Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
NOTE: use Perl; is on undef hiatus. You can read content, but you can't post it. More info will be forthcoming forthcomingly.

All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

use Perl Log In

Log In

[ Create a new account ]

LTjake (4001)

LTjake
  bricas@cpan.org
http://www.alternation.net/

Journal of LTjake (4001)

Monday May 05, 2003
12:15 PM

cover song db rot

[ #12012 ]

Sadly, the covers project has gone untouched since December. It was a pretty cool project, at first. I was interested enough to (co-)author a perl module to interface with the site's XML-RPC service.

However, over time, the data kept getting increasingly more inaccurate. A voting system was put in place to try to minimize the problems - it didn't help. Since December, the site has been put into static mode - no new entries are being accepted.

An alternate site has started, The Cover Songs DB, but input is restricted to authorized users only (which looks to be 3 people - although impressively they've amassed 2417 cover tunes).

My question is: how can a person design one of these sites with a reasonable amount of accuracy, without having such an iron grip on the input.

The first thing that came to mind was to cross-reference the input data with an already existing DB; specifically freedb. Assuming freedb is mostly reliable you could probably minimize some bogus data if the cover and/or original does not exist on db. However, you can still get bad links between original and cover (although, i guess release date would solve any chronological errors). But, you could still attribute a cover as being an original. I guess then you'd have to store already existing original tunes in a local db to be examined. But, what if there are two songs of the same name, blah blah, blah! It gets really hairy, really quick :)


List all Journal entries
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

cover song db rot 3 Comments More | Login | Reply /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More | Login | Reply
Loading... please wait.
  • Hi, Thanks for the little review of our site. I would just like to add that we're going to give levels to people in the future, so other people will be able to add songs. This way the database will grow at a mucher faster speed. It's first a question of seeing who we can trust. Bastien

    • Hi There! It wasn't so much a review as it was a statement that your project exists :). I'm glad you plan to expand the interactivity of your site; however, it will still require a lot of dedication on the part of the admins to add in the new content.

      One of the attractions of the covers project was that it allowed for user input without going through any hoops - it was easy to participate, even if it's only once (e.g. I have a favorite band, and you're missing a cover song from your DB by them, so, I'll ad

    • What you describe was indeed one of the possibilities. However, we have chosen from the start not to work like this. We chose to focus on quality and not on quantity. If you look at the defunct Covers Project, you can clearly see why. It has become very unreliable due to the lack of control, and due to the lack of background information on the songs. You know, on the internet, it's not the quantity of information that matters. On the contrary even, we are flooded with information! In my opinion the sc
Stories, comments, journals, and other submissions on use Perl; are Copyright 1998-2006, their respective owners.