Artist metadata

Ideas
1

Yet another post - for yet another topic.

One feature I miss from spotify, although clearly not essential, but that I keep coming back to, is being able to display some trivia about artists.

There are several services that could be used:

  • discogs
  • lastfm
  • Metabrainz (thanks @Matthias_Meulien , I found out about this from you previous post here).

I’ll probably end up giving a try on this by writing a generic extension for this, although initial experiments show that this will never be perfect, esp. for artists that have homonyms.

1 Like
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At present time, clients do that on their own: Iris fetch information from Last.fm if I remember correctly; Argos from Metabrainz then Wikipedia.

(…) this will never be perfect, esp. for artists that have homonyms.

If the music files have tags with MBID (Musicbrainz identifier) then it’s non-ambiguous. This is what was implemented in Argos.

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Ah right, last.fm seems very furnished as well. I feared their dev account were manually reviewed, but it seems they are not after all. And their search seems to be a bit more effective, sorting by relevance.

If the music files have tags with MBID (Musicbrainz identifier) then it’s non-ambiguous. This is what was implemented in Argos.

Ha didn’t know that was a thing ! I’m mostly listening music from tidal though, so I can’t use that. I was considering building a db of id associations, but that’s the kind of thing that is hard to maintain…

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Musicbrainz let’s you search using Spotify URI, which is brilliant. I think they also support Deezer ID, but not Tidal.

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Note also that the Troi recommendation engine from Musicbrainz devs implements a fuzzy index that could be reused to dynamically deduce MBIDs from artist and track names.

Would be nice to be able to automagically bind MBIDs to tracks in Mopidy!

(See Support for recommendations in Mopidy-Listenbrainz - #6 by rob - ListenBrainz - MetaBrainz Community Discourse for some context)

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That is really interesting, we need to take a real look at if/how we can use that. Thanks for the pointer.

Would be nice to be able to automagically bind MBIDs to tracks in Mopidy!

I agree… again, we need to think how we can do that. Open to suggestions, here or on Zulip (better).

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Actually, can you do it for Tidal (and others) using https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/ ?
e.g. Rumours – Harmony ?

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Actually, can you do it for Tidal (and others) using https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/ ?
e.g. Rumours – Harmony ?

Could work out, but this only works for releases, so it’d need to go idal artist → Tidal album → MusicBrainz album → MusicBrainz artist.

I’ll start by fetching data from last.fm, and see how it compares with what I can find from metabrainz in practice.

I realized that metabrainz does not store any artist bio / description, which is mostly what I was looking for, and Wikipedia data is not the best as well, as it’s purpose is more being factual than giving a short description of what a band is about.

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Ahh yes you’re right, that’s convoluted.

Would adding a bio : string field to our existing Artist model suffice for what you’re looking for? Although unsure how some backend (e.g. Mopidy-Spotify) would be able to populate this field without calling out to an 3rd party service, Spotify’s API doesn’t provide this data as far as I remember. And we no wouldn’t want every backend reimplenting a metabrainz lookup system. Not sure how this would best fit.

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Honestly I’m not sure it’s worth changing the models for that now, we can start experimenting with the different data sources first:

  • see what we can get in different usecases
  • see how that can be integrated in the frontends

For now, beside bio, what could be nice:

  • artist specific images
  • period of activity (this is displayed in lastFm, I’m not sure exactly where this info comes from, but this could be computed with first and last release e.g.)
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Many metadata are made available by Wikidata, for example:

(belong those data is Tidal artist ID, YouTube video ID, Spotify artist ID, Wiki quotes, images, etc.).

All available under the friendly Creative Common license. Most of them with sources.

Metabrainz website displays the Wikipedia short page which is available from Wikidata.

Make sure to read Last.fm term of services before implementing a feature based on their API…

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Ha seems nice as well. Now what I’m dreaming of would be a way to automate the creation of missing entries !

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Got something working, using MusicBrainz search to get wikidata id ( wikidata does not have search API unfortunately), then wikipedia link: