View Full Version : Improved allmusic.com information
hi, since xbmc uses the guest login to allmusic.com it's not possible to search on both album name and artist. therefore xbmc only seaches on album name, and the list returned could be messy to look through. e.g. searching for "born in the usa" will return a pretty good list with bruce springsteen on the third line. but seaching for "the best of" will return a list ... just imagin
i can see three solutions
1) filter the list return and grab only the lines also mathing your artist. maybe sorted on 1'st - the whole artist name, 2'nd - how many words matching the artist name
2) providing a allmusic.com login username and password in the xboxmediacenter.xml file so that the users can register at allmusic.com and use the advanced serch with both artist and album name
3) use other database than allmusic.com.
pade,
those are good ideas...
the first option would be easy to implement and should be there. i'll take a look at this next weekend.
and i didnt know that you could do both artist and album search when you login in. i'll register myself and see how we may be able to utilize this in xbmc.
and i didnt know that you could do both artist and album search when you login in. *i'll register myself and see how we may be able to utilize this in xbmc
sorry, i was wrong. it's not possible to search on both albums and artist. i have asked allmusic.com why it's not possible to do a combined album and artist search. i will get back as soon i hear from them
that's a shame but thanks for checking for me. i hadnt gotten a chance to check it out myself as yet.
but i looked at the current system, and i think the list can be ordered in better way. i'm going to *try* to do some approximate string matching for the artist name and use that to order the items. but, i have absolutely no idea how this may work with other languages.
and if there is an exact match for both album name and artist name, should xbmc just assume that is the correct item?
and if there is an exact match for both album name and artist name, should xbmc just assume that is the correct item?
if that could be acheived would this not allow for a query all files the same as the video context menu has? :bowdown:
yeah deanrparry :kickass: that would be nice. but with the extra criterial that it's just one singel exaxt match.
well, today its certainly possible to query all albums, but like videos, it would yeild alot of incorrect information. lets see how well it works first.
this is working really well. each returned item from allmusic is now ranked by relevance. it's based on a fuzzy compare of the album name and artist name to the current item from allmusic. the album and artist have an equal weight in the final relevance number.
it's just a number from 0.00 to 1.00 which is xbmc's guess at how "correct" the found item is. a 1.00 means both the album and artist match 100%. if there's only a single item with 1.00 relevance, its automatically choosen. otherwise, the user has to choose, and the list is ranked by relevance (highest to lowest).
while working on this i discovered a bug that seems to have existed before my changes. if you "refresh" and choose a completely different album, the thumbnail is not updated. once i fix that, i'll commit the change.
this sounds like a major step. :)
so will this new search method look at artist tag then album tag and combine the 2 for a lookup instead of just looking up the album tag?
both, but they arent combined, per se. the album and artist tags are read from the file you invoke the lookup from. (or in the case of a folder, we read all the files and you choose an album.)
the allmusic.com search is still only based on the album name. but the returned list from allmusic.com contains both album and artist names. these are then compared against the album and artist tags from the lookup and ranked.
excellent so should be pretty accurate :) thank kraqh3d for yet another superb looking patch :)
this has been committed to cvs, along with the fix to the problem i described earlier.
works a lot better than the old method. now if only there was a solution to greatest hit lookups.
i.e. if the album name is set as 'greatest hits' to automatically lookup the 'artist name + album name'
e.g. 'korn greatest hits' instead of 'greatest hits' + 'korn'
combining a greatest hits search under album name has a better chance of a successful lookup for greatest hit albums.
unfortunately, allmusic.com doesnt have a way of doing combined lookups. but, it shouldnt matter.
in your example, assuming the korn greatest hits album is returned from allmusic.com, xbmc should rank that one the heighest.
