[HN Gopher] Horrible edge cases when dealing with music
___________________________________________________________________
Horrible edge cases when dealing with music
Author : pabs3
Score : 466 points
Date : 2022-04-03 00:04 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dustri.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dustri.org)
| cosmotic wrote:
| Very "creative"
| tomcam wrote:
| They missed a few common ones; Led Zeppelin's fourth album with
| Stairway to Heaven on it was named only with Prince-like
| symbols, and of course the group named The The (which Google
| indexes well).
| deadbyte wrote:
| The Inertia Variations is fantastically uninspiring.
| cgh wrote:
| Both of these are mentioned in the article, or were you
| referring to something else?
| mehrzad wrote:
| A funny edge case I've found in one of the most popular music
| services (Last.fm). There is an instrumental post-rock ish band
| called Collections of Colonies of Bees and they have an album
| where almost all the tracks have the same name; they are all
| titled "Fun" except for the last track titled "Funeral".
| https://open.spotify.com/album/0LP8DTy4amlLIVXGOjvCo2?si=HJ3...
|
| This has caused last.fm to think "Fun" is one of my most played
| songs of the year even though they were all separate tracks.
| aasasd wrote:
| I bet the most popular track name in techno is "Untitled".
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| One of the simplest data model mistakes that seems nearly
| universal in music software is pretending that some things are
| single values when they're really lists.
|
| Take "artist". An album can have a compilation of tracks, each
| from a different artist. A given track can have multiple artists,
| eg a guest singer. There can be multiple composers of a track,
| there can be multiple writers of lyrics, and there are usually
| several performers (even if they all are part of the same band).
|
| An album can have multiple names, or no name at all (which often
| means people refer to it in different ways, giving it multiple
| effective names). Likewise with tracks.
|
| Albums and tracks get re-released, sometimes re-mastered,
| sometimes re-recorded entirely, without the names changing.
|
| The same recording of a given track might be released on multiple
| albums, eg as a single in a pre-release and then within the main
| album.
|
| Tracks might be mastered differently for different media (Radio
| vs CD vs background use in cinema, etc).
|
| Names of any of these things don't have to be representable in
| any existing text encoding, or even any combination of encodings.
|
| Artist name should be a list (or other multiple element
| structure).
|
| Track name should be a list.
|
| Album name should be a list.
|
| Etc. Assume a malicious artist will find a way to make the
| assumption that any field has a unique value incorrect.
| creshal wrote:
| - Artist names can become rather long too, especially for
| collaborations. Some anime OSTs easily break 256 characters.
|
| - And for song titles that need careful escaping,
| QuelI->EX[cez]->{kranz}; and EXEC_SOL=FAGE/. have tripped up more
| than one CLI music player in my experience.
| morelisp wrote:
| A simpler explanation is that your computer has an unstable
| grathnode installed.
| petsounds wrote:
| There is a band from Pasadena, California called Ozma. Way back
| in the day (1999), they released an album called "Songs of
| Audible Trucks and Cars" [0] via MP3.com. I later found out that
| they really wanted the title to be "Songs of _Inaudible_ Trucks
| and Cars" [1], but MP3.com had a character limit on album titles,
| so they had to shorten it
|
| [0] https://www.discogs.com/release/8369169-Ozma-Songs-Of-
| Audibl...
|
| [1] https://www.discogs.com/release/15809071-Ozma-Songs-Of-
| Inaud...
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| If, like me, you immediately thought "why not just drop the
| 'and' and replace it with an ampersand?", Ozma had to do that,
| too, and parent's quoted the album title incorrectly, alas.
| tashi wrote:
| "Songs of Inaudible Automobiles" would have fit and been fun
| to say aloud.
| buro9 wrote:
| I've recently wondered whether it's worth periodically
| reprocessing the metadata on music files with musicbrainz Picard.
|
| It was all done when added to the catalog, but presumably the
| metadata could be updated and a periodic refresh would be a
| benefit.
| FabHK wrote:
| Meta Comment:
|
| I much prefer this informative post (with a clear title and
| plenty of examples and explanations) to the uncommented
| "Falsehoods programmers believe about ..." listicles.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Absolutely. Stating that an assumption is false with no further
| information doesn't help me update my mental model of the
| world. Giving an example of how an assumption is incorrect
| shows the type of errors that can occur, when they can occur,
| and lets the reader figure out a better way to work around the
| false assumption.
| sriku wrote:
| I understand "horrible" in this case in a somewhat lighthearted
| sense. But it points to a tendency to simplify cultural
| complexity in the interest of "legibility" from the system
| perspective. The same diversity of cases need to be accommodated
| in much design done for, say, a diverse country like India where
| though urban populace me be English savvy, rural populace aren't
| necessarily so ... And even in urban areas local language and
| culture dominates.
|
| A place this diversity crops up most commonly is the so called
| "standard" firstname middlename lastname fields. This just
| doesn't work in India where people may have even 7 components to
| their names ... and who are you, dear system developer, to
| dictate what their name should be like.
|
| The name structure diversity I understand is a problem for Europe
| too with hyphenated names. This brilliant sketch by Fry and
| Laurie says it all - https://youtu.be/1LopIroSjsU
| wincy wrote:
| I mean, we get to dictate it because we're writing the code and
| don't know? I guess enterprising Indian developers should help
| it get fixed. As the whole world gets online this stuff gets
| sorted out, eventually. It's not as if it's malice or
| something. There are Americans with longer names though, I had
| a friend whose full name was five words, and all of his sisters
| and brothers also had "three middle names".
| sriku wrote:
| Not malice ... rather incompetence. If we can't handle this
| much accessibility, what hope do we have of making "ethical
| AI"?
| throwaway684936 wrote:
| Presenting my new album: SQL Injection'); DROP TABLE Artists;--
| Tokkemon wrote:
| Amazing!
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| Provocative, you could say.
| defensem3ch wrote:
| There's also Goto80's Files in Space
| https://www.goto80.com/goto80-files-in-space-mcmp3-data-airl...
| nescioquid wrote:
| Here "edge-case" indicates that music is not mere noise, while
| somehow remaining an instance of "marketing" or "acculturation".
|
| This is a good example of what happens when the insensate take
| power and pander to those who just want to read the "rule book".
|
| No art. No expression. No bother.
|
| Let's just agree on some fucking fiction that gets record label
| to bother with classical music meta-data in a way that meets the
| real world. Can we start there, at least?
|
| edit: click the inverted triangle if you are a jack-ass
| nescioquid wrote:
| You know, I've never down-voted anyone.
|
| I think doing so is somehow complicit with the status quo
| idiocy the world evinces. Instead, I prefer to voice my
| disagreement with a comment which hazards some reasoning and
| which elicits a discussion.
|
| But clicking the inverted triangle is unassailable and makes
| everyone who resorts to it a coward. Fuck off, you enemies of
| music and reason! Were I a lazy asshole, I'd spend my entire
| day down-voting everyone! How much easier could it be?
| cgh wrote:
| This is pretty classic r/iamverysmart material right here.
| nescioquid wrote:
| About what I expected from a herd of Eseln. Thanks for
| confirmation.
| thewakalix wrote:
| You didn't say "only if", so it's still possible to click the
| inverted triangle without being a jack-ass.
| porcoda wrote:
| In addition to all of these edge cases, it doesn't help that the
| metadata services have a lot of inconsistency as well. Say I have
| a song X that was performed live on DATE at some VENUE. It may
| show up as titled "X", "X [live]", "X (Live DATE)", "X (DATE
| VENUE)", and so on. Stuff that should be in metadata ends up in
| strings embedded in song and album titles, which makes for a big
| mess. I curate a huge collection and trying to keep my metadata
| consistent is a massive headache. I think I've tried just about
| every tool out there and still haven't found one that I'm happy
| with.
| wdr1 wrote:
| I feel like musicians were doing Little Bobby Drop Tables long
| before the XKCD comic.
| seaish wrote:
| Related, songs that are meant to be played by accident:
| https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4he7lv/183-the-veno...
|
| Example album: https://drumkoon.bandcamp.com/album/they-tried-to-
| ban-this
|
| He has hits like "Hey Gugle Play Music" and "Hey Siri Play Space
| Music".
| mherdeg wrote:
| I enjoyed his track "Sorry Katie I Spammed Your Smart Speaker".
| shiomiru wrote:
| Unicode support is one thing. I frequently have to re-tag
| Japanese music because its tags are encoded in shift-jis which in
| general doesn't work on Linux.
| bobbyi wrote:
| Amongst major artists, Tupac is good at causing confusion. Is he
| Tupac, 2Pac or Tupac Shakur? Does it depend on the album? Is his
| alter ego Makaveli a different artist?
| emptybits wrote:
| Yup. ARTIST_ID does not have a 1:1 relationship with
| ARTIST_NAME over time.
|
| Another example... from 1976 to present day: Johnny Cougar -
| John Cougar - John Cougar Mellencamp - John Mellencamp.
|
| Close enough for library software to store/recall them all as
| "John Mellencamp"? Maybe. But perhaps not to fans or historian
| or artist liking.
| geenew wrote:
| Richard D James == "Aphex Twin" || "AFX" || "Caustic Window" ||
| "Bradley Strider" || "GAK" || "user48736353001" || "Polygon
| Window" || "Universal Indicator" || "The Tuss" || "Powerpill"
| || "Mike & Rich"
|
| (for me, 'artist' is the alias, 'album artist' is 'Richard D
| James'...)
| webmaven wrote:
| Don't forget Garth Brooks|Chris Gaines and Eminem|Slim Shady
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| Imagine documenting something like this
| https://www.discogs.com/artist/661099-Filipe-Santos (check out
| the edit history) where the artist actively sabotages the
| documentation effort and makes their music unavailable on a
| whim.
| tzs wrote:
| It's not much an edge case in the sense of those, which mostly
| concern software authors making incorrect assumptions about the
| data in fields, but rather a "not even realizing we need a field"
| case, but music library managers are often quite annoying when
| dealing with classical music.
|
| They really want to fit everything into the artist/album/song
| scheme, and that doesn't really work well for much classical
| music. In classical music most of us would want something like
| composer/piece/orchestra/conductor/performers (the "performers"
| field would be for performers in addition to the normal
| orchestra, such as soloists or choruses), and it should be
| possible to change the sort key order among those fields.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's a sleeve notes problem. Ideally you'd want a complete copy
| of all the info in the sleeve/inlay. This includes some
| combination of headline writer/composer, producer, conductor,
| headline performer, co-writers, arrangers, session players,
| engineer, studio, lyrics, and random sleeve notes/essay,
| possibly in multiple languages.
|
| Per track.
|
| Plus artwork. With credits.
|
| Plus random thank-yous and special thank-yous to sponsors and
| other contributors.
|
| The importance of each field varies with each project. For
| classical conductor showcase projects the conductor is the
| headliner. For classical composers, obviously it's the
| composer. For compilations it can be a concept like "Classical
| Chill" or "Early Music from the 15th Century." For pop projects
| it's usually the band/artist name. For movie tie-ins, it's the
| movie, or perhaps the franchise.
|
| And so on.
|
| You get all of this for free on CD/vinyl labels, and the fact
| that it's freeform doesn't matter because the sleeve artwork
| and visual placing of the elements make it clear who/what
| matters.
|
| Trying to fit this into a single fixed metadata schema is
| madness. It _can 't be done._
|
| This is one of those situations where trying to data-fy the
| information leads to huge loss of detail. You get some nominal
| (poor) searchability, but you give up a huge amount of
| interesting supporting information.
|
| What the industry needs is a digital sleeve note standard which
| can handle all of this and more.
|
| But metadata is designed for sales and stream tracking, not for
| user satisfaction. Which is why it's so bad at capturing what
| users want.
| jay-anderson wrote:
| Definitely. Pieces end up being listed something like "Symphony
| No.3, Mvt. II", but they only show the performer which is the
| orchestra playing rather than the composer so I have no idea
| which symphony it is. I haven't seen any service get classical
| music right.
|
| I think your list is pretty good
| (composer/piece/orchestra/conductor/performers). It'd be nice
| to also have a field for the movement. Also I totally agree
| with custom sort order being a must. E.g. for choir pieces swap
| out 'orchestra' for 'choir', for piano pieces only include
| 'performer' field, concertos should have the 'soloist' before
| the orchestra, etc.
| Aidevah wrote:
| Agreed, I've tested many self-hosted music streaming servers
| and decided to settle with navidrome in the end but not without
| major reservations. I personally don't mind sorting music via
| album/song, but the lack of composer field is really painful.
| Unfortunately the omission of composer information occurs in
| the subsonic api, which have a large number of compatible
| players, so adding the field is not as straightforward if one
| wishes to do it in an interoperable way.
|
| I used to be quite happy with a local music library and playing
| it with mpd, but at some point I got sick of maintaining over
| 100 GB of music library across multiple devices. The streaming
| solutions for mpd are quite awkward to use, otherwise I would
| have stuck with it just to get the composer field.
| nerdponx wrote:
| A lot of music library managers (including good old iTunes) let
| you add a lot of various and esoteric song tag data as columns
| in the track list. The problem was always that the column
| arrangement that makes sense for one style of music doesn't
| make sense for another.
