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[dtc]

In a few more days, we plan to put the audio version of Spotlight on simmer and let people try it out more and let us know what they think.

As always, your suggestions are welcome.

Spotlight has come a long way and it very useful. However, quite frankly, I do not believe the audio version is really ready for prime time in regards to finding albums for anyone but the most known artist. I have artists with up to 30 albums and SL finds no albums for them, not even the ones in my library or in YADB.    If  the Album lookup is not improved, it will stay an incomplete feature. Plus, About still gives description which clearly have nothing to do with music. Sorry, but that is how it works, or does not work, for me.

[JimH]

I have artists with up to 30 albums and SL finds no albums for them, not even the ones in my library or in YADB.   

I remember you've said that before and I understand.  We've talked about solutions for the problem. 

We can obviously solve the problem of an artist you have in your library.  We're not focused there yet.  You can easily find those albums without Spotlight.

The harder ones are artists with names that aren't unique.  Japan, Patchouli ...  Also obscure artists who don't show up in Google and/or Wikipedia.

Long term, we may need to run a database like YADB.

Short term, we could possibly let users set a tag we use for search.  It could be a search term or a link.

[JimH]

One more comment about this subject.

I'm not sure how many tracks that streaming services are claiming they provide now, but last I remember, it was around 50,000,000.

We won't be able to reliably provide SL info on 5,000,000 artists or whatever the number is.  We can probably get the top 20% right.

So, if your artist is in the top 1,000,000 artists, it will probably work.

If not, You'll want to be telling your friends and relatives to buy their music.

[dtc]

Fair enough. I fully understand the many smaller artists will be hard to find.

However, using the user's own database and the J River YADB seems like an easy way to potentially add to the album data.  For example, someone like Christine Lavine produced 30 albums and may well have more entries in YADB than the one I have in my library. Given that YADB is a J River resource, it seems like it should be used.  And the effort should be fairly minimal. You already have the code to do lookups in it and in my library.

Plus, Lavine has 26 entries in Discogs, 16 entries on Spotify, 20 albums on Pandora, 18 on Apple music and all her albums are in Wikipedia.  I am not sure what sources you are using, so I do not know how you missed all her albums.

As far as Artist Info, it seems like coming up with 5 or 10 keywords and searching for them to validate that the entry is actually in the music business would be relatively easy and would keep some of the obviously incorrect data out of SL. Patchouli as an herb and Texas as a state could easily be eliminated with a simple search for artist, singer, band, music, group, music and a few others.  My guess is that that would throw out more incorrect entries than legitimate ones.  Again, it seems like a small effort.

Thanks for listening.

[dtc]

So, if your artist is in the top 1,000,000 artists, it will probably work.

If not, You'll want to be telling your friends and relatives to buy their music.

Patchouli are friends of mine, so now at least 1 more person has heard of them.

[cncb]

The next build will look for some of those keywords to try to avoid incorrect results.  The About section is omitted if it cannot find any.

[Doof]

The harder ones are artists with names that aren't unique.  Japan, Patchouli

Fans of Tool can vouch for this as well. The official website and subreddit get around this by using toolband.com and r/toolband. Using "Tool band" in google searches helps narrow it down too.

Could MC internally add a term like "band" to help narrow Spotlight searches down. I just did a quick test of "Japan band" and "Patchouli band" and both seem to have found the correct result.

[dtc]

The next build will look for some of those keywords to try to avoid incorrect results.  The About section is omitted if it cannot find any.

Good. If nothing is found, do you try another search?

[cncb]

Good. If nothing is found, do you try another search?

Yes, it tries again by adding "band" to the search.

[dtc]

Thanks.