RE: DIYHA Digital Jukebox

["Mark Hetherington" <mark.egroups@xxxxxxx>]

Sorry for missing this out in the previous post, pressed 'Control Enter' by
mistake. Coke and keyboards so does not mix :)

> The problem I am up against at the moment is that I am getting old and
> havent heard of several of the artists in the archive, and even
> some of the
> ones I have heard of, I have no knowledge of their work. This means
that I
[snip]

CDDB might be of help in this but might be a fair amount of work getting to
the info unless you maybe write some kind of simple program to grab and
parse their info. There are probably other resources on the net offering
information in a more usable database format.

> 1. How do people primarily choose what to listen to ?

Personally, where 1 is most likely I would probably say:

> 	by Artist	*3*
> 	by Title	*2*
> 	by Genre	*1*
> 	by Album	*4*
> 	by Playlist	*5*

Playlist is a difficult one since I might use 1-4 to build playlists then
use a playlist as priority, but usually it would be last on my list. If
ever
I got around to building a decent set of playlists, this might become my
primary choice.

> 2. If I can make a downloadable version of the software available
> with loads
> of Artists and Songs already populated are people interested. ?

Would the database be accessible from an external program (e.g. Access) or
is it custom for the application?

> Obviously it wont contain the MP3's or any actual Album details
> but most of

No MP3s obviously, but why no Album details? One idea for albums is to have
them stored as playlists. That way people could contribute
"albums" that
referenced the main database entries.

Not sure if you are already doing or have this planned, but it would be
good
to reduce repeated MP3s as you mentioned above by allowing one song to be
linked to multiple database records. An album playlist would do this for
album based lists, but for multiple artist/title issues, it would likely
fall within the realm of database itself. If the database became a
contributory system, eventually it would likely collect all permutations of
artist/title for a particular track which would help identify those works
you are unfamiliar with and those you suspect as being repeats of each
other.

> the track data should be of use in speeding up data entry. At the
> UKHA meet
> I was asked several time why my Jukebox doesnt use the MP3 tags.
> The reason
> is the poor quality of the information in them. As an example look at
the
> data below.....
[snip]
> the meeting is not possible with data like that. I also intend to
create a
> VB application that will be able to use the cleansed data in the
> database to
> edit filennames and MP3 tags to the format that the end user wants.

Might be useful to have some form of MP3 tag import system. Well written
tags could then be accepted by a user while badly ones could be skipped or
replaced with better information possibly taken from the database.

> If I can get the data import to work, what would be made
> available would be
> a semi-populated database containing over 1500 artists, 3000 albums,
30000
> songs. It would be upto the end user to point the database at the
correct
> MP3 file but that task would probably be semi automated just
> requiring mouse
> clicks to find the tracks.

How about a kind of fuzzy search across the MP3s. E.g. search for
Frankie+Goes+Hollywood+Relax in any order in an MP3 filename then
"suggest"
linking it to the appropriate database entry. Possibly extend it so that
Frankie+Hollywood+Relax and Frankie+Relax would also bring up the same
suggestion but with maybe a lower result rating.

I am not too familiar with your Jukebox project yet so hope something in
there is of use/interest and apologies if I am suggesting stuff you already
have in there or planned.

Mark.