|
| One missing feature that I've never seen in a music library
| application is the ability to have "presets" for these column
| headers that you can easily switch between. So you can turn on
| the "classical" preset which shows Composer, Performer, etc.,
| and you can turn on the "contemporary" preset which shows
| Artist and Album.
| Semaphor wrote:
| That's actually something MediaMonkey [0] (Windows-only) had
| for a long time (I assume the current electron version as
| well, I use the last native version). Classical is one of the
| defaults, but you can add whatever.
|
| It's one of my favorite pieces of software, a true music
| library manager and not a music player with some management
| features tacked on.
|
| [0]: https://www.mediamonkey.com/
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| There's an analogous problem going on on musescore.com, where
| you're supposed to list the work your score is based on.
| Viewing a score on the site will then include links to other
| scores based on the same work.
|
| I uploaded several pieces from Swan Lake, and listed each of
| them as the particular piece that they were. For example,
| https://musescore.com/user/36584999/scores/6642212 is Swan
| Lake, No. 4 (Pas de trois), part IV.
|
| But every time I list a piece like this, it gets "corrected" to
| the canonical reference, which is "Swan Lake". And the "other
| scores based on the same work" are totally useless, because
| they can be any piece from anywhere in the ballet. It's more
| than 600 pages long! Where's the value add from _removing_ my
| indication of exactly which piece of Swan Lake I just scored?
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _...music library managers are often quite annoying when
| dealing with classical music._
|
| Apple will apparently be solving this problem this year with a
| dedicated "Apple Classical" app, the origin of which is their
| Primephonic (https://www.primephonic.com/) acquihire.
|
| "Why are you shutting down Primephonic?"
|
| "To focus on creating an even better experience for customers
| around the world. Apple Music plans to launch a dedicated
| classical music app next year combining Primephonic's classical
| user interface that fans have grown to love with more added
| features."
| nailer wrote:
| The odd one for me is Pendulum - there's two different Australian
| acts, both electronic, with the name Pendulum. For some reason
| the newer Pendulum really liked the name and weren't bothered /
| ethically concerned that the Pendulum that made 'Coma' had
| already existed. As of today Spotify has songs from both artists
| under the same artist name.
| lukaslalinsky wrote:
| There are much worse things than Pendulum. John Williams seems
| a very popular name for artists. :) Back when I was designing
| the "new" MusicBrainz database, that's what we have been using
| as the test case for this.
| lukeh wrote:
| Plenty of duplicate artist names, Spotify artist support will
| split them into separate artists if you contact them, and now
| aggregators like DistroKid let you specify the actual artist ID
| when uploading (at least for some DSPs). It's just another
| instance of there are only two hard problems :)
| tomcam wrote:
| Yeah my favorite is definitely Pendulum.
| lacrosse_tannin wrote:
| There's also different releases of the same album... 2020
| remaster, vinyl rip, web flac, japan edition...
|
| Sometimes the music app just smooshes all together so the "album"
| looks like it has 4 of each track
| nescioquid wrote:
| I wonder what the "You suck, Flying Circus" sounds like.
| joe__f wrote:
| Does anyone recognise the equation from the Aphex Twin track?
|
| [?]M-1=-a [?] D[e][ [?] Fj[e-1]+Fext [e-1]]
|
| With the [?]M and the sum over Fs, I wondered if it might be
| something to do with rocket dynamics derived from Newton's second
| law?
| trelliscoded wrote:
| It's pseudomathematical nonsense. The Fji term might be a hint
| about the image hidden in the track when plotted on a
| spectrogram, but the rest of it doesn't make much sense. You
| can see the original title here:
|
| https://i.discogs.com/YC8CLuli-NW3VB5z7eA9mALjnL2Qef4aGyDYH4...
|
| As an example, why would the index of the last term be inverted
| like that? Maybe it's supposed to mean something phonetically,
| but I'm not a music person so I can't figure it out.
| joe__f wrote:
| Oh I didn't realise the eta was the index, I was reading the
| sum as over i on the right hand side
| Bud wrote:
| Pretty disappointing to see an entire article like this go by
| without a single mention of classical music. Also known as
| basically all music prior to 1940 plus a lot of the most enduring
| music since.
| Karuma wrote:
| They do mention Tchaikovsky there... Or what do you mean,
| exactly?
| zokier wrote:
| > Also known as basically all music prior to 1940
|
| Sure, if you ignore blues&jazz, traditional folk, and all non-
| western music.
| tomcam wrote:
| Not sure I understand? There are accepted names/sequencing for
| all major Baroque, Classical, Romantic etc. artists: Mozart K
| numbers, Bach BWV numbers, etc. And usually there's a close to
| unique name like Adagio in D Minor, Piano Sonata in Bb Major,
| etc.
| repsilat wrote:
| I guess they mean that there are no original recordings for
| most of it, lots of cover bands etc.
| Tokkemon wrote:
| Most of this is great, but I'm calling BS on the Tchaikovsky
| example. Yes, there's been multiple historical spellings of his
| name, and to be absolutely accurate you would use the Cyrillic.
| However, the vast, vast majority of use cases should use the
| modern accepted spelling in English when referring to
| Tchaikovsky, which is what Wikipedia uses. There's a line you
| have to draw somewhere between accuracy and comprehension by the
| user and "Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky" is a pretty damn good one.
| The only other one I see commonly these days is the slightly more
| Anglicized "Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky" but that's it. Most other
| variants are historical or just have different editorial
| decisions, but they all refer back to the same guy, not a living
| artist who is changing his stage name all the time.
| blahedo wrote:
| > _...in English..._
|
| Even in English-language contexts I've seen variants of the
| German-style transliteration on occasion. But more importantly,
| the author is not restricting himself to English, and indeed
| the musicbrainz link gets to such a high count precisely by
| including other languages' transliterations. Only three are
| listed as English, and they're the two you mention
| (with/without Anglo first name) plus one that omits the middle
| name.
|
| Were you saying that all other languages should use "the modern
| accepted spelling in English", or were you just ignoring the
| fact that speakers of other languages (or owners of foreign-
| published albums) might use music databases?
| kzrdude wrote:
| The database might implicitly force a monolingual perspective
| on the dataset if they can't handle multiple translations of
| several fields. It's not an easy problem to manage, I
| imagine.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| > Weird album names:
|
| > + from Justice
|
| > from David Bowie
|
| > ' from Frank Zappa
|
| > () from Sigur Ros
|
| How are these albums names "edge cases"? I feel like ANY software
| would deal with them just fine. Hell, the last two don't even use
| non-ascii characters (though you definitely should have unicode
| support regardless).
