Hi everyone,
Recently we spent some time improving our documentation about which fields people should fill in to describe the tools that they’re using to play music and submit listens to ListenBrainz, and also to provide more detail about what music is being played when it’s available from an online service or webpage.
The new fields, media_player, submission_client, music_service and origin_url, are described here: JSON Documentation — ListenBrainz 0.1.0 documentation. We also include a set of examples showing how to use these fields
If you maintain a tool that sends listens to listenbrainz, we encourage you to update the data fields that you send. If you have any suggestions for improvements then please let us know.
For media_player and submission_client, how should we handle capitalization (or does it not matter so much)? I use the mpd media player with my own submitter for listens. I’m wondering if I should put mpd, MPD, or even MusicPD for media_player. Perhaps eventually once people implement this you’ll have a list of player names that people use in practice.
that’s a great question! we spent a long time trying to decide on a guide for music_service and we didn’t even think about these two fields.
Personally, I think that you should use the “most commonly accepted capitalization” of that service. In the case of MPD, I see that their docs refer to it all in upper-case: User’s Manual — Music Player Daemon documentation, and so I’d use that. My idea for this field would be to say something like “user x is listening to song y using MPD” in a small notification on the ListenBrainz website. In this case, we’d just use whatever gets submitted by the client, so it doesn’t matter how it’s written.
We can also look at the submission statistics at a later stage and if there is some confusion in these fields, we can update the guidelines.
odd question, are there any plans to clean origin_url like we do on MusicBrainz? or at least have a separate cleaned URL? that could allow for more consistent MBID matching using origin_url
for example, I watched a YouTube playlist with the music video for A New Start, but it somehow got linked to the wrong recording. both recordings have different YouTube links as well…
the link given to ListenBrainz was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py21QCndbxc&list=PLQmVFdwvZgfXlb2RDXWV1NaPXgYPu786G&index=20, if that’s important.
Using data submitted in these fields is a possible option in the future to improve the mapping, we’ll see how detailed they are and how we can use them.