The Song Fight Bulletin Board

According to the (potentially inaccurate) count on the Jukebox, the archive currently has 9934 songs. We'll hit 10000 some time soon. Who will have song #10000?!?!?!

how is this determined? is this listed according to what order the songs get sent in, when they are received via email?

ooooooo. that's 66 songs to go!!!!

freaky..........

I must admit, I find it rather exciting. I'd love to be Mr. Ten Thousand!

I guess there isn't really a fair way to determine it via the Jukebox. For whichever fight pushes the count to or over 10000, maybe the fightmasters can provide insight onto which songs were submitted in what order, to determine who's #10000?

For the past few weeks I've been in the painstaking (but immensely rewarding) process of listening to the ENTIRE archive in chronological order. Yes, really. However, I skip songs as soon as I determine I am not enjoying them. I am keeping a spreadsheet of all my favorites, which is working out to about 1-2 songs per fight. I'm up to mid-2003.

My idea is to start a Best of Song Fight blog on Wordpress to call attention to some of my personal favorites. This is in no way an attempt to re-organize the Song Fight catalog, because I believe one of the strengths of Song Fight is the co-mingling of all levels of music making, from pros to beginners, and not parsing them out, other than through the voting.

But over time I realize how much I missed the songs I eally enjoyed but had forgotten, so I started doing this for myself as much as any other reason. Then I had the blog idea. The whole thing is going to be totally separate from the real site, and I'm going to make big obvious and frequent to-do's about how the REAL way to experience it is to go there and listen for yourself. But at the same time, it's a shame that some fantastic music is buiried among some, well, lesser efforts.

Right now it's just an idea and a big spreadsheet. I'd like to start with some "Best Of 200x" posts, with playlists and such, and maybe some "Best Country" or "Best Electronica" or whatever. Also, I'm thinking about re-reviewing some old noteworthy fights.

The reason I bring this up is if anyone has a problem with my doing this, let me know before I devote any time to setting it up. If the blog thing doesn't happen, I'm still going to do this for my own enjoyment.

I like your idea, but I'm not much of an authority on anything

Jim - Niveous went through the entire catalog a year or two ago. He made a Top 500 List out of it. Just saying, in case he may be of some help to you. (He's very helpful!)

I started up a Twitter account ( http://twitter.com/sfarchivist ) some time after I built the Jukebox where I was tweeting songs that I liked from the archive, and also started a "Deep Cuts" thread on the boards here somewhere. I guess there is a chance somebody might think that discussion like what you're talking about should be happening on the boards, but in my not-worth-much opinion I think people talking about and highlighting good songs from the archive can only help drive more traffic to Song Fight! Spud may feel differently though. (Just make sure you don't use any kind of blog service that puts ads on your blog, even ones that aren't paying you, as that seems to have been part of what irked Spud recently about SpinTunes, I think?)

It's going to be Wordpress, and as I'm going to be doing nothing if not promoting Song Fight, I can't imagine there should be a problem with it. I didn't want to do something on the boards because they are so easily hijacked with other topics (for an example, see this very thread right now).

OK, hijack over.

My only thought is this, if there's a way to link directly to a song in the archive, please do it (I suppose Sam knows as much about this as anyone). I am planning a graph DB navigator and it would be great to include your reviews (and anyone else's). So, if I'm pointing at song 12345, the SFjukebox is playing 12345, and http://jos.com/reviews/12345 exists, much rejoicing would occur.

There isn't really a unique id for each song in the official archive, unfortunately. Fight "key" (e.g. "canadian_girlfriend") plus artist name seems like it should be unique but when you dig in you'll find that is not the case because "fluffy porcupine" entered "So Aggravating" three times.

http://sfjukebox.org/songs/so_aggravati ... 0porcupine

The only thing that I have found so far that is unique per song is the mp3 URL.

Every song in the Jukebox does have a unique numerical id, since I'm storing them in a database. They're not globally unique ids, as there are artists with the same ids as songs, etc. No two songs share the same id though. Oh man, now we're getting into some real nitty gritty details. I don't generally expose the numerical ids of anything in the jukebox, though. In fact there is no way at the moment to request a song by its numerical id. That would be pretty trivial for me to implement though if somebody wanted it.

