Re: Suggestion for improvement over CDDB

Roundeye (roundeye nospam at bellsouth.net)
Tue, 9 Mar 1999 13:05:50 -0600 (EST)

theobald nospam at paraskevas.capsl.udel.edu wrote:
[snip]
> Since most classical music is public domain, the information about the
> source music should be separate from the CD track information, since
> there can be a many-to-one mapping from the latter to the former (more
> than 1 CD can have the same piece of music). Entries for the pieces
> should be in a separate table (sorry I don't know the proper DB terms
> for these concepts). It would be very convenient to have a common entry
> for, say, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, and the entry for each available
> recording would link to this entry. This would be more convenient for
> people entering discs (except for the first person to enter a given work)
> and cut down on discrepencies, typos, etc.
> Also nice would be separate keys for conductors, orchestras, and
> record companies.
> There would be a glitch with CDs that split movements into multiple
> tracks or combine multiple movements into one track, but I think this
> could be handled.

The problem as you present it isn't well-defined. Is Beethoven's 9th
as played by the Boston Pops the same as that played by the Nigerian
Wind Symphony? Who is the Artist (in our traditional ( read "CDDB")
definition) here. I agree that the existing methods are incomplete
when it comes to this sort of music, but we have to figure out how
this data is used -- that is, if you're using CDDB in a CD player
how does the player represent the tracks (presumably wrongly).
If you're cataloguing your own collection you may have different
requirements.

I would be happy to see us make a good stab at supporting classical
music in a more reasonable fashion than CDDB, but I think that
starting off with a object in an object database for every song is (1)
overkill and (2) ambiguous.

roundeye

--
 "If man pages were written by the Bible's authors they would tell you
 about everything.  If the Bible had been written by the man page authors 
 you'd spend four days trying to figure out who Jesus is." (Howard Merry) 
       Rick Bradley -- http://personal.bellsouth.net/~roundeye