ChartBrainz: Browse and rate top rated releases by genre and decade

Hi everyone, MusicBrainz doesn’t have a good way of exploring the ratings and genres in chart form, so I decided to take that project on:

https://chartbrainz.com

The current version features:

  1. View up to 250 releases for each genre. Since there isn’t much ratings data, the threshold to be included in the chart is very low, only 3 ratings.
  2. Genre charts are hierarchical. So when looking at rock, you see all the genres and subgenera included.
  3. Login to MusicBrainz to sync your ratings. You see your ratings overlayed on the charts.
  4. Submit ratings. Directly on charts or through the unified search.

The ultimate goal would be to have these features built into MusicBrainz, but this is also a good way to more easily explore what the community might want (or not want).

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I cannot select a genre (for example “rock”), but it’s interesting, already!

I’m on Android Wiki browser.

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cool prototype~ I’d love to see where this goes

an issue, when I select a decade, it shows albums from the previous decade, i.e. I select the 2020’s, but it shows Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories from 2013, among others from the 2010’s

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When I say “atrocious UI” I really mean it lol. I don’t have an android to test this on, but here’s a screenshot :smile:

Any frondend developers that wish to clean up the code, you’re most welcome to put in a PR on GitHub.

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I really like the idea and, as you were saying, would encourage to add more genres and ratings.
That’s a nice way to discover new musics, especially if it could work with the folksnomy tags, could make nice collections more reachable

ex:

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Yes, indeed. You’re not the first one to notice this: Selected decade uses the wrong year range · Issue #1 · elliotchance/chartbrainz · GitHub

I’ll wait for the l_genre_genre tables to be included in the next dump and release a bunch of small fixes (including the decade bug)

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I have been using RYM for this the last year or so and if we could port some of the core features over to MusicBrainz with charts (RYM provides static charts, but also lets you create custom charts based on a wide variety of factors: genres, years, moods, wishlist, etc). It would be immensely powerful for collectors and music discovery.

RYM also has this concept of “lists” which sort of has an analogy to MusicBrainz collections. However, lists in RYM are infinitely better because you can include different types (releases, artists, etc) on the same list and there is rich formatting that can be attached to each item. I know comments on collections are coming, I just hope they will also support Markdown or something similar to make collections a much richer and more engaging medium.

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This is great. Hopefully, MB, CB and LB have a consolidated rating system one day. That would get us more ratings to use.

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Unfortunately, the latest dump doesn’t include l_genre_genre yet. However, I have made some small fixes in the meantime:

  • The decade buttons were filtering on the wrong decades. This is now fixed so that 2010s correctly filters 2010 - 2019.
  • The decades filter is now based of real decades in the available data.
  • Some minor layout fixes so it’s a little cleaner.
  • All releases and each genre have been increased from 100 to 250 releases.
  • Removed NULL markers (“\N”) shown in incomplete dates.
  • The genre list now collapses parents so the list doesn’t become very long. Also, removed some indention and added bold so it looks cleaner.

Fixes #1

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Big Update!

  1. New domain. You can view the site at https://chartbrainz.com.
  2. Sync ratings. You can now login and sync your ratings, it will show your ratings on the respective chart items.
  3. Submit ratings. You can submit/change/remove ratings for any chart item. Ratings are in half-star resolution.

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A way to search for genres would be neat, I wanted to look at the drum and bass charts but I could not find it initially because it is grouped under EDM (not a super intuitive hierarchy we have there).

When I found it, I also noticed that it doesn’t list anything - is that because of your methodology or a bug?

Good suggestion! I also like to look at Trance and have to go through many level to get to it. I’ve added a ticket: Filter genres · Issue #5 · elliotchance/chartbrainz · GitHub

That was a bug, it was not replacing spaces with hyphens in genre names, but it is fixed now.

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EDM is what RYM uses for “any electronic music meant for the club” basically, that’s why it’s under there since I mostly follow their hierarchy when it seems reasonably sensible :slight_smile:

It is sensible when you consider how broad Electronic actually is and the fact that there’s so many subgenres just focused around dance music.

In any case, I’ve added a filter for the genres to find then more easily which I’ll push out shortly.

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I can live with that just fine, just felt a little off to me because I got into drum and bass from the much more relaxed, jazz-y side of the genre that hardly feels like club music.

The lines of genres can often be so blurred. I think RYM handles this well with a genre having multiple parents, but there are still always influences. I sort of handle this with the chartbrainz hierarchy to use the parents, then fall back to fusion or influence so that a genre can appear under multiple parents as well, but this can be tweaked in the future if it doesn’t work out so great.

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Big Update!

Rating on charts is somewhat useful, but being able to rate anything in MusicBrainz is much better. Now you can use the unified search for artists and releases and rate them inline.

I have also made some bug fixes and UI cleanup.

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I’ve been interested in testing this, but I have some concerns. When I try to log in, musicbrainz warns:

ChartBrainz is requesting permission to:

View your public account information
View and modify your private ratings
Perform the above operations when I'm not using the application

Now, I don’t mind sharing my public account information (it’s public), but I do not want my private ratings modified. Why should my ratings be modified? And why would anything be done to my account when I’m not using the application?

I have tried to modify the url string to exclude various switches, but have been unable to stumble across a combination that permits use of chartbrainz without compromising my data and privacy.

Secondly, in scanning the site, I noticed that the ‘classical’ genre does not list any classical music at all. It’s all rock. Why doesn’t it display the correct genre?

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MusicBrainz doesn’t provide an optional message, but I’ll break it down:

  • The public information gives me access to the user name (not the email). I need the user name for many actions.
  • There is only a single scope for read and writing ratings. I cannot separate the two, however, depending on how you use it I will need both.
  • Offline access means that MusicBrainz gives me a refresh token. Without that, your session will only last one hour and you’ll be required to reauthorize. To be clear, I don’t access anything actually offline. It’s directly from your browser. I don’t even store the tokens or interact with my backend at all.

These are all valid concerns. If you’re tech savvy you can check the source on GitHub to see exactly what it’s doing with your data.

That being said, there’s no reason to login to use ChartBranz. Only if you want to see and add your own ratings.

I do see releases under “classical” - so I bet this is a big. Which browser/OS are you using?

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I think it’s because when you click, it takes much time to display the result, sometimes it displays “No releases” or the other releases, then after a while I see the correct releases.

Maybe if there was a way to display “Now loading…” it would feel better. :wink:

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