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The music industry needs to more widely use some kind of equivalent to the ISBN that the book industry uses. A simple "ISMN" list per playlist/library would be
by coder543 2y ago
The music industry needs to more widely use some kind of equivalent to the ISBN that the book industry uses. A simple "ISMN" list per playlist/library would be all that would be needed to move between services when both apps have the same songs.
One could also imagine a standardized ismn://<number> URL format that could open in your preferred music app, and this could work even without a streaming service if you already own that song in your personal music collection.
ISMN seems to exist: https://www.loc.gov/ismn/about.html https://www.loc.gov/ismn/about.html
But, I've never actually seen it used for recordings; it seems to be focused solely on music notation. So, it would be nice to have some kind of recording-focused identifier for keeping track of specific performances between services.
- sneak 2y agoThey’re called magnet links.
- Muromec 2y agoYeah, but the next step is to make identifier somethink like a has so the media can be content addressable. Wait, we can't have that. It's too convenient
- coder543 2y agoContent addressable doesn't really work here... different apps may have the same recordings encoded in different formats and bitrates, but they are still the same recording. Unless you meant "content addressable" in the sense of a uniquely assigned identifier like I was already talking about, and not a computed identifier from the raw bytes of the file like a hash.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bariumbitmap 2y agoThis sounds like an acoustic fingerprint, such as AcoustID[0]. I think AcoustIDs and XSPF[1] would be a good combination for shared playlists. It's a shame that development stopped on the Tomahawk music player[2], it would have been an ideal platform for shared playlists like this. [0] https://musicbrainz.org/doc/AcoustID https://musicbrainz.org/doc/AcoustID [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Shareable_Playlist_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_Shareable_Playlist_Format [2] https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk https://github.com/tomahawk-player/tomahawk
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoNow we just need to associate payment/attribution related metadata with those identifiers
- rjmunro 2y agoMusicBrainz has also been making a list of unique identifiers for music tracks: https://musicbrainz.org/ https://musicbrainz.org/
- encom 2y agoThis exists and is called ISRC. This metadata is embedded in a subchannel on CD's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Recording_Code?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Recordi...
- coder543 2y agoCool, I didn’t know that. I wish it were actually used by the various music apps.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoIt's a pity that compression is likely to provide subtly different data under different network conditions. If everything were lossless we could just use hashes as identifiers and proceed without the participation of the apps. After all, they have no incentive to make this easy for us.
- loyx 2y agoThis is actually a beautiful idea. It'd definitely be possible for music purchased through bandcamp since lossless is generally available for most releases. Commenting to bookmark this.