RE: [backstage] DRM
One might argue that the BBC should make their radio stations available in as many different ways as possible, to satisfy as many users as possible: after all, we pay for it. The flip side is that every format you add, has some extra setup costs of various magnitudes, and when belts have to be buckled because it's public money, why spend it when you're satisfying most people now. After all, how many people are not listening to (say) Radio 1 live online just because it's not being streamed in MP3 format. Not necessarily agreeing with it - just saying it exists as an argument. winmail.dat
RE: [backstage] DRM
James Cridland [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Though looking at the big screen on the wall, the vast majority of users seem content with Windows Media (over 80% of our online listeners right now). Do you think those of us who aren't content should complain more? I complain sometimes but mostly the reaction from people here is sorry - it is like it is - get over it I was rather hoping it didn't come across like that. I, and other BBC staff, do try to explain the way things are, and why they are in respect to BBC decisions - we have the knowledge of why a lot is done the way it is. I should also add that most of the BBC staff on this list aren't (unfortunately!) the decision makers on the big subjects like DRM, audio streaming, and so on. We can try and influence the decisions in our areas where appropriate, we can keep bleating on about things, however we're not always in a position where we can actually make it happen :( If I had my way, we would have had Ogg streaming years ago! winmail.dat
Re: [backstage] DRM
Andrew Bowden [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: James Cridland [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Though looking at the big screen on the wall, the vast majority of users seem content with Windows Media (over 80% of our online listeners right now). Do you think those of us who aren't content should complain more? I complain sometimes but mostly the reaction from people here is sorry - it is like it is - get over it I was rather hoping it didn't come across like that. I, and other BBC staff, do try to explain the way things are, and why they are in respect to BBC decisions - we have the knowledge of why a lot is done the way it is. I've worked for the civil service and know how easy it is to get defensive when you don't mean to be - even about obviously stupid things - I remember sticking up for government nuclear policy when it was clearly mad. I also know that it's easy to get critical of one set of people when you actually mean to be critical of another set. I don't think many of the criticisms that are laid out here are about the people doing the work. They're mainly frustration with things not moving faster, being too locked down or not transparent enough. All problems for managers, not hackers. I should also add that most of the BBC staff on this list aren't (unfortunately!) the decision makers on the big subjects like DRM, audio streaming, and so on. We can try and influence the decisions in our areas where appropriate, we can keep bleating on about things, however we're not always in a position where we can actually make it happen :( Which is why, a few months ago, I was suggesting that managers at least listen to this list. Maybe they should get a summary. Maybe someone should do what the debian project does and do a weekly summary of activity here. I might investigate that. Maybe it could have a level of automation like kernel traffic used to have. Anybody else think that's a good idea? If I had my way, we would have had Ogg streaming years ago! Yes. The real reason people like me want it is because it's hackable in a way that other streaming tools aren't. If we had ogg we'd be able to provide just about everything else ontop of ogg. Ah well. -- Nic Ferrier http://www.tapsellferrier.co.uk for all your tapsell ferrier needs - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC
I've been lurking on the Musicbrainz dev list for years; iirc, there is some hidden category to make duets/collaborations like that resolve to two artists. It may well be worth finding their list archives to check we're not about to rediscuss all of the conversations! (Is Rob Mayhem and Chaos on here now? Hello love, if so!) k -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Wood Sent: 24 January 2007 23:47 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC I bumped into a fully fledged spec for a music ontology the other day [http://pingthesemanticweb.com/ontology/mo/], which looks like it hit revision 1.0 in December. Seems it's sharing your position of wanting to work with the musicbrainz model, but also wanting to extend it to make it more applicable to other uses (namely linking up to other resources)... I've only recently started looking at the musicbrainz data, but the first thing I noticed (as seems common to other models) is the sometimes broken assumption that the artist name of a track should resolve to an artist entry. E.g. 