|
| Edit: I just realize HN won't the star symbol (U+2605). Which is
| weird since it does support characters like Chinese/Japanese
| glyphs aiueoNi Hao
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Beltalowda wrote:
| There are actually some challenges with stuff like that; how do
| you sort "'" for example? Most people call the album
| "Apostrophe"; should it be sorted under "A"? What about the
| "+"? "D" for dagger? Somewhere else? How do you find things
| like that in the search box? Should searching for "star" return
| that Bowie album?
|
| > Edit: I just realize HN can't display [star]
|
| It doesn't do emojis and various graphic characters. This is
| supposedly a "feature" _shrug-emoji-here_
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Sorting is usually solved by allowing for optional separate
| sorting-key tags. So ' : album='
| albumsort=Apostrophe
|
| These can act as search input as well, so searching for
| 'apostrophe' could yield it depending on the software used.
|
| + can either just sort wherever Unicode puts it, or if the
| album has a known pronunciation like 'star' above, have a
| sorting key too.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| > + can either just sort wherever Unicode puts it, or if
| the album has a known pronunciation like 'star' above, have
| a sorting key too.
|
| Sure, but it doesn't happen automatically, so it's not
| "just do [..]". You need to think about some of these edge
| cases.
|
| I wrote a simple music library/player a bunch of years ago
| and ran in to some of these issues. I never did figure out
| how to deal with the band named "" in a sane way.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| You can "just do" the default string sorting. The system
| (or programming language you're using, etc.) always have
| a way to sort them by default.
|
| And it doesn't have to be in A to Z. It could be (and
| IMO, should be) in "special" which such initial-index
| catalog typically already have.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Wikipedia lists it as "Cross":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_(Justice_album)
| kzrdude wrote:
| The aversion to emojis is strange. I've come around to
| thinking of them as a net positive. Just text is sterile and
| the tone often comes off wrong! Smiles lighten up
| conversation, we need that to not lose track of each other's
| humanity when arguing in comment threads. :)
| [deleted]
| kingcharles wrote:
| This is more of an edge case:
|
| https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0022/8193/0805/products/im...
|
| When music downloads were first starting up in the late 90s I
| was responsible for building a schema to store all the world's
| music. We had to rip millions of CDs. When I got that Aphex
| Twin one above I gave up. I think we just called it [Track 2]
| or [Maths symbols] or something.
| kingcharles wrote:
| HN strips emojis. I can't even paste my web site domain on
| here.
| maxbendick wrote:
| My time to shine! I work in music distribution.
|
| The Apple Music style guide is a great and accessible place to
| look if you're interested in music metadata:
| https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/en.lproj/static.h...
|
| DDEX is the set of metadata standards used across the music
| industry: https://ddex.net/
|
| Also worth knowing that not all content on streaming services is
| music! Some of it is spoken word, ASMR, non-music field
| recordings, etc. The difference between sound and music is
| subjective of course though.
|
| On an artistic note, music can of course be presented in an
| infinite amount of ways. Not all these can be represented (i.e.,
| re-presented) on streaming platforms. Installations and
| generative music for example. That's ok! To be able to represent
| all this music (and non-music) requires restrictions, otherwise
| we wouldn't be able to create programs for it in the first place.
|
| Sometimes restrictions on sound content are to make the streaming
| services friendlier to use, like the formatting of featured
| artists in titles. Royalty laws put restrictions on the handling
| of different roles, like songwriters and composers.
|
| BUT nothing is stopping you from building your own way of
| representing music digitally, so long as you follow relevant
| laws.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > Also worth knowing that not all content on streaming services
| is music! Some of it is spoken word, ASMR, non-music field
| recordings, etc. The difference between sound and music is
| subjective of course though.
|
| Even some albums that are clearly about music can contain non-
| music, take Tenacious D's skits as an example.
| Thorrez wrote:
| >Sometimes restrictions on sound content
|
| Is there some sort of rule against sirens?
|
| The song "Car Alarm" prominently features a car alarm on
| Youtube, but not on Spotify. This could just be a choice by the
| artists though, rather than a platform restriction.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV7nHX2RLjQ
|
| https://open.spotify.com/album/2u4HDb57v96iiJZUC7PqOx?highli...
| spicyjpeg wrote:
| I have noticed that it's fairly common for many songs to
| feature random car sounds in their YouTube mixes, but not in
| the final masters that end up on iTunes and streaming
| services. It is also relatively common to have "watermarks"
| (e.g. additional short vocal clips at the beginning and end)
| added to the YT/Soundcloud mix, presumably to make it easier
| to figure out if a DJ just ripped the song off YT.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Music videos will often have different versions of the song
| with added sound effects, a more cinematic intro and outro,
| and even breaks in the song for a dramatic sequence. These
| flourishes make sense when you have a video but wouldn't
| make any sense in purely audio context.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Probably not a rule, but maybe more like a liability thing?
| If people listen to your music while driving, you don't want
| them to freak out from the sound effects and then sue you
| because they got in a car accident.
| moogly wrote:
| I guess don't put on Steve Reich's "City Life" when driving
| in NYC.
| ratww wrote:
| That's a music video. They traditionally have sounds and
| dialog that aren't part of the music itself.
|
| Here's the regular version, same as Spotify, also on Youtube:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4inWiKCt-E
|
| I don't know if Spotify has music videos, but Apple Music for
| example does, so you can have both versions.
| fivre wrote:
| Maybe you can explain one of my long-burning questions: why are
| non-English tracks handled so inconsistently? I'll sometimes
| see an English translation, sometimes a transliteration (for
| non-Latin scripts), and sometimes the original language. It's
| not consistent which gets used even for a single artist, and
| sometimes changes to a different one.
|
| The albums Angedoniia
| (https://open.spotify.com/album/1HxmgR8wpc1ySplYCTNwaW or
| https://i.imgur.com/ndOXsgL.png) and Prodano!
| (https://open.spotify.com/album/5kp7j9B4TDA3VfhaXz9XcJ or
| https://i.imgur.com/QJNjXc1.png), for example, both contain a
| version of the track "Rizhskaia". The former uses the original
| Russian while the latter uses Rigas', which is a sort-of
| translation (it's an adjectival version of "Riga", which
| doesn't really exist in English).
|
| https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/en.lproj/static.h...
| indicates that there are separate fields for each of the
| original, the translation, and the transliteration, but it
| doesn't seem like anyone actually _uses_ these, and instead
| just picks one arbitrarily to stuff into the main/native field.
| I'm not sure if Spotify even has a way to display the
| alternates--I can't recall ever seeing a toggle for it, though
| idk if I've ever actually encountered a track that includes the
| variants, since you can't see raw metadata on Spotify.
|
| Is it just that music labels do a lackluster job of handling
| metadata? I expect this is probably the case, since classical
| music is similarly messy--it's a crapshoot whether the composer
| or performer gets used as the artist. For that I've at least
| seen the composer metadata field populated sometimes, but
| internationalization fields don't seem to be used ever.
