almost staying on topic and because this discussion hasn't kicked off yet i thought i'd throw this in: after scooting around http://www.virginradio.co.uk/ i was wondering clearly u have lots of tracklistings clearly we have a fair few but if u flip between radio 3, radio 1, 1xtra, Later etc they're all marked up differently some are tables, some are lists, some are paragraphs with line breaks I half remember a while back someone on backstage was screenscraping radio3 tracklist pages if that person's still about, what were the problems, what would u like to see? How much easier would machine accessibility be if they shared a common markup (dare i say microformat) and if they did what would you want to see there?
________________________________ 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/
