Yesterday we went to see Carlos Chaouen playing live in a very small theater close to our place. It was a nice concert, with about 100-150 people attending, where Carlos, one of the classical cantautores in the coffee places of Madrid, played most of the songs of his last album, and also some of the best known ones, like “No me canso”, which is now famous here because of the terrible version performed by the former Mecano singer, Ana Torroja, in her last album.
I’ve been playing during the last week with these two very cool projects.
Audioscrobbler keeps a database with the music profiles of the registered users, based in the messages sent by plugins of the media players (there are plugins for a long list of players) when the users plays a song. Based on this, Audioscrobbler creates statistics, generates recommendations, and creates a network of people where the connections depend on the musical taste.
MusicBrainz is a music metadatabase with information about the names of the artists, the names of their albums and the concrete list of tracks included in each of the albums. But the very interesting concept is that the keys in the database are based on the physical characteristics of the audio CD, or the MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files. Any music player, using the provided API, can obtain metainformation on a concrete song, and use it for tagging. And it works!