James,
The 128 character description could well be the ISRC code from the
original label.
If it is, then it contains a lot of those same details, and is unique
across all manufactured CD's.
I would also be surprised if you haven't come across these guys....
http://www.gracenote.com/prof_home.html
They seem to have the Song ID database sown up.
RichE
On 25 Jan 2007, at 16:55, James Cridland wrote:
Michael,
Ignoring for a while the question of why the BBC is now looking at
putting third-party music information services out of business, and
being constructive:
The major problem we've found working with any third-party music
data is the issue of non-standard descriptions. Take a well-known
song, which is in our system as... "The Beatles: Norwegian Wood
(This bird has flown)", aka "Beatles, The: Norwegian Wood", for
example. Life gets harder with R.E.M.'s "End of the world as we
know it (and I feel fine)", since R.E.M. is also known as REM and
R. E. M. and... ooh, it's horrid. This needs fixing.
Secondly, working with third-party systems is a little difficult
for cleared-for-broadcast stuff. Oasis's "Fsucking in the bushes"
won't look great on scrolling DLS, however we do it - and automated
swear filters don't work cleverly enough. (I've added an extra
letter in there for work-safe email).
The way we've ended up working with these types of services is to
have to pre-moderate everything before importing, which is a
nuisance but the only way. Easy for us, given the comparatively
small amount of music we play; harder for the Beeb, I'd guess.
If it helps (which I doubt it will), if you go to http://
nowplaying.virginradio.co.uk/vr.js - do it in Firefox so you can
see it on-screen - you'll see the following information within a
JavaScript line:
Artist name ~ artist ID ~ Track name ~ track ID ~ Live on-air
studio ~ Presenter name ~ Presenter image reference ~ short
description of show (which makes no sense right now I notice!) ~
Short legacy web action description ~ Webcam true/false flag ~ DJ
show link ~ Official artist website ~ tickets available true/false
~ 128 character description ~ some number which probably does
something
I appreciate this is nothing to do with what you're asking, but I
wondered whether it was interesting to the conversation.
And I'm always up for a pint.
j
--
http://james.cridland.net/
http://www.virginradio.co.uk/vip/profile/bigjim/
