James Firstly a vague attempt to put your mind at rest about "why the BBC is now looking at putting third-party music information services out of business". If you mean we plan to make a service that competes with allmusic etc we don't [honest]. We just want to be able to better represent music on the bbc. So we can join up our data around The Fall at Glastonbury, The Fall in session etc. We're particularly interested in better representing music around "unqiue bbc content" ~ sessions, glastonbury, proms, electric proms etc. We are not in the business of trying to to make a music encyclopedia If you mean why don't we source the data from a commercial provider (muze, gracenotes et al) the difficulty is they tend to be product centric. Which is all good for amazon and other people wanting to flog music but is tricky for us. So we'd be more interested in Hex Enduction Hour as a "cultural artefact" rather than a set of saleable_items with catalogue numbers and release dates. If we want to provide a set list for a band at glastonbury the "songs" they play are not the same as the audio artefact on the album they're plugging. Same problem with all of classical. We need better ways to express this model this than just artist > track > release Having said that brainz at the moment is just a triangle of artist | track | release with various "advanced relationships". The difference is Robert is also wanting to move in the direction of describing /music/ rather than products. We just wanna help this move along without alienating his community Secondly i'm with you on the various typos/variations of artist titles, release titles etc. But what musicbrainz api does give us is lucene ~ so we can ask for artist id of an artist whose title is lucenely like REM Thirdly the swear filter stuff is tricky. The BBCs swear filter (merde) is the first thing i'd make open source ;) But radio 1 homepage is already displaying incoming text message keywords and filtering out txt swearing is also tricky More questions for editorial, legal and policy ~ i just want the ids Finally can i ask what ur artist id and track id are: var gimpdata="Steve Miller Band~391~The Joker~E148~A~Russ Williams~williams~the music we all love~Contact Russ~False~http://www.virginradio.co.uk/russ/~~False~Steve Miller\'s godfather is Les Paul, pioneer of the electric guitar.~1615 ";
Are these internal Vigin ids or do they tie into some other id schema? ________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of James Cridland Sent: 25 January 2007 16:55 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC Michael, Ignoring for a while the question of why the BBC is now looking at putting third-party music information services out of business, and being constructive: The major problem we've found working with any third-party music data is the issue of non-standard descriptions. Take a well-known song, which is in our system as... "The Beatles: Norwegian Wood (This bird has flown)", aka "Beatles, The: Norwegian Wood", for example. Life gets harder with R.E.M.'s "End of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)", since R.E.M. is also known as REM and R. E. M. and... ooh, it's horrid. This needs fixing. Secondly, working with third-party systems is a little difficult for cleared-for-broadcast stuff. Oasis's "Fsucking in the bushes" won't look great on scrolling DLS, however we do it - and automated swear filters don't work cleverly enough. (I've added an extra letter in there for work-safe email). The way we've ended up working with these types of services is to have to pre-moderate everything before importing, which is a nuisance but the only way. Easy for us, given the comparatively small amount of music we play; harder for the Beeb, I'd guess. If it helps (which I doubt it will), if you go to http://nowplaying.virginradio.co.uk/vr.js - do it in Firefox so you can see it on-screen - you'll see the following information within a JavaScript line: Artist name ~ artist ID ~ Track name ~ track ID ~ Live on-air studio ~ Presenter name ~ Presenter image reference ~ short description of show (which makes no sense right now I notice!) ~ Short legacy web action description ~ Webcam true/false flag ~ DJ show link ~ Official artist website ~ tickets available true/false ~ 128 character description ~ some number which probably does something I appreciate this is nothing to do with what you're asking, but I wondered whether it was interesting to the conversation. And I'm always up for a pint. j -- http://james.cridland.net/ http://www.virginradio.co.uk/vip/profile/bigjim/
