Comment by exogen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exogen | Hacker News Reader

Discogs is great. In my experience doing entity matching/record linkage across all the different music APIs:

- Discogs seems to have the most complete release data.

- MusicBrainz has the best organized encyclopedic data. For example they have entities for specific instruments, relationships between artists, entries for supporting roles like recording engineer, etc.

- Wikipedia still has the best common-sense/canonical info about singles. For example, Wikipedia will tell you in the first sentence (or infobox) "song X was first released on album Y in year Z." Answering that can actually be quite challenging on other services.

- Spotify is the go-to for finding useful qualities of individual songs (due to their acquisition of Echo Nest). Things like popularity, danceability, energy, etc.

A long-term project of mine has been wrapping all these up in a more approachable API. So far that has only resulted in this big GraphQL schema project: https://github.com/exogen/graphbrainz – but the idea is to build on that and make it even simpler.

> - Wikipedia still has the best common-sense/canonical info about singles. For example, Wikipedia will tell you in the first sentence (or infobox) "song X was first released on album Y in year Z." Answering that can actually be quite challenging on other services.

Sad fact: For a while Discogs had an experimental feature aptly called "Tracks". It allowed individual tracks, not just the whole release, to be viewed as separate entities along with references to all releases on which said track appeared. A database of canonical tracks.

It enabled me to see if that great track from an ultra-rare and hard to find album perhaps appeared on a compilation or any other much easier to buy release. Sure, you can achieve similar results by simply searching, but it's much more cumbersome and downright difficult when it comes to rather generic track titles leading to countless irrelevant results.

Sadly the feature was abandoned: https://www.discogs.com/track

There's also AcousticBrainz for audio features, coupled to MusicBrainz: https://acousticbrainz.org/

Do Spotify expose much of that API? I remember using, or coming across, Echo Nest around the time of its acquisition only to find that Spotify cripplied its functionality.

As far as I know they still support all the same fields that the Echo Nest did! At least, I can't remember any additional ones that aren't here:

https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...

Wow, "Echo Nest" really threw me for a loop (Amazon Echo? Google Nest?) - it is a research project created at MIT Media Lab to analyze audio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Echo_Nest

Very well explained. I am a programmer who DJs and a music collector, so I am naturally interested in these technologies.

I used to do a lot of data mining on data from various musical sources. Mostly with the goal to make the discovery process faster.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com