'The Pogues Kirsty McCall' is an artist entry for 'Fairytale of New York'. Whereas It'd be way more useful to have two artist entries point to the track, and put the 'artist title' somewhere else. iTunes provides a compromise of making 'Artist' and 'Album artist' available to differentiate this, but this still doesn't provide the many to one relationship that would be more semantically correct, imho. Although my thoughts generally tend to verge towards the 'finding new music' angle, I'd most likely be up for points 7 8 :-) Cheers Dave PS First post n'all. And I should probably come out as a BBC employee using non-work email 'all my own/not bbc thoughts' disclaimer applies, etc. On 1/24/07, Michael Smethurst [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Evening all BBC Audio and Music (ne Radio and Music) are about to embark on the long and winding road to a better online music offering To this end we've been working with http://mayhem-chaos.net/blog/ of http://musicbrainz.org/ to improve our music (meta)data So the questions to you are: 1. Have you worked with musicbrainz data? 2. If so what's missing from / wrong with the model (we've spotted works, movements, songs as opposed to tracks, releases conflated with products... maybe there's something you'd like to see in there). Responses from classical music geeks especially welcome! 3. Have you worked with the musicbrainz api? 4. If so what would you like to see there? 5. Have you ever worked with any bbc music data (unlikely cos to the best of my knowledge we've never given you any ~ sorry) 6. What music related data would you like to see from the bbc? 7. If you sat in a pub and sketched an ideal schema to describe music what would it look like? 8. Would you like to sit in a pub and sketch an ideal schema to describe music? We might run to a pint... As a first stage we're working with Robert to expand his schema to allow the modelling of classical music, live music, sessions etc without alienating his community. If there's enough interest it might be an excuse for a musicbrainz/backstage/bbc meetup later this year Sorry to be quite so open ended but if you've got an opinion on any of this (or anything in any way related) please scribble it here Cheers Michael - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC
Now - an aside - Musicbrainz was set up because of Gracenote. If I understand correctly, the dataset that Gracenote CDDB is based on was orginally an 'open' database with information contributed by the public. It was sold, and changed its licensing structures away from the original open source model. FreeDB was then set up, but the data isn't controlled enough, and it's full of rubbish, dupes etc. Musicbrainz puts more control and structure around the data, and was initially a 'cleansing' effort around FreeDb data. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Richard P Edwards Sent: 26 January 2007 01:27 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC James, The 128 character description could well be the ISRC code from the original label. If it is, then it contains a lot of those same details, and is unique across all manufactured CD's. I would also be surprised if you haven't come across these guys http://www.gracenote.com/prof_home.html They seem to have the Song ID database sown up. RichE On 25 Jan 2007, at 16:55, James Cridland wrote: 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/
Re: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC
Dear --- Richard P Edwards [EMAIL PROTECTED] May I ask you who do you think music is made for? Who makes the music? If it comes from inspiration then it belongs to us all! Thereby hides the sins of man, he takes that which he does not make and uses to feather his own nest! Have a nice day! From a real person called brian Nixon aged 68 and finds this web site un helpful, for no one seems to be dealing with the Trusteeship of the Trustee's of an Organisation that was set up and paid for by us the licence fee payer and then we who own it are ignored when policy is made, because like governments, they are all ruled by the word Democracy but in fact is a lie to us all. A lie to us all is a crime called Perjury and Perjury is itself a lie to ones self in the only fact that life gives to us human beings and that is we are alive and the only other state we know as a fact is death. So the beginning or the end of the arguments I have seen daily on this web site for which I pay for. Is no one cares at all about us all and that we live in that new dictatorship of a pending Republican State that Mr. Blair AGREED IN AN AGREEMENT HE AND NOW DEAD MO MOLAM MADE ON OUR BEHALF WHETHER WE WANTED IT OR NOT! READ FOR YOURSELF THE PROOF OF WHAT I CLAIM. GO TO THE ULSTER UNIVERSITY WEB SITE AND ASK THEM TO BRING THIS AGREEMENT UP FOR YOU TO READ! THE ON THAT SAME SITE ASK THEM TO READ THE 1689 FREEDOM ACT AND COMPARE WHAT REALITY HAS GIVEN TO US ALL! HAVE A NICE DAY! wrote: James, The 128 character description could well be the ISRC code from the original label. If it is, then it contains a lot of those same details, and is unique across all manufactured CD's. I would also be surprised if you haven't come across these guys http://www.gracenote.com/prof_home.html They seem to have the Song ID database sown up. RichE On 25 Jan 2007, at 16:55, James Cridland wrote: 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/ ___ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. The New Version is radically easier to use The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC
