I play a lot of niche stuff, mostly promotional 12" singles. I can see exactly the track I’m playing in Discogs but I’m not clever enough to get Spinitron to match what I’m giving it to the release, so I end up with about 90-100% cover-less playlists. (This probably affects nobody but me, but I’m already here, so…)
Would there be a way for me to point Spinitron directly to the Discogs entry for any particular release using the Discogs Release ID and have it offer to “correct” my release grabbing data from there?
For example, let’s say I want to log a particular mix of Fashion’s “Move On” - ideally, I could plug in “[r91785]” somewhere and Spinitron could call up Discogs, find https://www.discogs.com/Fashion-Move-On/release/91785 and use it to populate the track length, year, label and so on.
OR does some process like this already exist and I just don’t know about it? I feel like I was more successful with this, say, a year ago. Elsewhere on the forum I thought I saw mention of using UPC code to match releases but when I experimented with this I couldn’t force a successful search.
Discogs is a great resource. We have tried in the past to find ways to use without success but we hadn’t thought on these lines.
We could provide a field into which you copy paste a Discogs URL or release ID. It’s not so hard to do so long as we can figure out a good user interface for it.
Since I don’t think the feature will be used by very many DJs, we don’t want it cluttering up the joint. On the other hand we do want it to be easy to use with a minimum of steps involved. Ideas?
It’s not the first time I’ve seen software that accepts a Discogs URL as a way to identify a source of metadata. A great little program called XLD does it. (One of the things I regret losing when I switched to Windows.)
Unfortunately I probably don’t know enough about APIs and backends and whatnot to offer really useful implementation suggestions.
I think the way I was envisioning it in my mind was, when entering a spin, if I could provide a Discogs release ID, it might trigger a “Did you mean…” including only the tracks on that unique release’s page and I could select (“correct”) from there. Or I could provide a release ID, hit the magnifying glass icon and get the same slate of choices. Am I describing this in a way that makes sense?
I was just asking for ideas about the user interface. We can cope with all the rest.
Yes, I like the idea of adding something to the “Did you mean…” dialog box. We could put a URL input there that accepts a Discogs URL and maybe later we can allow others, like Musicbrainz or Spotify…
Fetching data from Discogs is easy. Designing the UI is less so. It needs to be easy to use and not get in the way of DJs that won’t use it, which will be most DJs.
My current idea is to put a text input in the “Did you mean…” dialog with a submit button. You would copy-paste the URL of a page with the release or song. The URL can be Discogs or some other references. Remember you can run the “Did you mean…” search on demand on any spin in a playlist with the spy glass icon button.
I second the idea from CRZ to allow Bandcamp lookups on the playlist edit screen.
Furthermore, it would be lovely if the live playlist had a link where one could click to listen to the song on Bandcamp. I suggest adding a Bandcamp pushbutton alongside the ones for iTunes, AmazonMusic, and Spotify. Make it easy for listeners to take the next step and support the artist with a purchase of music or merch.
has there been any progress towards implementation of this idea?