A few months ago, in a previous blog post, I explained the complexities in trying to determine the original album from the results of a song lookup and showed some hidden preferences that can be edited to modify results.

Here is another one that you can edit and may improve results. In the CD world, one of the indicators of a compilation is the number of tracks...most (non-Punk and Sound Effects) original albums have about 12 tracks...but compilations tend to have over 15...

As part of the algorithm to find the original album out of all the results, we give higher priority to those albums that have less songs...The default for this value is a conservative 18. You...

Continuing our cycle on important contributors to the art of music metadata, we move into the 1980s and give a nod to Ira Robbins and his indispensable Trouser Press Guide to Alternative Music. Ira Robbins started off editing his Trouser Press 'zine in the 1970s and the reviews that appeared in the 'zine were eventually compiled in 1983 into the first edition of the The Trouser Press Guide to New Wave Records. The book gave discographies and band overviews comprised of brief bios, paragraph reviews of the major releases and mentions of comings and goings of significant band members.

To the contributors, these reviews were a labor of love and it clearly comes out in the writing...

Just as we we're stabilizing our build system to be able to handle all the existing and upcoming variations of PC and Mac operating systems, we were hit with the release of iTunes 9...

It seems now to be a regular event -- second Tuesday of September, Apple releases a new major upgrade of iTunes. Since Apple is ruled by PR, it means that no one outside of Apple is given any clue of what will be in the new release...otherwise, rumors would become facts and any announcements at their event would be pre-empted. Here at TuneUp, we receive no beta versions of iTunes and all we can do is cross our fingers and hope that nothing breaks.

No such luck...and, by the amount...

It's been a painful month for development and QA here at TuneUp central. To support more OSes and media players, our development and QA systems and processes have undergone necessary upgrades and improvements. Up till now, we were developing for a single media player (iTunes) on two PC OSes (Windows XP and Vista) and two Mac OSes (Tiger and Leopard). However, in the near future, we'll be adding support for older Macs (PowerPC), the new operating systems (Snow Leopard and Windows 7) as well as adding support for new media players (Windows Media Player 10-12 being the first).

To prepare ourselves for these new complex release scenario, we've been doing a lot of background work....

Continuing the blog theme of indispensable rock info books and godfathers of (rock) metadata...Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Pete Frame painstakingly researched, drew, edited and published his two volume of Rock Family Trees. Rock Family Trees had a new and unique way of presenting the history of some of the most famous rock bands as geneologies.



The coolest thing about the presentation of the information is that allowed you to track movements rather than just individual bands (for example, the late '70s post-punk Liverpool scene) or bands that were intrinsically linked a la Free/Spooky...