That's sounds great, but a quick look at their database shows no year, no composers, which is the most important for our database. So we would still need to look up the records.
Not sure where you're looking, here's an example:
http://musicbrainz.org/release/6473ff12-496f-3fb8-a94a-65d565487885
The amount of attributes for each album/track etc differs from release to release as it's all crowd sourced with different ambition levels. But if you guys enter that data yourself, it would make sense to add it to musicbrainz instead. Also, if you should find incorrect metadata, it's just a matter of changing it, and hope that your change doesn't get downvoted (low risk since they are true music nerds as well, and are suckers for correctness).
Here's btw examples of cover relations:
http://musicbrainz.org/recording/5bf51cfc-55bc-4dc8-bdd1-fd173ae414ae
...which actually links to SHS
In your first post you suggested that users could submit a cover relation by giving the two ids from musicbrainz. The problem is that a record (as we conceive it) can have different ids in the musicbrainz database. This implies that i'd have to implement duplicate checking which isn't trivial for music, as the music industry doesn't tend to be consequential.
musicbrainz have release groups with their unique id for albums, and each album in a release group have its own id. For example some album released in Japan might differ from the same album being released in the US.
If I'd suck data from musicbrainz after all, I'd just have the titles, performers and albums without furter information. Biggest problem is that the data won't have been checked. After a quick browse I find "Queen Latifah" and "Queen Latifa". I think that those errors are more frequent in a system where everyone can add, than in a system where you have to be trusted.
As you mentioned above, you check your metadata manually, so the work is already done once, and doing it for musicbrainz instead would at worst lead to the same amount of work, but hopefully less.
And finally to the main point I'm hoping to make here. You have a nice API going, but it's kind of broken since it only exposes artist names as the artist of some cover, and only artist name for lookups. This makes it pretty fragile when it comes to multiple artists with the same name. Since many people have musicbrainz tags in their mp3s/flacs/etc, it's trivial as a music player developer to find exact matches of additional content online using these tags without the risk of getting the wrong artist... so that would for me be the largest win with integrating with musicbrainz. You can continue to enter your own metadata, just getting the artistmusicbrainz artist_id connection going would be a huge win. For example, Freebase, LastFM, and YouTube are today consumers of the MusicBrainz data, perhaps worth something.
Last edit: 2012-10-18 13:51:40 UTC
by dsvensson