The pubs are obviously open. Cheers, Rich. On 1/26/07, Brian Nixon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear --- Richard P Edwards [EMAIL PROTECTED] May I ask you who do you think music is made for? Who makes the music? If it comes from inspiration then it belongs to us all! Thereby hides the sins of man, he takes that which he does not make and uses to feather his own nest! Have a nice day! From a real person called brian Nixon aged 68 and finds this web site un helpful, for no one seems to be dealing with the Trusteeship of the Trustee's of an Organisation that was set up and paid for by us the licence fee payer and then we who own it are ignored when policy is made, because like governments, they are all ruled by the word Democracy but in fact is a lie to us all. A lie to us all is a crime called Perjury and Perjury is itself a lie to ones self in the only fact that life gives to us human beings and that is we are alive and the only other state we know as a fact is death. So the beginning or the end of the arguments I have seen daily on this web site for which I pay for. Is no one cares at all about us all and that we live in that new dictatorship of a pending Republican State that Mr. Blair AGREED IN AN AGREEMENT HE AND NOW DEAD MO MOLAM MADE ON OUR BEHALF WHETHER WE WANTED IT OR NOT! READ FOR YOURSELF THE PROOF OF WHAT I CLAIM. GO TO THE ULSTER UNIVERSITY WEB SITE AND ASK THEM TO BRING THIS AGREEMENT UP FOR YOU TO READ! THE ON THAT SAME SITE ASK THEM TO READ THE 1689 FREEDOM ACT AND COMPARE WHAT REALITY HAS GIVEN TO US ALL! HAVE A NICE DAY! wrote: James, The 128 character description could well be the ISRC code from the original label. If it is, then it contains a lot of those same details, and is unique across all manufactured CD's. I would also be surprised if you haven't come across these guys http://www.gracenote.com/prof_home.html They seem to have the Song ID database sown up. RichE On 25 Jan 2007, at 16:55, James Cridland wrote: 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/ ___ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. The New Version is radically easier to use – The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC
All tru Brainz has advanced relationships to break Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel into paul Simon and Art Garfunkel (bad example I know) And for that matter Peter Andre and Jordan into Peter Andre and Jordan [http://tinyurl.com/2yxx76] David Thanks for the pointer to http://pingthesemanticweb.com/ontology/mo/. Very interesting and definitely worth following up. Still very focussed on commercially available stuff and lacking on the Classical front tho ~ difficult to describe eg glastonbury or the proms with this...? -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kim Plowright Sent: 26 January 2007 10:46 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: RE: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC I've been lurking on the Musicbrainz dev list for years; iirc, there is some hidden category to make duets/collaborations like that resolve to two artists. It may well be worth finding their list archives to check we're not about to rediscuss all of the conversations! (Is Rob Mayhem and Chaos on here now? Hello love, if so!) k -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Wood Sent: 24 January 2007 23:47 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC I bumped into a fully fledged spec for a music ontology the other day [http://pingthesemanticweb.com/ontology/mo/], which looks like it hit revision 1.0 in December. Seems it's sharing your position of wanting to work with the musicbrainz model, but also wanting to extend it to make it more applicable to other uses (namely linking up to other resources)... I've only recently started looking at the musicbrainz data, but the first thing I noticed (as seems common to other models) is the sometimes broken assumption that the artist name of a track should resolve to an artist entry. E.g. 'The Pogues Kirsty McCall' is an artist entry for 'Fairytale of New York'. Whereas It'd be way more useful to have two artist entries point to the track, and put the 'artist title' somewhere else. iTunes provides a compromise of making 'Artist' and 'Album artist' available to differentiate this, but this still doesn't provide the many to one relationship that would be more semantically correct, imho. Although my thoughts generally tend to verge towards the 'finding new music' angle, I'd most likely be up for points 7 8 :-) Cheers Dave PS First post n'all. And I should probably come out as a BBC employee using non-work email 'all my own/not bbc thoughts' disclaimer applies, etc. On 1/24/07, Michael Smethurst [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Evening all BBC Audio and Music (ne Radio and Music) are about to embark on the long and winding road to a better online music offering To this end we've been working with http://mayhem-chaos.net/blog/ of http://musicbrainz.org/ to improve our music (meta)data So the questions to you are: 1. Have you worked with musicbrainz data? 2. If so what's missing from / wrong with the model (we've spotted works, movements, songs as opposed to tracks, releases conflated with products... maybe there's something you'd like to see in there). Responses from classical music geeks especially welcome! 