I realize this is straying from the topic of lyric archival. If this should be pushed to a different thread, please feel free to move it to its rightful place. Depending on how/if the Songfight! lyric system evolves though, some of these questions could come up.
j$ wrote:I am not big on votes, but is it possible to have a votes out of?
i.e. j$ - Snooter May 20,2004 19 / 93 -
I'm not sure how helpful it'll be, but I added the total fight vote count to the right of each bar on the "View Artist" page:
http://www.dillfrog.com/tools/songfight ... _cashpoint
(e.g. the "From This Day On" song shows 6/63 votes). The blue bar's width signifies how strongly the votes compared to other song submissions for that title. For example, "From This Day On"'s highest per-artist vote count is 14, so your bar will extend 6/14ths of what it could.
To further confuse things, the artist-page bar doesn't extend as long as the song-page bar (I need the space), and the "Votes" column extends the width of the widest bar, not the width of a "100%" bar, though that could be changed easily.
I never claimed to know what I was doing
. Hopefully that explanation makes sense.
j$ wrote:And also also - this makes me think - I would like to consolidate further all my alternate identities so that the J$ list is a complete representation of my SF entries. There are quite a few that are solo efforts - or featuring 'guests' - is now a good time to put a list together for someone?
I don't want to speak for anyone else, but it seems like a cool thing to do, though it could be implemented in a few different ways. Depending on what you're looking for, though, it could make the system rather complex, requiring significant effort to code/maintain. Here are two angles to linking artists/etc together (though I'm sure there are other approaches),
PURELY HYPOTHETICAL:
1) Store a list of "artist aliases" (er, by artist I mean the "band" who submitted a song, not a specific member of that project). This would only be used to merge songs under the exact same artist.
For example, if you submit a song as "Johnny Cashpoint" and also as "J$", really the artist and style are all the same, so you'd want both of these to be considered the same artist. Thus all the "Johnny Cashpoint" and "J$" songs would show up on the same "View Artist" page, merging your vote/"preferred over"/etc stats and treating you as one single artist.
It would NOT be intended for indirectly relating artists (as a "See Also:" might do). For example, let's say I submit all my more polished pop/rock songs as "The Cow Exchange", and all my experimenal/dirty/failure songs as "An Unexpected Error". Even though the two artists have the same band member (me), I would never want their stats or musical styles to be treated as the same. An alias would not be used to link these two.
Really, this feature would be the same as if Spud (or whoever) renamed the artists in that "archive.txt" file, so that they were normalized. I'm not sure if this (#1) is even an issue at this point. But I'm a newbie still.
2) Store a member list in the system, and relate artists/songs to those members.
For example, let's say that the system (not just the forums) knows about Johnny Cashpoint (the human), Plat, Spud, etc. At that point, you'd build another layer of depth by tying these members to an artist(s) or song(s).
For example, at the user-to-artist level we might store information like:
- "Plat" is a "keyboardist/vocalist" for the artist "The Cow Exchange"
"JoeSchmoe" is a "lyricist" for the artist "The Cow Exchange"
"PapaMurphy" is a "official chef" for the artist "The Cow Exchange"
(Basically, someone is a member of some artist, and you fill in the blank what their role is)
Or at the user-to-song level we might store information like:
- "Plat" "contributed vocals" on the song "I'm With Steve Now" by "The Cow Exchange"
"Puce" "mixed the tracks" on the song "Gift With Purchase" by "The Bloody Hams"
Or at the artist-to-artist level we might store highly subjective information like:
- If you like "Down With Gender" you might also like "DWG"
From that information, we can dynamically build lists of related artists, given either the member's ID ("show me all the artists Plat has been involved with") or an artist ("show me all the artists related to The Cow Exchange", or "I like The Cow Exchange; who else should I listen to?")
Of course, this can become a very tedious and detailed task, so it'd almost have to be self-service (that is, you're not constantly asking someone else to update it, with each song) in order to work.
To be self-service, you need to tie it into the [forum] login identity system or risk having mismatched IDs (e.g. Plat from the forums might have a separate login ID and password to do the self-service song updates.. yuck! not to mention someone would have to coordinate the handing out of these new IDs). Oh, and a member would have to be given access rights in order to update info for his/her artist (unless there's a trusted group that won't mess up entries which aren't their own).Trust me, it's kind of gross to tack on once the songs have started rolling in.
And also, just like not everyone posts lyrics, not everyone would fill out these details - it'd have to be optional. Finally, like forums or anything else, moderation would be involved, and would have to be accommodated for in the code. For example, I might untruthfully list that a member has some vulgar role with one of my artists. Or I might thoughtlessly compare my artist to all the uber-popular artists solely to attract more listens.
Wow.. So uh.. that's probably more than you wanted to read. But hopefully it gives some insight into its potential complexity (and potential awesomeness). It wouldn't have to go that deep, but it could, and I'm staying away from there for now, because of all the upfront work (mainly setting up member accounts and giving them artist permissions) and the fact that this is an unofficial prototype that could be shut down any day.
Personally I'd hold off on making that list, because I don't know if/when you'd ever get to enter it into a system, but whatever makes you happy.
Spud wrote:Hey Plat, the stream all function is working for me at the office in WinAmp under Win2K.
Just wondering, though, they are listed chronologically on the page, but they stream in alphabetical order...
I think I fixed the song ordering issues, so the playlists should match up with what you see on the Web page. There's no way to flip the ascending/descending order, though that wouldn't be too hard to do.
Also, I fixed some of the m3u problems I was having, and it's working in IE/FooBar2000 now. You might find it working with Win98SE also. It had to do with how some browsers improperly handled the "Vary" HTTP header, I guess.
P.S.: It's a shame this forum meters post count instead of post length
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