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Comment by wcerfgba | Hacker News Reader

I find jazz has a similar problem: there may be a band leader but usually each instrumentalist is of note, and there is no way I am aware of to track each performer in an ID3 or APE tag.

Consider for example the Cannonball Adderley album "Somethin' Else" [1]. The album artist is Cannonball because he led the session, but he is in no way the 'author' of the entire album. The performances of Miles, Hank, Sam and Art on their respective instruments are what make the album what it is. In addition, some of the tunes are 'standards': "Autumn Leaves" is by Kosma and "Love for Sale" is by Porter, although I suppose this info could be stored in the ID3 composer field on each track.

I would love a way to track performers across all my jazz albums and be able to see which albums different people performed on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somethin%27_Else_(Cannonball_A...

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I've found similar problems with a bunch of group names. For instance, I want to listen to more Gerry Mulligan, specifically Gerry Mulligan and the Concert Jazz Band, which had a Complete Verve recordings album that I got from the jazz collection at my university's music school, but Spotify and Apple do not have. They did several other albums and Mulligan had other groups (trios, quartets, etc) but they're hard to correlate together. Many of the jazz greats were in the boat where they performed on a lot of things that wouldn't list them as primary artists, but that's how you need to find them to find 95% of their work -- especially in instruments like my favorite: trombone. Band leader vs band members doesn't even have an ID3 field to the best of my knowledge without just sticking them all into the artist field. Compound that with the amount of jazz out there in the no-copyright state (because of age or racism or both in the distant past) that only exists in a collector's collection as a 45rpm stamping with low-ish quality and it turns out that there's a lot of missing music from pre-1950 or so.

It'd be great if there was a music service that somehow incorporated the metadata in something like the Allmusic database. Say for example, while listening to an album, you could click on any side member and easily access any other album they'd played on. Same with songwriters, or album producers, recording engineers, etc. You can get all or most of this manually, but tied into a listening interface would be pretty slick.

That said, I don't know how much of a market there'd be for this

There is, sort of; it's called Roon, and IIRC its interface can do exactly what you're describing. Back when I was a subscriber, its equivalent of a "daily discovery" list would frequently come up with things like "Highlighted Performer: Drums McDrumface" and create a playlist of every song in my library McDrumface played drums on.

https://roonlabs.com

The downside with Roon is that it's not actually a standalone music service; it's sort of like a software-only version of Sonos or Bluesound, letting you aggregate your personal library and (extremely) select streaming services and send sound to any Roon client device (a computer or mobile device running Roon software or, in some cases, directly to hardware that supports Roon's transport protocol). And, it's still a subscription service -- so you're paying $10/month for great metadata, that multidevice playback system, and an "audiophile" music player. I subscribed for a couple years, but decided I really couldn't justify it.

I very much agree; particularly as I may wish to hear particular bassists and they are usually not listed as the band leader. It would also be useful to able to add multiple tags, both "jazz" and "post bop", for example.

wish there was an algorithm that could make me a playlist full of stuff that sounds like Blue in Green from Kind of Blue.

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