4 ms·

Hi! Nice to hear from you. Classical music has a very complex taxonomy and the so-called “metadata problem” hasn’t been solved by any streaming provider so far

Hi! Nice to hear from you. Classical music has a very complex taxonomy and the so-called “metadata problem” hasn’t been solved by any streaming provider so far. There are some guys in Berlin that are creating a completely new streamer called Idagio, and it seems promising. But they are struggling to sign deals with labels, the process of adding recordings to their database is understandably slow, and subscribing a new streamer implies an additional cost to listeners. I tried to solve the “metadata problem” using existing infrastructure: Spotify and All Music Guide. (Scraping AMG website sits in a legal gray area, I know.) DBTune looks very nice; I recall a similar app in early 2000s called ClassiCat. Anyway, if you have the UPC of an album, it’s fairly easy to play it in Spotify. Cheers! PS: I’m a Nielsen fan too :)

cannam 9y ago
Concertmaster seems to be simpler and more focused, in terms of metadata, than anything I might have made would have been. Which is a good thing -- having used it a bit now (by applying the fix provided elsewhere in this thread) I have to say I'm delighted with it. The UI-first design, in which the complexities of the metadata are very well hidden, is a joy.
- adrianosbr 9y ago
  Thanks so much! I'm very sorry for the bug, it'll be fixed shortly.
derobert 9y ago
Check out MusicBrainz for metadata. E.g., https://musicbrainz.org/artist/1be1367d-119f-4b08-bdfe-50b95043e544 https://musicbrainz.org/artist/1be1367d-119f-4b08-bdfe-50b95... (Nielsen's artist page) or e.g., https://musicbrainz.org/release/d757ff3a-5502-4e86-952e-dc1e0f2faada https://musicbrainz.org/release/d757ff3a-5502-4e86-952e-dc1e... (an album page) — note all the classical metadata. Further — the data is licensed freely, and there is an API to get at it all; no scraping needed.
- adrianosbr 9y ago
  Thanks! If I can recall correctly, MBz API doesn’t inform UPC numbers - something essential to the Spotify integration. But it seems nice and I’ll study it further.
  - reosarevok 9y ago
    Hi! MusicBrainz team member here. We do have UPC numbers (well, barcodes), although if it was me doing this I would depend on those as a second source, and first check if there's an actual Spotify album ID (which we already store, but we don't have that many of right now). In fact, this seems like the kind of app that might make people actually go and add more Spotify album IDs in MusicBrainz just to get more/better content in Concertmaster.

cannam 9y ago

Concertmaster seems to be simpler and more focused, in terms of metadata, than anything I might have made would have been. Which is a good thing -- having used it a bit now (by applying the fix provided elsewhere in this thread) I have to say I'm delighted with it. The UI-first design, in which the complexities of the metadata are very well hidden, is a joy.

adrianosbr 9y ago
Thanks so much! I'm very sorry for the bug, it'll be fixed shortly.

derobert 9y ago

Check out MusicBrainz for metadata. E.g., https://musicbrainz.org/artist/1be1367d-119f-4b08-bdfe-50b95043e544 https://musicbrainz.org/artist/1be1367d-119f-4b08-bdfe-50b95... (Nielsen's artist page) or e.g., https://musicbrainz.org/release/d757ff3a-5502-4e86-952e-dc1e0f2faada https://musicbrainz.org/release/d757ff3a-5502-4e86-952e-dc1e... (an album page) — note all the classical metadata. Further — the data is licensed freely, and there is an API to get at it all; no scraping needed.

adrianosbr 9y ago
Thanks! If I can recall correctly, MBz API doesn’t inform UPC numbers - something essential to the Spotify integration. But it seems nice and I’ll study it further.
- reosarevok 9y ago
  Hi! MusicBrainz team member here. We do have UPC numbers (well, barcodes), although if it was me doing this I would depend on those as a second source, and first check if there's an actual Spotify album ID (which we already store, but we don't have that many of right now). In fact, this seems like the kind of app that might make people actually go and add more Spotify album IDs in MusicBrainz just to get more/better content in Concertmaster.