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

[Yoni Rabkin]

Yoni Rabkin <yoni@rabkins.net> writes:

> 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.

And at the moment it is a matter of two steps forward, one step back, as
the results of translating the response from musicbrainz to sexp is a
mess via `xml-parse-region'. I might try to do it with
`re-search-forward' over the xml instead... sheesh.

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