[HN Gopher] Poor schemas, poor cataloguing: why music tagging sucks
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Poor schemas, poor cataloguing: why music tagging sucks
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 39 points
Date : 2023-02-18 19:32 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sporks.space)
(TXT) w3m dump (sporks.space)
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| This reminds me of an article I read a while back of weird mp3
| tags.
|
| One example was Rammstein's Untitled album, it literally doesn't
| have a title. How do you tag that?
|
| (if anyone has the link to the article, I didn't add it to my
| Wallabag collection...)
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >streaming is useful for discovery
|
| Only if you want your service provider to do the discovery for
| you.
|
| I have AM and I don't need or want their discovery as I am quite
| proficient at doing my own discovery. This means that 3 of 5
| icons on the bottom row of their ios interface are a total waste
| of incredibly valuable UI space for me.
| msla wrote:
| I'm fine with "service providers" essentially similar to FM
| radio stations (in addition to actual radio stations, FM or
| otherwise) doing some discovery for me because the good people
| at Soma FM and WFMU and KFGM and KBGA know more about their
| music than I do, and their brains aren't driven by an algorithm
| aiming at getting me more like what I've already heard. This
| doesn't have to be human-curated, even, as long as the
| algorithm behind the selection is not tailored to me.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I really think a stupid-simple labeling scheme is the most ideal
| path. You can get by with only 3 tables and 6 columns if you do
| this.
|
| Sure, you'd have to have labels like "Release Year 1999", "Track
| #2", etc., but this path can actually be very elegant and
| desirable at query time.
|
| A few generic columns added to the label/tag table would allow
| workarounds to most of the edge cases. For example, if you added
| an "IsSequential" column, then labels like "Track #1", "Track #2"
| can be interpreted as such.
|
| I think the dragon is trying to build a schema that directly
| represents the business of music. There are so many genres,
| cultures, varieties, etc., that you would go insane before you
| had everything properly covered.
| 369548684892826 wrote:
| Seems ok for personal tagging but for a general schema that can
| be used internationally, like the kind of thing the link is
| talking about, you can't really have words that need
| translation mixed in with the tag data.
| thewebcount wrote:
| I have to wonder if the problem exists partly because most people
| don't care? As a musician myself, I care a little bit. But as a
| user, I haven't updated metadata on a music file (other than the
| ones I create from my own music) in probably 2 decades. What I
| get from the music services I download or stream from seems
| decent enough. I'm not a collector of rare or obscure songs or
| versions of songs. I mostly stream music, and have an older
| catalog from my CDs (which are now in my attic). I don't have
| time to hand-curate the tags or databases or whatever for my
| music, TV Shows, movies, etc. What the services currently offer
| mostly works OK for me.
| Stealthisbook wrote:
| Librarians really care about it since they have to get the
| exact thing a patron is looking for. Most people also do care
| occasionally. Everybody has the moment when they want to find a
| specific track, maybe from a live album that featured that one
| drummer they like. Having a service that serves everybody means
| every day having to fulfill thousands of those individual once
| in a decade requests
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| CrypticShift wrote:
| I'm for dissociating the metadata from the files. I have a custom
| (Text) DB of Artists and Albums, enhanced by online services
| metadata (last.fm, RYM, Spotify). I'm more interested in
| flexibility (filters, notes...) than in "exactness"
| (Versions...).
| photochemsyn wrote:
| With all the buzz over machine learning and 'the classification
| problem' it might be interesting to run something like a waveform
| classifier trained on large music collections, i.e. on the binary
| files themselves, - at least as a means of discovering new music
| one likes (probably wouldn't solve the metadata problem as
| described in the article however, that's more of an archival
| issue it seems).
| Spivak wrote:
| I think you're describing https://maroofy.com/
|
| But the bigger issue is that while it's pretty good at finding
| songs that sound similar it's not great at finding songs that
| are musically similar.
|
| But nonetheless I really appreciate a novel recommendation
| algorithm that's not based on popularity. I've gotten good recs
| from this site with with less than 10 monthly listeners which
| is super cool -- I've never been so underground.
| tunesmith wrote:
| I've had this problem to an even more frustrating degree when
| trying to catalog my own rehearsal recordings. I'm the composer,
| so at least that part is clear. But the "album artists" vary from
| rehearsal to rehearsal, I have many recordings of the same
| version of song, differentiated by rehearsal date, and I have
| different versions of songs too, for instance from when I add or
| drop an extra verse or extend a bridge. A lot of these recordings
| are in iTunes, but now I'm petrified to turn on iCloud Library
| sync because of the various data loss scenarios that are still
| out there.
|
| Believe it or not, I had my entire process nailed when Bento
| existed. Then they got rid of it and I tried to cobble something
| together with Filemaker and it was always an awkward fit.
|
| I'm not really aware if there's an open source or commercial
| offering out there for this sort of thing. I've come close a few
| times to just investing the hundred hours or so to roll my own
| web-based thing on a private server.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Is the field named 'Album Artists' or 'Album Artist' ? I
| noticed in Navidrome, it will group Compilation albums by
| 'Album Artist'.
| sammalloy wrote:
| Wikipedia has most of this data already available, so all music
| software has to do is use it.
| commotionfever wrote:
| or https://musicbrainz.org/
| ssl232 wrote:
| Or better, Wikidata: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| Cataloguing classical music has always been a headache, even for
| experienced librarians. There are multiple recordings, some
| conductors record the same piece multiple times, with same or
| different orchestras and soloists, arrangements for different
| instruments (maybe in a different key), parts of a piece known
| under alternative names (Bach's Air for a G-string is just one
| movement from his orchestral suite, and he never called it that
| anyway). Old composers often borrowed bits or rearranged whole
| pieces (Mozart did his version of Handel's Messiah), and various
| historical ways to name and number pieces (concerto #1 in B from
| opus 6).
| boppo1 wrote:
| I've wanted to 'get into' classical but this had made it
| difficult. I just settle with whatever the local station plays
| and forget the name thereafter.
| irrational wrote:
| > Individual tracks have no relation to each other
|
| I added a bunch of songs to my favorites in Spotify and then hit
| the enhance button which is supposed to suggest other songs I
| might like. Many of the songs it suggested were duplicates of the
| ones I already had, but from different albums. It wasn't able to
| recognize that this song was the exact same song in various
| albums of the same artist.
| youssefabdelm wrote:
| I'm currently in the middle of creating a user-contributed site
| that I think will benefit from "schemas" (or just organization /
| "cleanliness" in general)... as a COMPLETE beginner who's very
| concerned about this issue (I really don't want my data to turn
| into a mess)...
|
| 1. what resources would you recommend?
|
| 2. Is there a "gold standard"?
|
| Article already mentioned some great terms to look up and
| explore.
| amgutier wrote:
| Roon handles metadata and relationships between entities the
| least bad of anything I've tried. It'll do things like link
| covers and live performances of the same song together, or let
| you group multiple issues of the same album and switch between
| them.
|
| It's not cheap, and it takes some effort to fix some bad source
| data, but I've found it very rewarding and get a ton of enjoyment
| exploring my library now.
|
| https://roonlabs.com/
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