Is this Mahler? This sounds like Mahler | Hacker News Reader

Is this Mahler? This sounds like Mahler

sarabee.github.io

285 pointsluu35 comments

It's great to see modern software engineers dealing with classical music!

It would be amazing if spotify could put some more love into their gigantic collection of classical recordings. Their autoplay feature often changes the piece in between movements, which is a torture. Some database for navigating through all the works of a composer, sorted by significance would also be very helpful to discover new pieces.

I would also love to see more innovation in score management/recognition etc. Like seeing the score while you listen to a recording or being able to compare different recordings at a given bar. You could even teach music lessons if you can use it to easily compare home made recordings with professional ones.

Spotify overall would be hugely improved if we could just filter and navigate by labels, for electronic and particularly for Classical.

I'm pretty sure they even have the data somewhere anyway, there was definitely a "Here are your stats for [Duration of time]" thing with subgenres and similar.

You can at least search by label in Spotify, using "label:X" as a search term. Not perfect but it's better than nothing...

I've come across this in the past that worked really well til the integration with spotify broke and I didn't try and fix it. https://getconcertmaster.com/

Check out ConcertMaster for Spotify and Concertino for Apple Music. They have pretty good database of classical music that acts as an overlay for Spotify/Apple Music, essentially fixing the tags for a lot of composers/works.

The data is also available separately at https://openopus.org/

Wow open opus is what I have been looking for for a long time! Thanks!

This is what I once tried to build, but stopped as I encountered too many unknowns: https://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/comments/fxsg8s/disc...

If open opus could be extended with such kind of metadata, that would be incredibly valuable.

This is great. Anyone know of something similar for jazz? Being able to see the full personnel of recordings and explore based on that would be amazing (actually it would be cool for rock too).

Are you familiar with the Musicbrainz database? [1]

What features (if any) are missing that would make it more useful for you as a listener? I'm not affiliated with them but I'm interested in building apps in this area, to make art and music easier to explore and navigate

[1] https://musicbrainz.org

Nope haven't seen it. If the data is reasonably complete, it looks great.

I tried out ConcertMaster, and I really like the ability to see works organized by type. But the database seems very, very small? There's almost no baroque or renaissance music here beyond the big names like Bach, Biber, and Vivaldi, for example.

Are you familiar with Idagio (https://app.idagio.com/)? Superior to Spotify across every dimension for classical music.

It even has the recording comparison feature you are dreaming of!

That is very cool. Now I'm missing the feature to compare recordings at a given bar! And to see the score from imslp :D

edit: Just applied there for a job. I'm curious what they will say.

Awesome. If you'd received money for leads you'd earned your provision now ;)

Idagio looks pretty awesome. Do you know who's behind it?

My only complaint so far is that they claim that one of the reasons for creating Idagio is that the main streaming services are track/album-oriented, implying that Idagio does this better. But if I go to an Idagio album (here [1] is a random example), there are just tracks. If I view the same album at Apple Music, the album is nicely divided into works [2], and also annotates each track with the composer.

I do love the ability to browse by work and find matching recordings, though.

[1] https://app.idagio.com/albums/r-strauss-and-brahms-orchestra...

[2] https://i.imgur.com/d3sNrnc.jpg

I guess they have the metadata - if you click on the work [1], you get only the tracks that are part of it [2]. Idagio seems to be a company located in Berlin! [3]

[1] https://i.imgur.com/hAe8ZSk.png [2] https://i.imgur.com/EGkTwSD.png [3] https://about.idagio.com/jobs

Indeed. It's the in-album grouping that I was desiring, though. (By the way, I pasted the wrong link: This is the Schumann/Brahms album: https://app.idagio.com/albums/schumann-and-brahms-lieder.)

Link 1 should have been: https://app.idagio.com/albums/schumann-and-brahms-lieder.

Any idea how it compares to https://www.primephonic.com/ ?

The worst is using free spotify and you get an ad between the third and fourth movements of Beethoven's fifth... So agonizing

A low-tech option is to keep at hand a copy of Morgenstern and Barlow’s Dictionary of Musical Themes.[0] Listen for a central theme in the piece that’s playing, search for the sequence of notes assuming that it’s in the key of C major or minor, and voilà.

There used to be a website that offered a search function for this work, but it went offline some time ago.[1] I really miss it (though I own a printed copy).

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Musical_Them...

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160310085832/http://www.multim...

Low-tech but but requires some high-end ears

That’s true. I think a lot of people learn solfège in primary school, but then it’s “use it or lose it.”

The quality of general music teaching in schools varies wildly, and I'm afraid the average experience is not too helpful. As usual, some countries are better than others.

Personal anecdote from a medium sized generally pretty average school in Finland: we were never expected or required to know anything about music, the lessons in primary school were just listening the teacher play some simple melodies with piano (we weren't allowed to even try that precious instrument), "singing" random stuff (it was more like shouting, there were never any exercises or guidance), and occasionally listening some pop cds, no exams of any kind (which meant music was our favourite subject after physical education, drawing was pretty popular too).

There's this: https://www.musipedia.org/

I usually go first for the "piano" interface, but the other options can be useful too.

It couldn't find some of the songs I tried but it finds interesting similarities. I didn't know that "London bridge is falling down" was based on Bach's BWV1005 for example (or vice-versa).

Peachnote may also be used for the same purpose, but its usefulness is much diminished by their limiting of the length of search queries.

There is still http://themefinder.org/, which is passable for obvious stuff and offers a lot of different ways to search.

Great stuff! It might look even better if you use a serif typeface such as Plantin

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantin_(typeface)

Very cool! Fascinating to read and find soon many commonalities with the author.

* Works in tmux, builds currently playing into status bar

* As an engineer, prefers classical music

Only suggestion, I might try to find a way to make the updates asynchronous, not periodic. If the endpoint were checked in a tight loop, you could trigger the update on change.

Gb major. This Chopin guy is just showing off now.

I believe Nicolas Slonimsky may have invented playing Gb Chopin with an orange, but I could only find a defunct audio link for that. This was the best video version I could find of the Black Key Etude in Gb played with an orange (much better than the numerous Lang Lang versions online)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK4R65XtfQY&t=42

Hell - this is another hardware piece I would say easily has a market. I think I just found a theme in HN ...

The classical music app that I want is surtitles. I.e, your phone figures out what is being sung on the radio, and displays an English translation of the lyrics.

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