| stavros wrote:
| It's really hard finding Greek songs on Spotify for this
| reason. There are many ways to transliterate (eg "eukhe" can
| be "efhi", "euxi", and all the combinations thereof, and
| that's just with two ambiguous letters) and no names are in
| Greek, so it's basically a game of trying to guess the
| transliteration for the track you want.
| notimetorelax wrote:
| I'd say software should handle this issue - you type in
| Greek and it should match all possible transliterations.
| stavros wrote:
| That's very hard, there are too many combinations. A
| better solution would be to just use the original Greek
| name.
| YawningAngel wrote:
| That's a good solution for Greek speakers, but a terrible
| solution for non-Greek speakers, who _can_ learn a
| "canonical" transliteration but can't write Greek
| stavros wrote:
| There is no canonical transliteration, though. Also it
| doesn't make sense to learn Greek like that, and nobody
| does in practice.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| While I don't doubt your knowledge, note that many
| aspects of European language, including English, and
| including the European alphabets, are in a sense
| transliterations of Greek.
| stavros wrote:
| Certainly, and there isn't a canonical transliteration
| there either. There is some consistency, but the primary
| goal was that the words look good in the target language,
| which isn't a concern for me when I want to type my
| language in a keyboard that doesn't have Greek letters.
| For that case, multiple transliterations per letter
| exist, including some that use numbers (e.g. thelo =
| thelo, thelw, 8elv, and any combination of those).
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Oh, I absolutely agree that they should list the original
| Greek titles. I was just addressing an interesting (to
| me) linguistic side issue.
| stavros wrote:
| Ah, yeah, I agree that the way that Greek words got
| transliterated is actually very interesting (doubly so
| when you speak Greek and can see the intent behind it).
| maxbendick wrote:
| This is an area that many parties handle differently.
| Streaming services, artists, labels, and distributors don't
| all handle translation metadata consistently. There are specs
| in DDEX for this, but it's a matter of support and doing the
| translation work AFAIK.
| bobuk wrote:
| quick upvote for examples from Yanka. I thought that I'm the
| only one who still listening her.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| I still think it's pretty bad for classical music. An important
| question for various pieces is who plays a particular
| instrument, but there really isn't a nice way to encode this in
| the metadata (encoding the relation of both person and role
| where role could be anything).
|
| I also usually want to know who the conductor was and what was
| the orchestra
| inopinatus wrote:
| I'd expect publishers of classical music to know the
| difference between a composer, a conductor, a soloist, and an
| orchestra, but no, apparently not. They freely mash them up
| across fields. The difference between a symphony and an album
| is often mangled too, especially on releases containing
| multiple works. And for fuck's sake, no, a movement is not a
| song. I don't play, "like", flag, list, cross-fade, or
| reshuffle them independently.
|
| Music metadata has been optimized to suit the marketing
| preferences of contemporary record labels. But more general
| classes of music won't shift units on Spotify so the message
| is loud and clear, a resounding "get fucked" from the
| assholes that run this industry.
|
| (One side of my family is in the recording business. I can
| confirm the whole thing is run by assholes.)
| efitz wrote:
| I like being able to address and like/favorite individual
| movements. Beethoven Piano Sonata #14 ("Moonlight") is a
| masterpiece, but the second movement is <expletive>. I
| don't know if I could listen to it hundreds of times like I
| have the first and third movements.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Beethoven Piano Sonata #14 ("Moonlight") is a
| masterpiece,
|
| Which one ? Played by Kissin ? Or by Rubinstein ? Or by
| ...
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Most consider the _composition_ to be a masterpiece.
|
| Artists/conductors 'perform' 'interpretations' of works.
| Whether any interpretation is 'masterful' or 'virtuosic',
| etc., is up to the critical listener.
|
| Three recordings by Horowitz may have been released ...
| which one is 'best'? Depends on the phase of the moon and
| your playback equipment!
|
| The 'quality' of a particular performance may depend on
| the instrument provided to the artist. The year of
| recording can be _very_ important (reflects techology
| used). The acoustics of the recording venue are also
| inherently part of the performance ... e.g. too much
| reverb.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Many classical works have more than one 'track'.
| Musicians, critics, etc. usually refer to them by the
| tempo marking text. A lot of music software just doesn't
| get this. These tempo markings (by the composer; often in
| italian) are the _track names_. So Moonlight has 3
| movements:
|
| I. Adagio sostenuto
|
| II. Allegretto
|
| III. Presto agitato
| inopinatus wrote:
| This is perfectly highlighting that we've got no way to
| express our actual preferences, and are stuck treating
| something as a song when it isn't, but it's the only
| paradigm offered to us.
| gvurrdon wrote:
| This is also important for jazz. Should I wish, for example,
| to find albums where a particular bassist is playing then
| this would be rather difficult unless they happen to be the
| leader for that particular recording. Also, it would be
| particularly helpful to have subgenres, e.g. jazz -> post
| bop, jazz -> free, etc.
| azalemeth wrote:
| This, many times over. Id3 tags are one thing but all decent
| classical record labels (most of whom have always been drm-
| free) like Hyperion or Naxos give you a pdf cd jewel case
| booklet. I've got recordings of many friends and it's always
| a pleasure to see their names in this. I don't use streaming
| services and one of the unexpected joys of iTunes is that the
| album art can contain a pdf with a cover image. The rest of
| the UI mostly assumes that you're listening to non-classical
| music though. I'd love to able to search for e.g. "Victoria's
| Requiem" and get albums with sensible names, even if they're
| in Latin, seemlessly grouped by performance.
| eliaspro wrote:
| A few years ago, we started working on a platform for
| classical music [1] and took great pride in our metadata and
| our underlying schema which basically covered 99% of all the
| weird edge cases classical music has.
|
| Unfortunately, we couldn't make it work economically even
| though we tried several approaches for monetization and had
| to shutdown a while ago.
|
| [1] https://grammofy.com/
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Might you release the schema into the public domain? I know
| that's much more easily said than done, and it's your hard
| work and you deserve the benefits, so no argument from me
| if you don't.
|
| Or maybe share some tips on what works with the corpus of
| classical metadata?
| eliaspro wrote:
| While I'd love to see some of the quite spectacular
| internal tooling + data to be released under an open
| license, put to use for enhancing MusicBrainz' existing
| data etc., I doubt it's going to happen.
|
| All team members have started new opportunities since
| quite a while and untangling all this, filtering out
| potentially copyrighted/licensed material etc. would take
| quite some effort.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I primarily make hip hop music, but I would absolutely love
| a platform like this where I can listen to a classical
| piece, and download the score and MIDI files.