** edit **
ok, it looks like allmusic.com limits the number of returned items. and "korn greatest hits" doesnt find the correct item either.
i apologise... try 'greatest hits korn' as the album title that works :)
yup. that works. i can have it append the artist name if this works reasonably well for "greatest hits" albums. do some more testing and report back.
i think the record label e.g [emi], [geffen] etc.. and the year (2003), (2004) etc... need to be filtered out of the items found to make it more accurate as they seem to throw the artist, album search way out. bit like the stacking used in videos only on the items found so basically strip anything between [] and () and the - might help make the search more precise. :)
i've never seen the record label in square brackets. typically anything in square brackets is an album name qualifier like [uk release], etc. this is used in the comparison because there's multiple versions of the same album. removing anything in square brackets would be bad. it will likely yeild more albums of exactly the same name.
and we add the year in parens... its not used in the comparison.
i'm lost then as i think that some of the info in the brackets is throwing the searches out of sync... oh well ill manually add them using folder jpg :) thanks anyway mate
sorry bud, i cant help you if you cant give me some examples. i've not seen the record label in square brackets in my testing, and i did a decent amount (that's how i discovered the bug with the image not being updated when picking a different album from the chooser dialog.)
i have seen things in square brackets, but as i said earlier, it was usually some qualifier to seperate identical albums. (different regions, a limited edition version, extra bonus tracks, etc, stuff like that.)
for that reason alone, i would not want to blanket remove all items in square brackets. it would create multiple identical album names, thereby negating the 100% matching which now (mostly) works.
folder.jpg wont work, and never did. once you do an album lookup, that cover gets cached as the album cover, and as the folder icon if theres only a single album in that folder.
right then so i think its confirmed allmusic does not allow for greatest hits lookups as the artist name cannot be looked up at the same time. :) unless the greatest hits tag is unique i.e. greatest hits [asia] then it will find *any* artist with [a????] after the greatest hits text.
roll on amazon :p
uh no... not really.
allmusic.com is apparently limiting the number of returned items. querying for album name "greatest hits" yeilds too many matches, so the list is truncated back to their limit. how they determine whats is returned in the list when that limit is reached is unknown.
the [asia] has absolutely nothing to do with the artist. that is just how the album is named in their database. it means its the asian release. nothing more.
adding [a to the query means the query returns less items that just searching for "greatest hits". i assume in this case their internal limit of the number of returned items is not reached, and the correct item is in the returned list.
ahhhhhhh yes! now i see... damn... so basically for greatest hit lookup you would need to retrieve every album allmusic has listed then filter the artist... *:sniffle: now thats a scary thought *:verysad: and not possible until allmusic lift there limit if they do. i suppose they filter by most recently viewed or edited or such like? who knows. oh well thanks kraqh3d i now understand the logic now :)
just wanted to say; great work! works much better now.
on the record label in brackets thingy. just a theory, but if a artist has several best of records on different record labels, it might be the identifier used to differentiate between these..
spiff i believe thats correct mate... each of top listed labums seem to have on average 5-6 records labels all titled 'greatest hits'
dean...
exactly! there's not much more i can do now. allmusic is limiting the number of returned items. my changes merely used the artist to more accurately determine the correct album from those in the returned list. in this case, however, the correct album isnt even in the returned list.
if anyone figures out a way to reliably combine the album and artist together in the query, i can test it out and change it.
spiff...
thanks!
the only way i have managed to even return the album is being registered and doing the following.
choose advanced search
database to search = pop
looking for = text mention
search by = name
enter name == robbie williams
this is the only way i have managed to list his album.
way to much hassle for you guys!
thanks all dedicated developers. personally i hate these kind of programming so i'm glad someone else did it *:o. i did ask allmusic.com for a combined artist and album search hi, i registred in order to get access to the advanced search. i thought that i then could serach with both album and name. i realised that that was not the case. why not? it's almost impossible to search for e.g. "the best of" since there are to many artists producing that album title and here are the answer. thanks for your feedback. we always love hearing from our users and appreciate, and take to heart, their feedback. we are continually evaluating new features and functionality. we have forwarded your suggestion about improving our advanced search on to our website development team & editorial staff for consideration.
stay tuned. we hope you continue to visit, and enjoy, allmusic.com.
best regards,
amg
i post a new reply as soon i hear something new from allmusic.com. shall i or someone else ask them for the limited number of results return, that gives us problems when looking for e.g. "the best of". that might result in that they change the interface, and i don't know how much work that could generate for us.