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.
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.
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