[Serious] Storing dance music is a specially designed jukebox application

Hi Guys,

I'm hoping I can get some insight into how people feel about a particular problem I am having when it comes to the creation of a specific library for dance music.

As you may or may not know the genre "dance" covers an absolutely huge amount of sub genres and since I like to listen to particular sub genres at any give time I decided to make myself a jukebox that can extend meta-data beyond what is currently offered. I imagine this system could be built upon to include classical ... but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The issue I am having comes with mixed and unmixed versions of the same track. A song can have different remixes and my system will handle this with grace but this assumes that you have the unmixed version of the track.

For instance if you buy your music of beatport or iTunes you get the unmixed album in songs and then 1 Track that is mixed. This is how most of my music is. But if you buy an album you tend to just get the mix with track markers.

I am wondering if anyone has any bright ideas on how this should be handled. Currently the system recognizes a "track" as an entity that can contain one or more versions (dance audiophiles will appreciate this) . So rather than 5 song entries you have one and then can drill down into the particular version you want.

As my jukebox does not currently understand the concept of albums these mixed tracks, usually from Cd's would sound strange. I was thinking of having a further drill down that would give the "single" and album mix versions and an option to "smart" play albums.

So after reading this I am wondering, does that sound good or how would you do it!

I like a bit of dance music, so I understand where you are coming from.

I think what I would do is store the album info, and have a link to it from each version of the tracks. The album info (in addition to album name etc) would have an indicator of whether or not it is mixed.

It seems to me that would cover all of the play options.

Yeah, I see where you are coming from. I originally did not want to even bother with albums at all but looking through my collection it seems that some artists intentionally pre mix there own albums as a kind of overall ensemble.

So here is sort of what it will look like

Code:

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Tiesto
    I Will Be Here
          Radio Edit
          Bennassi Remix
                    Unmixed
                    Gatecrasher 2010 Album Mix
                    In Search Of Sunrises 2042 Mix

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If the unmixed version is played it just plays, if any of the album mixes are played it would still play but it would also open up an album window as that would be the most logical "next song" choice.

I know this sounds like a lot of work to play a song but to me this seems to be the most logical way of storing songs as apart from albums as showcase the current way is mimicking a limitation in CD technology (Space) that is not present on a PC.

This of course leaves me in an awkward awkward positions of having to provide the meta-data as the current meta-data systems to not have information like this in place. In fact the closest one I have seen Is dis-cogs.

ugh, Tiesto.

This could be useful though as a lot of dj's these days are going digital and dropping the vinyl. I know if I had 600-800 bucks I'd upgrade my outdated final scratch system.

I like Tiesto, but regardless youve hit the nail on the head for the people I am targeting. They can keep there tunes in wav or ogg and still tag the music better than is currently available. The only issue is there will be no auto tagging as there are few libraries outside mp3 for tagging music files!

How would you handle the same track appearing in multiple albums as can often be the case with Dance music ?

Well it depends,

Taking Tiesto as an example again. Lets say that I have the following albums. Parade of the Athletes and Just Be. Both of them have adagio for strings but they are different versions so they will be listed as different versions and of the unmixed variety. now if we add in the adagio for strings single pack. It has both those versions so we only need to add the extras and then let the system "link" the two songs we had to the album.

Now lets say we have a gatecrasher album that has the same song that is present on both albums, well it will still show up as a unique song since it would be mixed in with two songs from the gategrasher album.

Code:

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Tiesto
    Adagio For Strings <-- The actual song name
              Original Mix 
                      Unmixed <-- Two albums share this exact son so its only listed once
              Radio Edit
                      Unmixed
                      "Album name" mix <- This is still the radio edit version but we keep it because it is mixed

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Does this make sense.

Yes, that makes sense but i was more talking about the album linking bit, if you have the exact same mix of a song on 2 albums will you have 2 albums links from the 1 song ?

Its a nice idea by the way, i have stupid amounts of music on my computer and no music player (for example in Windows Media Player where you have the library feature) has ever got even near categorising them well.

I was discussing this actual topic with penagate last night and here is the issue on duplicates:

1. They are mix so not really duplicates
2. They are actual duplicates but preserve an album structure
3. They are actual duplicates and do not preserve an album structure

One and two need to be include as they are not "true" duplicates. Three, in my mind, should be deleted but you can imagine the guffaw that would cause as people never fully trust jukebox applications. The final solution was simply to allow them to still be listed. Here is how the structure looks

Code:

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Artist/Track/Version/Appearance

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This means you could have something like so:

Code:

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Tiesto/Adagio For Strings/Original Edit/Adagio For Strings Single
Tiesto/Adagio For Strings/Original Edit/Just Be

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Both tracks, I know, are the exact same, their not mixed and sound identical but it gives the user confidence that all their music is present but gives the illusion of individuality. The other advadage of this, as Pena pointed out, is that because we know the song appeared on album "x" we can give it metadata that would allow it to play the next song from the album rather than the next song in the list if that is what you prefered.

Good stuff Dean,

And yes i agree with Penagate on this, the link to then play the next song from that album is a great idea in fact you should be able to play the whole album the song is from as well.