nwestbury Wrote: > I could not agree more with you. All your comments agree spot on with > the problems I see with Musicbrainz and why the Musicbrainz data is not > really usable for classical music. The problem is what can we do about > it. It the developers at Musicbrainz are just not interested in > supporting classical music then one option is to fork the software and > the data. However, this would be a drastic option and would require a > lot of work to keep the project going. The best thing may be if we > could somehow work with Musicbrainz to put in support that allows us to > plug-in our own tables (performers table, composition table, etc.) and > our own bits of code. Perhaps I need to familiarize myself with > Musicbrainz internals and come up with a proposal that allows support > of a classical music database while only have minimal impact on the > core of Musicbrainz.
I think the idea you expressed at the beginning of the thread is a very good one. 1) Enter Composer, Conductor, Orchestra, soloist, etc names once. Enter each composer's works once with names for each movement (or maybe aria.) Enter the data to describe classical works and the people who composed and performed them in a way natural to clssical music. 2) Use that data to describe what's on some music files. 3) Use the descriptions of music file contents to select and play classical music. There are some real benefits of that approach: - If you enter a person's name once and pick from a list when describing music files, you don't have multiple spellings. - If you have multiple recordings of a work, you only have to type the work name (and the names of movements once.) - With the right s/w, describing the contents of a CD you just ripped will normally require picking from several lists and not much typing. Accomplishing each step Step 1) I looked at my collection of classical music CDs. If I exclude composers that appear on a few tracks of a compilation CD or two, I have works by about 100 different composers in my 1000+ CD collection. I think that 2/3 of my collection is by 10 composers. I think I could type the information about my Cds by one of those 10 composers in 2-3 hours. Maybe I might noot enter the titles of movements but it would be minimally useful to me. So building the database doesn't seem an impossible amount of work to me. Some initial users will have to work to enter data but it seems doable. Step 2) Describing the contents of CDs or music files requiring some new software. You probably want to get the disk ID (and perhaps an additional identifier) and associate a composer, work and performers with a group of tracks. If the job just involves selecting from a few lists, it can fit into the flow of ripping CDs. Trying to scan and reformat freedb or musikbrainz results might help but it may not be necessary. Step 3) The biggest job seems to me to be using the results with existing CD rippers, file taggers and music players. Many don't support Composer information separate from the Artist tag. Most don't have an API for changing tag information for music files that have already been scanned. And most store data in a private format that is not guaranteed to be stable from one version to the next. I think that the most promising approach is to emulate the freedb interface. And to provide a flexible template method for mapping database fields to freedb fields. Since few current apps. use musikbrainz, I don't see that it buys us much at this stage. A different approach might be to use a special app to select a performance from the database and then give a commqand to the music player to play the selected set of music files. Slimserver might support this through the CLI or HTTP interfaces but most players would not. Of course, you won't be using the Squeezebox display or remote anymore or even the web interface. So I'm not clear on the value of musikbrainz. They appear to enter the artist, album and track title again for each CD. The samples I examined had inconsistent names for composers. Bill -- Listener ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Listener's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2508 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19858 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
