Facts about Songs

[aantix]

Stemming from Karanight's Q&A post, it would be cool if kJams displayed a series of facts for a given karaoke song.

This is something that can easily be downloaded using the Freebase database. There's an easy to use summary and you could essentially display the Wikipedia summary that they have for each song.

E.g.

http://www.freebase.com/view/en/love_shack
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/sweet_caroline

[Karanight]

Yeah, I've been adding the year a track was first released by the band in question and the highest position they reached like this 1998.4.It needs to be kept condensed but more info could be added with a bit of thought. It makes the nights more interesting to the punters and they're often surprised how poor a track performed in the charts. After adding lots of info like that I found that the info doesn't appear in the rotations. I've thought of adding it to the end of the artist name but I don't like that idea.

[dave]

this is a great idea for a future version of kJams.
you can edit the rotation screens now to show whatever info you want about the songs
i don't have a tutorial for it yet, let me know if you're interested
more info on editing screens in general:
http://karaoke.kjams.com/wiki/Producer
http://karaoke.kjams.com/wiki/ShowScreens
http://karaoke.kjams.com/wiki/Xattr

[Karanight]

I've given this a bit of thought and at first I just wanted the info on my screen but the more I think about it, having the info on the TV screens sounds awesome. No other karaoke program that I know of does this so It'll be a first. Singers flock to my venues because they like the smooth running night. I've even had to start more sessions to reduce the numbers of people in the venues at some sessions (not that I'm complaining) so much so that soon I'll need another licence.

This would make the night even better, so yes, bring it on.

[Karanight]

Is there no one thats interested in the feature to add their voice

[dave]

well, i'm interested.

[Karanight]

Well that's the number one voice.

It'd be great if when its done if every song with a particular title and artist could have the some info at the start, a bit like the meta data where we can alter one track and have the alteration applied to all the same tracks.

[dave]

sure, artist info would apply to any song by that artist, and title/artist would apply no matter what "album" it is from or who is singing the song tonight

[DeusExMachina]

I'll add my voice! COOL idea.
And as a center position between the two interfaces, I would say give it a metadata tag, which lets you make a showscreen for it, to display as and when you choose, and a pop up, like the get info box now, that shows up only on the host's screen, so he can seem like the all powerful Oz, if he/she so sees fit!

(Thought it would be nice if it was not metadata assigned to the track, of course, as that would really bloat already large libraries. More like some kinda of "dynamic metadata.")

[dave]

it will be meta data, and all meta has a tag, so any of it may be shown in the showscreens. and it has to be assigned to the song, it has to be stored somewhere.

but remember: when i switch to SQL the whole "storage takes time" argument will evaporate

[DeusExMachina]

Less concerned about the time, than about the amount of space associated with all this extra data, pulled automagically from some online reservoir, that will then be added to every track.
If you have multiple tracks for songs, then the same info will be duplicated, often more than tenfold, across the entire library.
It would be nice if there were some way to just have an association link in some additional DB that links song/artist entries with the info links, or perhaps just a live link and a template form to process info from that live link, similar to what you do now with the freedB stuff.

[dave]

OIC, well i think we're not understanding eachother about "multiple tracks for songs". each song has only one track. a song equals a track. so let's just call them songs. if you have multiple *versions* of a song, by the same artist, but on different albums, they all share the same "facts", it would certainly not get duplicated across each song.

having said that, probably what will happen is the info gets fetched on the fly over the intarwebs, and is never stored locally.

[DeusExMachina]

OIC, well i think we're not understanding eachother about "multiple tracks for songs".

Probably. I am using track as in individual songs. I was just concerned that if it was stored as a metadata tag, it would be associated with each track, just like all the other metadata is, in the associated XML file. As such, every single song would have it's own xml file, bloated with redundant "song trivia" data.

The "fetched on the fly" model is what I was getting at in my last bit.

[dave]

right. i'm saying, even if i did store it locally, it would be in a central repository, NOT stored with each individual song.