|
| Are there any legal reasons preventing this ? I don't have
| the ability to play classical music myself, ( my weighted
| 88 key sits taunting me), but I'd love to be able to take
| these compositions and integrate them into my own music.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| IANAL, but in the US, copyright on classical pieces tends
| to apply to the performances, not the music. For example,
| a Bach piece is in the public domain (the score and
| probably the MIDI derivative[a]) just from being old
| enough, but a recording of that public domain piece may
| be copyrighted itself.
|
| As always, this isn't universal. Check your local
| copyright laws to be sure.
| infofarmer wrote:
| Pleasant to see Apple has made some progress on their metadata
| guidelines (it used to be abhorrent for a company saved by the
| iPod). Looks like a useful one-pager to get a quick overview of
| the challenges without getting into any of them.
|
| For a proper attempt to preserve metadata, I'd refer to the
| MusicBrainz Style Guideline --
| https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style
| infofarmer wrote:
| There's a reason why MusicBrainz SQL schema looks like what it
| looks like, after years of careful simplification to achieve an
| optimum approximation of reality.
|
| https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Database/Schema
|
| 10+ years ago at Zvooq, during the golden age of music metadata
| and recsys startups, we tried to really solve entity resolution
| in the domain. I've never seen another streaming service make an
| honest attempt at this, even at Spotify with their 2014 acquihire
| of the Echo Nest. You still get Utada and Hikaru Utada as
| ~completely separate entities
| willhinsa wrote:
| what.cd had a really solid model as a user, but I've certainly
| been pleasantly pleased with musicbrainz.org
| throwaway48375 wrote:
| I really miss what.cd
| isoprophlex wrote:
| How do you feel about redacted? It seems to operate in the
| same spirit (if not backend code)
| throwaway48375 wrote:
| Got nothing against them, but it's still not what just
| like what wasn't oink. Every time there is something lost
| you just can't get back.
| dewey wrote:
| What.cd had a very simple data model and it had the same
| issue as many music sites trying to fit it into a simple
| schema (and not a more sophisticated one like MB). The first
| issue that comes to mind was artist with the same name, these
| ended up being the same artist (Just like on Last.fm) if not
| split by hand by changing the artist name.
|
| The schema is here in case you are curious:
| https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle/blob/master/gazelle.sql
| andybak wrote:
| Ha! I contributed the initial classical style guide many, many
| moons ago.
|
| I'm still technically an automod although I haven't
| participated for a long time.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| I think MusicBrainz did a great job to find some common agreed
| denominator between all these styles and formats for music
| metadata. After setting up Funkwhale [1], I went through all my
| 16000 MP3s and synced those with the MusicBrainz Library, also
| adding new entries. It went pretty smooth and my library looks
| much better now. It is also really fun to listen again, when
| everything is structured and labeled.
|
| (btw., yes, I bought a large percentage and, nowadays, mostly
| buy on bandcamp [2]).
|
| [1]: https://funkwhale.audio/ [2]: https://bandcamp.com/
| photon-torpedo wrote:
| To add to the list: Song titles that cannot be fully represented
| in Unicode. Example (also to plug my favorite band): Magma, a
| French progressive rock [*] band that's been (on and off) active
| for more than 50 years, mostly uses their own invented language
| "Kobaian" where some of the characters use diacritics that are
| (to the best of my knowledge) not present in Unicode. E.g.
| there's an S with a kind of crown on top.
|
| [*] Actually their style of music is unique enough that it's
| given rise to its own genre, "Zeuhl".
| inetsee wrote:
| How about the horrible edge case when trying to read this pale
| blue text against a white background. It's been a while since I
| criticized the readability of a web page, but I think this page
| deserves a critique.
| f7ebc20c97 wrote:
| I'm gonna name my band an 18 TB string of random characters,
| interspersed with an "idea" that you can't even put into text!
| Take THAT, Unicode!
| javajosh wrote:
| Ooh, that gives me the idea to name my album the base64
| encoding of it's tracks. The album itself, of course, would be
| empty.
| akira2501 wrote:
| I believe you would no longer be able to copyright the track,
| then. So, you should encrypt the encoded titles, but record
| an audio track that is a voice recording of you reading out
| the encryption key for that track. You know, for DRM.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > I believe you would no longer be able to copyright the
| track
|
| Why? I'm not sure about US law, but here in Poland it would
| definitely still be copyrighted (even if you'd be
| effectively granting an automatic implicit license to use
| that name for the purpose of referencing the work).
| akira2501 wrote:
| My logic is that you cannot copyright a fact. It is a
| fact you released an album, and it is a fact you titled
| it such. I'm free to reproduce that information, say in a
| catalog, without violating copyright.
| [deleted]
| labster wrote:
| It doesn't matter if he can copyright it, he can still sell
| NFTs of each album track.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Hi are you Fiona Apple and if so can we be friends?
| scns wrote:
| Is that the limit on Postgres' TEXT column?
| whyoh wrote:
| Tagging challenges are one reason why I sort and browse music by
| folders/filesystem.
| thristian wrote:
| Peter Gabriel's first _four_ solo albums were untitled. Well, the
| fourth was titled in America, but untitled everywhere else. Fans
| tend to distinguish them by the cover art: there 's "Car",
| "Scratch", "Melt", and "Security".
| dehrmann wrote:
| Weezer's self-titled albums are distinguished by background
| color of the cover art.
| sharph wrote:
| It's worse than that, they were self-titled. So if there were
| some mechanism for numbering untitled albums, it can break
| down.
| kingcharles wrote:
| LOL. I used to work for PG. I created a schema for storing
| music metadata for him, so it's somewhat ironic.
| eschneider wrote:
| And for new bands: Maybe try not to name yourself after a
| Siri/Alexa/Whatever revered word. Jus try asking Siri to play a
| song by "Them." Ugh.
| rzzzt wrote:
| "The The" is my go-to example!
| tinus_hn wrote:
| It's a very ingenious and effective anti-piracy measure!
| philjohn wrote:
| Similar problems when dealing with books.
|
| J.K. Rowling has written works under other names, e.g. Newt
| Scamander.
|
| And then you have the case of the (actually recorded this way by
| the Library of Congress) author "Mark Twain (ghost, through
| mediumship)"
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| I was all geared up for a "misconceptions software developers
| have about _" post but this seems mostly like ... Unicode exists
| and data modeling should at least comprehend the domain?
| jandrese wrote:
| Or really: Natural Language Processing still sucks. Trying to
| fit anything human produced into a reasonable data model is
| doomed to failure.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| No mention of Prince?
| nocman wrote:
| You mean "The artist formerly known as the artist formerly
| known as Prince"?
