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Comment by infofarmer | Hacker News Reader

There's a reason why MusicBrainz SQL schema looks like what it looks like, after years of careful simplification to achieve an optimum approximation of reality.

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Database/Schema

10+ years ago at Zvooq, during the golden age of music metadata and recsys startups, we tried to really solve entity resolution in the domain. I've never seen another streaming service make an honest attempt at this, even at Spotify with their 2014 acquihire of the Echo Nest. You still get Utada and Hikaru Utada as ~completely separate entities

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I think MusicBrainz did a great job to find some common agreed denominator between all these styles and formats for music metadata. After setting up Funkwhale [1], I went through all my 16000 MP3s and synced those with the MusicBrainz Library, also adding new entries. It went pretty smooth and my library looks much better now. It is also really fun to listen again, when everything is structured and labeled.

(btw., yes, I bought a large percentage and, nowadays, mostly buy on bandcamp [2]).

[1]: https://funkwhale.audio/ [2]: https://bandcamp.com/

Ha! I contributed the initial classical style guide many, many moons ago.

I'm still technically an automod although I haven't participated for a long time.

what.cd had a really solid model as a user, but I've certainly been pleasantly pleased with musicbrainz.org

What.cd had a very simple data model and it had the same issue as many music sites trying to fit it into a simple schema (and not a more sophisticated one like MB). The first issue that comes to mind was artist with the same name, these ended up being the same artist (Just like on Last.fm) if not split by hand by changing the artist name.

The schema is here in case you are curious: https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle/blob/master/gazelle.sql

I really miss what.cd

How do you feel about redacted? It seems to operate in the same spirit (if not backend code)

Got nothing against them, but it's still not what just like what wasn't oink. Every time there is something lost you just can't get back.

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