KRKeegan

Introduction:

One of the major problems with using Allmusic.com as a metadata source is the difficulty in searching for the correct ablbum. Ideally we want to be searching for both Artist and Album together. However Allmusic.com only allows for searching of either album or artist not both. So the best way I have determined to match the album "Greatest Hits" is to first search for the artist and then search the discography for that album.

Part 2: Downloading Artist ID from Allmusic

Allmusic.com uses individual sql IDs to identify each artist and album. So what we need is a script to search and parse out the correct sql ID and add it to our mySQL database. I decided to use perl over php because this script will be run from a command prompt and not a browser because of the lenght of time necessary to complete it’s task.

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I know that ID3v2 supports adding multiple genre tags to a file but does any software support this? I have not seen any that does and I don’t understand why. Most music belong in multiple sub genres, take Fleetwood Mac for instance, it belongs in Rock, but also a sub category of Classic Rock. Most people just classify it as Classic Rock, but what if you want to here a mix of all Rock songs, then you would have to select each subgenre of Rock. Also imagine the issue of a song that people can not agree on what the subgenre is.

I know I am not the first to talk about this problem, but for some reason I have not seen a whole lot of activity in this area. I know most of us do not have our music classified with subgenres, but if no software supports them then how are we ever going to start.

I know that there are other technologies such as smart playlists, but until we incorporate the use of the ID3v2 tag the way it was meant to be used I don’t think it will be a mainstream feature. Does anyone know of a player/library that uses this technology? I have not tinkered with what happens on my iPod yet but I imagine it will only see the first genre and not the others.

The next step in the never ending saga. Alright after some poking and proding I have gone back to using AllMusic. While using the TowerRecords site gave me a more accurate search the underlying metadata was pretty bad. As I said before they were not even consistent in genre naming. I also know that other people will want to use the AMG info to add more metadata.

The New Theory

1. Search for the Artist Key
2. Do a string compare on the artist name and research if low.
3. Load the artist discography
4. Do a string compare of each album in the database to the discography
5. Load the album page and populate the metadata

Does anyone know of a perl module or perl example of a quantitative text analysis. Such as comparing STR to an array and giving numeric results of its similarity to each string in the array. Such as is if the comparision is a difference of case it would score very low and a comparison where the strings did not even contain the same characters would be very high?

This is an akward concept. But I am sure there are papers out there on this subject. This is what enables large search engines to work. Please comment if you know of any. Thanks.

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The Basics: If Internet addressing remained as it was originally designed, it is likely that the number of hosts today would far exceed the available IP addresses. The problem with the standard classed addressing scheme is that the network ID length is predetermined by the class of the IP address. This also predetermines the number of hosts on each network. Below is a table of the standard classed IP address scheme:

Class	From IP	To IP	Maximum Networks	Maximum Hosts
A	1.0.0.0	126.255.255.255	126	1,677,216
B	128.0.0.0	191.255.255.255	16,384	65,536
C	192.0.0.0	223.255.255.255	2,097,152	256

It is obvious that a Class A IP range is unrealistic in its number of hosts. A network with this much traffic on the wire would crawl to a halt. This system does not allow more than a two tiered structure for IP addressing, this does not really match the actual layout of the Internet. Subnetting allows for differing lengths of network IDs. This means that Any IP class range can be divided up into multiple network IDs. The subnet mask essentially tells the router what part of the IP address to use as a network ID, as demonstrated in the following table using binary:

IP Address	10000000	00000001	0001	0001	00000001
Mask	11111111	11111111	1111	0000	00000000
Result	10000000	00000001	0001	N/A
Logical Address	128	1	1	N/A

The logical address is exactly what the router sees and it uses this to determine where to send the packet. This enables the CMC network to divide the Class B IP address range into class C subnets. This means that at a maximum there is only 253 hosts on one line. This subdivision enables added security within the network and organization of the network structure.