|
| :-D
| moogly wrote:
| Adding to the list:
|
| There are two well-known Avishai Cohens, both jazz musicians (so
| you can't disambiguate on the broader genre), both from Israel
| (so you can't disambiguate on country of origin), but luckily
| they do play different instruments (bass and trumpet).
|
| ---
|
| The Australian post-rock/shoegazeish band The Dead Sea
| https://www.discogs.com/artist/1450625-The-Dead-Sea released a
| self-titled EP with 3 tracks in 2006.
|
| 2009 they released a full self-titled album (only 1 song from the
| EP featured on it).
|
| I can't even find the "second" release on discogs.
|
| Both were self-released, so no way to disambiguate on ISMN or
| record label/publisher.
|
| So you'd have to disambiguate only on the year of release, or
| define what demarcates an EP from a full album and mark them as
| such (there are some competing definitions out there, since it
| became less clear after the introduction of the CD, and now
| digital, but even back then you had complections like maxi
| singles and mini-LPs, IIRC).
|
| ---
|
| Many of John Zorn's releases tend to be headaches:
|
| "Tap"
|
| Composed and produced by: John Zorn
|
| Performed by: Pat Metheny
|
| Subtitle "Book of Angels, vol. 20"
|
| Overarching series "Masada Book 2"
|
| Released on Tzadik (Zorn's personal label) as a John Zorn/Pat
| Metheny output.
|
| Licensed to Nonesuch (Metheny's label) as a Pat Metheny release
| with different cover.
| slothtrop wrote:
| You also can't find Zorn's music streaming anywhere. I've heard
| of one store that offered digital purchases, but not for the
| whole discography.
|
| You can fill a large closet collecting just his stuff so I'm
| not sure why digital is off the table.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| > _There are two well-known Avishai Cohens, both jazz musicians
| (so you can 't disambiguate on the broader genre), both from
| Israel (so you can't disambiguate on country of origin), but
| luckily they do play different instruments (bass and trumpet)._
|
| Along very similar lines, there are also famously two musicians
| named Bill Evans. Both play jazz (genre) and both are from the
| US (country). As a bonus, both have been members of bands led
| by Miles Davis. And again you can differentiate them by
| instrument (piano and saxophone).
|
| Which is sort of what Wikipedia article titles do to
| differentiate them:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Evans
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Evans_%28saxophonist%29
|
| I guess Wikipedia also differentiates by level of fame, since
| the pianist article title doesn't have a qualifier.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| I've noticed some of these for years. When designing a music
| database, you do need to be aware of them. You need to use unique
| identifiers instead of names. last.fm doesn't do this.
|
| There were four bands called Kaleidoscope, all active around the
| same time: one from England, one from Mexico, one from the USA,
| and one from Canada. To disambiguate them, generally the country
| is specified, e.g. Kaleidoscope (UK).
|
| There were two bands called Bulldog Breed, both of which recorded
| albums called Made in England. They're decades apart, but as
| albums can be re-released, they're normally disambiguated by
| record label, e.g. Bulldog Breed: Made in England (Deram).
|
| There are two Nirvanas, the original UK-based band, and the US
| one. The UK Nirvana recorded a cover of Lithium.
|
| You'll be aware that the Beatles recorded an album called
| Revolver. A Russian band, called Revolver, recorded an album
| called Beatles.
|
| Do you include the definite article in the band's name? If so,
| what about The The?
|
| Tintern Abbey released a single single, the A-side of which was
| called Beeside.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| I've always thought it'd be a bit cheeky to start a band and
| name the first three albums "Self-Titled", "Eponymous"[0], and
| give the third album the name of the band.
|
| Fortunately, I lack any amount of musical talent, so this will
| never happen.
|
| [0] I know, REM beat me to it.
| cpeterso wrote:
| > Do you include the definite article in the band's name? If
| so, what about The The?
|
| My SiriusXM radio omits leading articles like "The", so "The
| Beatles" is displayed as "Beatles". I alway long wondered how
| it would display "The The". Would it be "The", empty string "",
| "The The", or something else entirely. I eventually learned the
| answer: "The The". Which is good, but then made me frustrated
| that it wouldn't allow the "The Beatles" to be "The Beatles".
| egypturnash wrote:
| I am amused that despite mentioning both Keygen Church and Master
| Boot Record, this list refrains from mentioning that the former
| is a side project of the latter.
|
| And, yeah, if I was still collecting my music as CDs? Keygen
| Church would be filed next to the MBR because of that, not over
| in the Ks.
| hamstergene wrote:
| Electronic music is also full of remixes, for example:
|
| Artist: Moby
|
| Title: Simple Love (B-Motion Remix)
|
| The actual artist is B-Motion and any kind of browser/catalog
| must group this track with other B-Motion music, or in worst case
| both, because remixes are in entirely different genres than the
| original.
|
| So "Artist" is not necessarily the artist.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| Another famous one is Prince's "Love Symbol no 2".
|
| Fun fact: he adopted it as his stage name to spite Warner
| Brothers Music, due to the unfavorable contract terms and the
| creative meddling they kept doing (among other things). By terms
| of the contract they had to go along with whatever stage name he
| picked. They had to spend a bunch of money having a custom font
| created, then mailed on floppy disk to every music reviewer,
| newspaper, magazine, radio station, etc as part of album
| promotion. No one was on the internet in those days so it ended
| up causing them a lot of trouble. I guess he found his own
| loophole in the contract.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| Catalogue numbers!
|
| You wouldn't index a collection of records by the shape of its
| sonic wave forms, would you?
|
| No more would you index by the artistic representations on the
| cover which, as we have seen, includes everything including the
| words purporting to be the artist name and the title of the
| release.
|
| No, of course not! You use the barcode on the back!
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalog_number_(music)
|
| For white labels, I guess you have to hide them in a pile until
| they get a release.
| recursive wrote:
| I was hoping this was going to be about the musical part of music
| rather than the book keeping.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I was hoping it was going to be about music engraving. See e.g.
| https://twitter.com/ThreatNotation
| Lammy wrote:
| > Most albums have several versions/releases
|
| And some times they're altered without any obviously-visible
| indication like differing number of tracks or "edition" naming,
| e.g.:
|
| - MM..FOOD? (2004) [RSE0051-2] where "Kookies" samples Sesame
| Street: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RYCLfGE-_Q
|
| - MM..FOOD? (2007) [RSE0084-2] where "Kookies" is totally re-
| recorded with a different and non-infringing beat:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iYSwvdEfeY
|
| If you use a streaming service you're hearing the latter and
| might not ever realize the former existed. The re-record is a
| fine song, but the original fits much better with the rest of the
| album.
| dotancohen wrote:
| This is my problem with Rust in Peace. It was a terrific album,
| but Dave didn't want to continue paying royalties to people he
| no longer likes. So in 2004 or so almost the whole album was
| rerecorded with studio musicians. It is horrible, mechanical,
| flat. Even some of the vocals were redone, poorly.