Roy, I'd love to hear more about this project you're planning. Are you actually going to use a graph database? What is going into the db besides the artists/fights/songs...?

My big spreadsheet does include the links to the actual SF archive. My big upcoming challenge will be to create usable playlists that can be accessed from within my blog. I think there must be a way, but I haven't researched it yet. As for the Jukebox, I'm really only using it as a player for my listening.

Paco Del Stinko wrote:Jim - Niveous went through the entire catalog a year or two ago. He made a Top 500 List out of it. Just saying, in case he may be of some help to you. (He's very helpful!)

It was a great adventure.

I can't wait to see your version Jim. Here's my list: http://www.songfight.net/forums/viewtop ... f=7&t=7972

Pretty soon, I'll have to do it again though. So many potential songs to add...

PS- Cutting it into playlists is very hard, especially if you wanna separate some by genres. Songfight songs don't fit nicely into genres often.

Oh, I can make playlists by genre. You're right that Song Fight doesn't fit into the typical genres, but Song Fight has a lot of its own genres. In fact, I'm really looking forward to the stage when I get to parse my favorites into such genres.

There are even Genres of Sucking (which I will not be making playlists of). Hey, I'm sure you ran into this phenomenon, but not 5 seconds into a new songs I can often tell not only if it will be any good, but which Genre of Sucking it is going to fit into.

The Robot Voice Over Distorted Electronics
The Growly Angry Monster Voice
The Near Suicidal Acoustic Dude About 20 Feet From His Mic
The Poorly Recorded Girlfriend Vocal
...among others.

Niveous wrote: Here's my list: http://www.songfight.net/forums/viewtop ... f=7&t=7972

Whoa! Not one single Balls to Monte song!?!?!? They're all over my list. I spent some time with your 500. Pretty interesting. Mine is going to be a lot more than 500. For each year I'm picking my top ten, second ten and as many honorable mentions as I like.

I am also hoping to make a playlist of Song Fight's Greatest Disappearing Acts, meaning the greatest songs by people who were never heard from again. (AT40 did such a countdown once. "In the Year 2525" by Zager and Evans was #1.) Inspired by a band called Victor and the Spoils who did exactly one entry, Alarm in the Graduate School, that I think is just brilliant: http://www.songfight.org/music/alarm_in ... -ALARM.mp3

Jim of Seattle wrote: The Robot Voice Over Distorted Electronics
The Growly Angry Monster Voice
The Near Suicidal Acoustic Dude About 20 Feet From His Mic
The Poorly Recorded Girlfriend Vocal

Albatross, you there?

We got another 4 potential band names.

Lunkhead wrote:Roy, I'd love to hear more about this project you're planning. Are you actually going to use a graph database? What is going into the db besides the artists/fights/songs...?

I'm learning Neo4j and want to build a graph including all the songs, artists, and liner notes people have posted (contributors, instruments, etc.).

Sounds cool! Let me know if I can help out somehow, like if you want to put something on GitHub or BitBucket and get some contributors. On the other hand, if you're curious about the Jukebox or somesongs.org code let me know. somesongs code is in BitBucket private repo, Jukebox code is still in an old SVN repo but should be going to either GitHub or BitBucket soon.

Caravan Ray wrote: Albatross, you there?

We got another 4 potential band names.

Totally. I'm sitting here wondering who I could collaborate with so we could make The Growly Angry Monster Voice actually happen.

Albatross wrote:

Caravan Ray wrote: Albatross, you there?

We got another 4 potential band names.

Totally. I'm sitting here wondering who I could collaborate with so we could make The Growly Angry Monster Voice actually happen.

I'd like to do up some posters around town advertising a fake "The Near Suicidal Acoustic Dude About 20 Feet From His Mic" gig, and see how many (and what type of) people show up.

Hey you clowns, get out of my thread!

Oh no! It's that Old Man Lunkhead!! They say he's crazy....I'm outta here!