UPDATE: RELEASED, SEE THIS THREAD





Hi!


I'm working on a foo_discogs a plugin using the discogs database (http://www.discogs.com) for tagging and adding metadata (custom tags) to releases (discogs way of saying album: EP, LP, CD etc)

The plugin has two goals:

- write standard tags from discogs info, like the freedb plugin. it will detect correctly compilations and VA by allowing to write the ALBUM_ARTIST tag

- write custom tags containing specific info like label, country, discogs rating, etc. When used with a playlist tree this will allow interesting sorting of your collection such as:

labels/releases (release is the cat number on the label such as GKF002)
country/labels/releases
discogs rating
by release date (much precise than the YEAR tag since discog info is YYYY or MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY). for example you could display the collection by YYYY/MM

All those custom tags can also be used in a track_info_mod panel !

I'm quite advanced for the HTML parser that extract release info from discogs page, and the plugin can already write tags using that info. There's no UI yet and for the first version it'll be very minimal. You'll probably have to enter manually the discogs release id (a number uniquely identifying a release in discogs db) after having selected all the files of *one* release. This is done only once, as this id will be stored in a custom tag to allow to later update some tags such as rating with current values.
I don't think there will be a dialog that guess the correct artist / release (and so the discog release id) from the current tags as this is not pratical at all with current way to interact with discogs.

plans for very future version:


- retrieve number of voters (for rating) to compute a weigthed rating.
- display in a playlist all music of an artist *and* its aliases
- give the choice to not write custom tags but use foo_custominfo instead to store discogs data.
- extract more info from discogs like Notes, Credits etc..probably not before there's no better than parsing HTML

Still too soon to say when i'll release it, but not before it's useful

Comments, ideas are welcome !

Sound pretty interesting...
BTW... Isn't ALBUM ARTIST?

sounds good..

Thank you very much! It'll be wonderful to get labels and catalog numbers done, and this should really speed up the organization process. The electronic music community salutes you



Knowing the discogs search engine, I'm imagining that you could run a search via URL crafting and get a list of all the releases that match that. One trick that I used with foo_run was to include "track:XXX" in the search parameters for discogs. For example, searching for

"artist:Squarepusher AND track:Papalon" (URL: http://www.discogs.com/search?type=all&...&btn=Search)

will return all the "Hard Normal Daddy" releases in the search results page, which was the album on which that track was released. If the user has a track or set of tracks selected in the playlist, you could use one of those as a track title to use with that method.

Once you get a search results page like above, you could parse out the different releases and release IDs from the HTML (perhaps distinguish them by label and format, if you wanted a really user-friendly approach) to let the user pick out which one he wants.

Honestly, though, it might be more trouble than it's worth. Just the automatic tagging functionality is value enough.

What is so special in foo_discogs?I don't understand.
It is similar to freedb and now you can already have with masstagger an album artist

Freedb doesn't really have many albums, and it doesn't store nearly as much information about a release usually.

By the way, regarding the "artist-and-aliases" playlist, I think a lot of people already manage something like that through tags. Personally, I use the FILED UNDER tag to categorize aliases; for example, if I'm tagging an Aphex Twin album released under the alias AFX, I give it a FILED UNDER = "Aphex Twin" tag, and I can sort by that in the album list view and in the physical directory structure and playlist view, if I so choose.

Hmm. I have never heard of discogs.
I have had trouble with some seldom stuff. But although I am listening to strange metalstuff I had always results with FreedB.

Is it a server? Isn't there a way to simply add it to the server list?

Something like you describe could work, the Helium Discogs plug-in does it and it kind of works. It's a bit of work to make it user friendly but can be done. Won't be in the first version though, you'll have to enter the release id manually

It doesn't have any API designed to allow programs or plugins to pull data from it (so far as I know); it's just a web database. Go check it out for yourself. It arose as a database centered toward covering electronic releases that weren't listed in most other music databases, and it still excels in that category; but it's also expanded to cover pretty much most any popular music as well. It also is extremely detailed in covering different releases of the same album along with label information, extra credits on different songs and albums, and cross-referencing between artists, et cetera.

For example, check out this listing for Isis's new album; compare to the freedb listing, which shows pretty much...nada, except track titles and the genre of "rock." Discogs is comparable to allmusic.com in its extensive details, except that it tends to cover a lot more obscure little releases and groups.

simply amazing, hurray! i would use this plugin and that feature all the time thanks for thinking about custom info support (now only if custom info could support album-wide info without redundancy).

What about MusicBrainz? It already has support for accessing data.

Glad someone else mentioned musicbrainz. In my opinion you should work on connecting MusicBrainz and Discogs, possibly via an intermediate layer... or on the MusicBrainz side.

Musicbrainz is pretty good - a sight better than Freedb, at least. The only slightly disappointing thing about Musicbrainz, to me, is that it doesn't attach a given album release to the parent label and catalog number, which I know a whole lot of people like to do. It also doesn't do genres (does it do year of release?) - Discogs lists genres acceptably, if not fantastically.

This plug in will be really cool. I hope it features custom field remapping, so that any given data will fit better into each person's own tagging scheme and one can hopefully choose which fields they want to download etc. If user submissions are possible, the same field remapping scheme defined by the user could be used to ensure a consistent set of tags are sent when submitting an album. Also it would be useful for things like release date; you could customize the way it is stored such as YYYY-MM-DD, instead of say MM/DD/YYYY or whatever discogs uses.
anishbenji

Edit: grammar

Great idea! Hope it turns out good.
I check Discogs too often...

Good ideas here.

Keep it up!

I was thinking of something similar to this: allow you to map discogs data to whatever tag (custom or not) you want and having all of them optional. However you can submit discog data only on the relevant discog form page. If you haven't seen the form it's quite impressive and all discogs submission are highly moderated, hence the quality of the db!
For date, month and day will be storable in separate tags to allow year/month display of the collection. Maybe the same think can be done with a single tag containing multiple values, I don't know.

sounds awesome all around!

There's plans for that. For now only Amazon ASIN is supported "natively" and label/number data is added as text, but it will be migrated to tags once they become available.



MB have full release date YYYY/MM/DD with country, or even several dates if you want. It doesn't deal with genere for a simple reason that they're subjective. You just can't say "release A" is "genre B" and have everyone agree with you - thus such data is not stored as separate field, but you can always mention it in annotation.

As far as I understand, this hasn't been released yet right?

Take a look at this.