|
| I'll sign up for the streaming service that provides the
| original 1990 Rust in Peace.
| scns wrote:
| Is that the album where they blew the advance on drugs and
| had none left for good mixing and mastering?
| dotancohen wrote:
| That was Killing is my Business I think. Dave remastered
| that one too, which is actually not bad, but some things
| were changed and due to copyright he had to leave off the
| Nancy Sinatra song.
|
| I'd love a version of Killing is my Business with the
| remastered content were it is identical to the original,
| but with none of the content or artistic changes. Something
| like the despecialized Star Wars videos.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Yeah that was particularly obnoxious. According to
| discogs.com I think there are more recent reissues/remasters
| of the original version.
| dotancohen wrote:
| The discogs javascript is not playing nice with the current
| Firefox. I'm specifically referring to the "Show more
| versions..." control.
|
| OK, found it! It seems that the desirable keyword is
| "Reissue" and specifically to avoid the keyword "Remaster".
| There was at least a Reissued but not Remastered LP in
| 2013. Maybe more, but that javascript is horrible!
| slothtrop wrote:
| I had the same problem earlier. Definitely a bug they
| recently introduced. It was easier sifting through
| sorting by year descending.
| kzrdude wrote:
| This annoys me in Spotify so much, that we often only get one
| version of the album, and usually a new one instead of the
| original.
|
| And maybe I should feel like it's a luxury to have extra bonus
| tracks with more takes at the end - but I lean over to the
| album purity side more - the album is one artwork by itself, I
| want the original track listing and nothing more, as "the
| album".
| iggldiggl wrote:
| > If you use a streaming service you're hearing the latter and
| might not ever realize the former existed.
|
| On a number of live Bob Dylan albums, for inexplicable reasons
| all online versions (not just streaming, but the download
| releaes, too) are now missing the between-tracks content that
| on the physical CDs is part of the pregap, which means you're
| missing out on the funny stage banter on the 1964 Halloween
| concert, or the infamous heckling on the electric half of the
| 1966 Manchester concert.
| rcthompson wrote:
| AC/DC is another edge case I've seen, mainly because in some
| contexts slashes are used as separators between multiple artists,
| so "AC/DC" could be misinterpreted as a list of 2 artists named
| "AC" and "DC".
| amelius wrote:
| Doesn't work well in filenames either.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| "/This name iss a valid POSIX path" is my display name on
| some services at my job. It helps to remind people to
| consider things like spaces, homoglyph attacks, and non-ASCII
| characters.
| can16358p wrote:
| What is the deal with Japanese exclusive bonus tracks/promo
| thing?
|
| Interested about why a significant number of albums have Japanese
| promo versions with extra tracks. Is that a cultural thing about
| Japan or is there another specific reason? (I know it's not only
| Japan but mostly Japanese editions that I see throughout the web)
|
| As if, almost even brouillard has a Japanese bonus track named
| brouillard in their album brouillard.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I heard somewhere that it was an incentive for the Japanese
| market, which still today is a large physical CD market, to buy
| the locally distributed releases of albums instead of just
| buying the original foreign release, which may have been
| available earlier and for cheaper, or if they already bought
| the original release, buy it again.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Is this why the super-high quality vinyls were also available
| only in Japan? I cannot remember the name of the company, but
| there is (was) some company selling increased dynamic range
| recordings of popular albums, on very durable (as in,
| regularly replace the needle) vinyl. I had heard an imported
| (from Japan) Dark Side of the Moon recording on that once,
| and it just blew me away.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I imagine the super-high quality vinyls are because of a
| very special breed of Japanese audiophiles who don't mind
| spending on their hobby.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-gift-for-music-lovers-who-
| hav...
| dotancohen wrote:
| I was likely wrong, it wasn't a Japanese company. This is
| most likely the company that produced the high-quality
| recording that I heard:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Fidelity_Sound_Lab
| scns wrote:
| I once read somehere that CDs are expensive when new, can't
| confirm though. When i was there i bought them used for cheap.
| Slayers' Hell Awaits, colored like egg yolk ~6EUR IIRC, thank
| you very much.
| parenthesis wrote:
| I was searching for the artist Urban Soul on Tidal to discover
| there's another artist called Urban Soul (I wanted the Roland
| Clark project) with albums by both mixed up together in the
| search result.
|
| 'Twas all in vain, since I wanted a particular remix of `Alright'
| -- which I have on a vinyl promo less that a metre from where I
| am sitting (I can remember clear as day buying it more than 25
| years ago) -- which Tidal don't have. So I ended up listening to
| it on YouTube.
| vermooten wrote:
| Don't forget how much streaming services struggle with classical
| music meta data.
| throwaway384813 wrote:
| Bookmarking this for future reference!
|
| I recently started a fun/side project which aims to improve my
| personal tedious process of (a) managing a queue of things I want
| to listen to, (b) keeping track of which of them I listened/liked
| and (c) easily sharing my "discovery activity" with my friends
| who share the same passion.
|
| The idea is that you can add items to a "Queue" list, using
| Discogs Master URLs (e.g.
| https://www.discogs.com/master/1994809-Alt%C4%B1n-G%C3%BCn-Y...)
| or Spotify album links, because this is what I use in my day to
| day.
|
| So I've started by parsing Discogs' data dumps[1] to backfill my
| database (aka. "release groups" in MusicBrainz), so that I avoid
| hitting Discogs API with every user query) with all "master"
| releases. But then realized that (a) they don't include cover
| images and (b) not every release has a corresponding "master"
| release and (c) they're not updated frequently enough (maybe
| monthly).
|
| Then I thought of using MusicBrainz data dumps[2] to augment the
| entries by Discogs in my database, which do provide cover art
| images, but then how do I correlate them with the already-
| inserted Discogs releases? Fortunately there's a Discogs URL for
| many release groups from MusicBrainz; unfortunately only 50% of
| them do have it.
|
| Then I could perhaps use solely MusicBrainz data and not Discogs
| at all, but then what if people are mostly using Discogs links?
| This will result in two identical records on my database,
| pointing to the same underlying release but in different sites
| (Discogs & MusicBrainz). Perhaps this can only be solved by human
| moderation and providing the ability to "merge two items".
|
| Then I thought of actually contributing to MusicBrainz and add
| the Discogs URL for every release group.
|
| Another interesting assumption I made, which turned out
| incorrect, was the every [artist, release title] pair was unique.
| But that's not the case - an artist may have multiple "master"
| releases (i.e. completely different tracks inside) with the same
| title.
|
| [1] http://data.discogs.com/
|
| [2] https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Database
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