3. Have you worked with the musicbrainz api? 4. If so what would you like to see there? 5. Have you ever worked with any bbc music data (unlikely cos to the best of my knowledge we've never given you any ~ sorry) 6. What music related data would you like to see from the bbc? 7. If you sat in a pub and sketched an ideal schema to describe music what would it look like? 8. Would you like to sit in a pub and sketch an ideal schema to describe music? We might run to a pint... As a first stage we're working with Robert to expand his schema to allow the modelling of classical music, live music, sessions etc without alienating his community. If there's enough interest it might be an excuse for a musicbrainz/backstage/bbc meetup later this year Sorry to be quite so open ended but if you've got an opinion on any of this (or anything in any way related) please scribble it here Cheers Michael - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit
Re: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC
Michael Smethurst [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: All tru Brainz has advanced relationships to break Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel into paul Simon and Art Garfunkel (bad example I know) And for that matter Peter Andre and Jordan into Peter Andre and Jordan [http://tinyurl.com/2yxx76] BWA HA HA! Although some of the comments are just a touch too sarcastic for me. Do we have to be so cruel to people like that all the time? -- Nic Ferrier http://www.tapsellferrier.co.uk for all your tapsell ferrier needs - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC
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/
RE: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC
On the subject of ISRC codes I've spoken to some of the production people about this Apparently they're supposed to uniquely identify the audio object So if a track appears on a single and also appears on an album with EXACTLY the same recording it should have the same isrc code BUT apparently labels often prefix the isrc with something to identify the label so if a release is re-released on a different label the tracks on it often have different ISRC codes even tho they're the same audio object Basically they're not guranteed Anyway, this is what i've been told... i'd be delighted to be told different... [and they're also no good for describing live music] We have come across gracenotes but unfortunately (once again) they don't really model the platonic ideal of a song (just tracks) so mike flowers pops wonderwall http://www.gracenote.com/prof/music/album.html/ambdreampop/7fc4bbab6b367 527a59404978be5b833.html has no song to tie it back to oasis's wonderwall http://www.gracenote.com/prof/music/album.html/britpop/6ffbeca624a0d776e 294e04ece5219d9.html they just happen to label the track search as song maybe there's more going on under the skin of the site but i doubt it From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Richard P Edwards Sent: 26 January 2007 01:27 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC James, The 128 character description could well be the ISRC code from the original label. If it is, then it contains a lot of those same details, and is unique across all manufactured CD's. I would also be surprised if you haven't come across these guys http://www.gracenote.com/prof_home.html They seem to have the Song ID database sown up. RichE On 25 Jan 2007, at 16:55, James Cridland wrote: 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/
RE: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC
Now - an aside - Musicbrainz was set up because of Gracenote. If I understand correctly, the dataset that Gracenote CDDB is based on was orginally an 'open' database with information contributed by the public. It was sold, and changed its licensing structures away from the original open source model. It's true, I contributed many titles to it when it was public. It always had two problems: 1. The 'hash' value it used for a CD wasn't a large enough number to avoid clashes. 2. The format of an 'artist' was useless. Aside from the obvious fact that a compilation album will have tracks by many artists, it failed with anything complicated. For example you might have a track that is 'by X and Y feat Z' which has been remixed by W which appears on a compliation by V. In addition the mix will probably have a name too (U), so you end up having the title as TITLE (U mix by W) and the artist as X and Y feat Z. -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.432 / Virus Database: 268.17.11/652 - Release Date: 25/01/2007 15:32 -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.432 / Virus Database: 268.17.11/652 - Release Date: 25/01/2007 15:32 - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC
