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The music classifying nightmare

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Re: The music classifying nightmare

#3

Post by andreasvc »

webjunkie wrote: post #2

The single most annoying thing I encountered was the inability of ID3 to handle multiple albums. Every artist sooner or later releases the exact same piece of music on another album. WHY DIDN'T THEY THINK OF THAT?

That's irrelevant, it's either ripped from one or the other, and that's the information that should be there. Lookinng up on which albums a song has appeared should be a database / wikipedia lookup. Think about it, is it relevant on which christmas compilations "so this is christmas" has appeared?

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#4

Post by baddox »

andreasvc wrote: post #3
webjunkie wrote: post #2

The single most annoying thing I encountered was the inability of ID3 to handle multiple albums. Every artist sooner or later releases the exact same piece of music on another album. WHY DIDN'T THEY THINK OF THAT?

That's irrelevant, it's either ripped from one or the other, and that's the information that should be there. Lookinng up on which albums a song has appeared should be a database / wikipedia lookup. Think about it, is it relevant on which christmas compilations "so this is christmas" has appeared?

It's not irrelevant. If the exact same recording of a song appears on two albums, an ideal categorization system would allow it to appear as such without storing multiple (redundant) copies of the song. An easy way to think of it is a normalized relational database. If the song has an id of 5 and is on two albums with id 2 and 3, then there would be an AlbumSong join table with schema (album_id, song_id) and two rows: (2, 5) and (3, 5). It should be irrelevant which album you ripped or downloaded first.

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#6

Post by ux »

baddox wrote: post #4
andreasvc wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's irrelevant, it's either ripped from one or the other, and that's the information that should be there. Lookinng up on which albums a song has appeared should be a database / wikipedia lookup. Think about it, is it relevant on which christmas compilations "so this is christmas" has appeared?

It's not irrelevant. If the exact same recording of a song appears on two albums, an ideal categorization system would allow it to appear as such without storing multiple (redundant) copies of the song. An easy way to think of it is a normalized relational database. If the song has an id of 5 and is on two albums with id 2 and 3, then there would be an AlbumSong join table with schema (album_id, song_id) and two rows…

I wonder how often a bit exact copy of one song appears... Sure the songs might have the same title and duration, but some very trivial edits might be done. You need to be extra careful when identifying these songs as identical if you don't want to lose any information.

Of course, from a listener point of view it might not mean much, but how would you decide at which level of non-similarity a track is the same as another one?

It's a bit like choosing a lossy codec quality, it's very subjective, and for indexation this might not be the best way.

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#7

Post by niklaslogren »

I feel your pain. I have also stopped caring about music classifying, for much the same reasons you listed. Nowadays I use only Spotify, and I trust in their tagging abilities, and in Last.FM's auto-correcting ability.

My main concern when I used foobar used to be how to handle multiple artists on the same album, which always resulted in the album being split up when displayed in a list. I was unbelievably happy when I discovered the "Album artist"-tag, which unites all songs in an album under the same banner, while still preserving (and scrobbling) the original artist name.

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#8

Post by ux »

andrewcooke wrote: post #5

doesn't the musicbrainz schema cover most/some of this? http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Database/Schema also, given the ubiquity of UTF-8, why the need for ASCII?

It would be interesting to make an analysis on how MusicBrainz deals with all these problems, I admit I didn't look much into this. But AFAICT it wouldn't really solve the file system problem, except if you decide to name your files with a hash. Also, you might still want at some point to keep extra information MusicBrainz wouldn't handle, even if you have a MusicBrainz ID stored in the file to identify the music.

About the ASCII, my point was just all about the fact that you can't actually keep only the international name and you need to store the name in different language version. Obviously, I don't have any problem with using UTF-8.

PS: note that UTF-8 won't be able to represent properly mathematical formula... :)

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#9

Post by andrewcooke »

ux wrote: post #8
andrewcooke wrote: post #5

doesn't the musicbrainz schema cover most/some of this? http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Database/Schema also, given the ubiquity of UTF-8, why the need for ASCII?

It would be interesting to make an analysis on how MusicBrainz deals with all these problems, I admit I didn't look much into this. But AFAICT it wouldn't really solve the file system problem, except if you decide to name your files with a hash. Also, you might still want at some point to keep extra information MusicBrainz wouldn't handle, even if you have a MusicBrainz ID stored in the file to identify the music. Ab…

yeah, sorry, was in a rush to go eat. didn't really mean that your worries would all go away, only that musicbrainz might be a good place to look for more info.

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#10

Post by redbad »

baddox wrote: post #4
andreasvc wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's irrelevant, it's either ripped from one or the other, and that's the information that should be there. Lookinng up on which albums a song has appeared should be a database / wikipedia lookup. Think about it, is it relevant on which christmas compilations "so this is christmas" has appeared?

It's not irrelevant. If the exact same recording of a song appears on two albums, an ideal categorization system would allow it to appear as such without storing multiple (redundant) copies of the song. An easy way to think of it is a normalized relational database. If the song has an id of 5 and is on two albums with id 2 and 3, then there would be an AlbumSong join table with schema (album_id, song_id) and two rows…

    >  If the exact same recording of a song appears on two 
    >  albums, an ideal categorization system would allow it to 
    >  appear as such without storing multiple (redundant) copies 
    >  of the song.
I don't agree. The song was released twice; if you have both albums, you ought to have two copies of it.
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