way you could start immediately with the actual tag update interface.
I'm not suggesting this is the right way to do it, but just something to
consider.

And just like you described, pinpointing the correct release can be
laborious.  It usually involves matching bar codes, catalog ids,
sometimes even CD matrix codes to the search results.  For popular
albums there can be dozens of releases with wildly different contents.
Usually it is enough to find something close enough.

Thanks,
Petteri