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/
Re: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC
Hi Michael, The label's prefix is always in the ISRC code this may explain further... http://www.riaa.com/issues/audio/isrc_faq.asp My understanding is that the code is attached to the original and unique recording. so many recordings of the same song can have different codes... but each is unique in its sound after mastering. They should never be the exact same audio object with different codes. That does make sense to me, as it is the recording that is important in this case, not the lyrical content or title. Obviously this is designed for admin and royalty collection and therefore the code would probably always be considered along with the CD label. which incorporates the other descriptions one normally requires. It can quickly become very complicated if you want to include Genre of music as a description, as you can see from the changing playlists of radio 1/2 etc. If it is just for live music, then most listeners will be able to discern what they are looking at or listening to from the Venue details along with the Artist name. So I would look toward the following Name, (Song Title) Artist, Venue Date Album Composer Genre Comments Obviously there will be other BBC type info that is needed, but these fields should be enough for a complete description, if I follow your idea. ATB RichE On 26 Jan 2007, at 13:21, Michael Smethurst wrote: On the subject of ISRC codes I've spoken to some of the production people about this Apparently they're supposed to uniquely identify the audio object So if a track appears on a single and also appears on an album with EXACTLY the same recording it should have the same isrc code BUT apparently labels often prefix the isrc with something to identify the label so if a release is re-released on a different label the tracks on it often have different ISRC codes even tho they're the same audio object Basically they're not guranteed Anyway, this is what i've been told... i'd be delighted to be told different... [and they're also no good for describing live music] We have come across gracenotes but unfortunately (once again) they don't really model the platonic ideal of a song (just tracks) so mike flowers pops wonderwall http://www.gracenote.com/prof/music/album.html/ambdreampop/ 7fc4bbab6b367527a59404978be5b833.html has no song to tie it back to oasis's wonderwall http://www.gracenote.com/prof/music/album.html/britpop/ 6ffbeca624a0d776e294e04ece5219d9.html they just happen to label the track search as song maybe there's more going on under the skin of the site but i doubt it From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Richard P Edwards Sent: 26 January 2007 01:27 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] Music, (meta)data, musicbrainz and the BBC James, The 128 character description could well be the ISRC code from the original label. If it is, then it contains a lot of those same details, and is unique across all manufactured CD's. I would also be surprised if you haven't come across these guys http://www.gracenote.com/prof_home.html They seem to have the Song ID database sown up. RichE On 25 Jan 2007, at 16:55, James Cridland wrote: 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
Re: [backstage] Joost anyone?
Hi Robert, I'm on the joost waiting list, but really itching to try it out. If you've still got a spare invite, I'd be most gracious. Cheers, Phil On 18/01/07, Robert Kerry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Email me if you'd like an invite - not sure how many I can give out though. :o) Rob evilgreenmonkey On 17/01/07, John [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Any idea how i can get one of those? Already registered on the beta-testers list, Appreciate it, John. On 1/17/07, Brian Butterworth [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mario, I would be very pleased to accept your token. Thanks in advance. Brian Butterworth www.ukfree.tv From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mario Menti Sent: 17 January 2007 06:52 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] Joost anyone? On 1/16/07, Brian Butterworth [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm not after a review, I wish to use it! The message I got when I signed up was to ask someone else 'who has a token' to provide me with one. And if you don't ask you don't get. Brian Butterworth www.ukfree.tv Brian - let me know if you have received an invite off-list. If not, I can send you one. (Before anyone else asks, I only have this one spare token at the moment, but more may be forthcoming in future...) Mario. -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.432 / Virus Database: 268.16.13/632 - Release Date: 16/01/2007 16:36 -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.432 / Virus Database: 268.16.13/632 - Release Date: 16/01/2007 16:36 -- John Griffiths http://www.red91.com - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ -- Website: http://philw.co.uk Skype: philwhelan76 Email : [EMAIL PROTECTED] MSN Messenger : [EMAIL PROTECTED] iChat: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
