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

[Yoni Rabkin]

Daniel Semyonov <daniel@dsemy.com> writes:

>>>>>> Yoni Rabkin writes:
>
>     > 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.
>
> The API seems to support returning the results as json (by setting the
> "fmt" parameter to 'json'), have you tried that?  I personally find the
> parsed data to be easier to manage.

I'll try json next; thanks

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