Sadly, the covers project has gone untouched since December. It was a pretty cool project, at first. I was interested enough to (co-)author a perl module to interface with the site's XML-RPC service.
However, over time, the data kept getting increasingly more inaccurate. A voting system was put in place to try to minimize the problems - it didn't help. Since December, the site has been put into static mode - no new entries are being accepted.
An alternate site has started, The Cover Songs DB, but input is restricted to authorized users only (which looks to be 3 people - although impressively they've amassed 2417 cover tunes).
My question is: how can a person design one of these sites with a reasonable amount of accuracy, without having such an iron grip on the input.
The first thing that came to mind was to cross-reference the input data with an already existing DB; specifically freedb. Assuming freedb is mostly reliable you could probably minimize some bogus data if the cover and/or original does not exist on db. However, you can still get bad links between original and cover (although, i guess release date would solve any chronological errors). But, you could still attribute a cover as being an original. I guess then you'd have to store already existing original tunes in a local db to be examined. But, what if there are two songs of the same name, blah blah, blah! It gets really hairy, really quick :)
Re:CoverDB
LTjake on 2003-05-07T14:46:37
Hi There! It wasn't so much a review as it was a statement that your project exists
:). I'm glad you plan to expand the interactivity of your site; however, it will still require a lot of dedication on the part of the admins to add in the new content. One of the attractions of the covers project was that it allowed for user input without going through any hoops - it was easy to participate, even if it's only once (e.g. I have a favorite band, and you're missing a cover song from your DB by them, so, I'll add it; that's the total sum of my contributions - but imagine if 1000 people did the same thing).
By limiting the participation, you're potentially limiting the site's growth and community interest. What i propose, rather than putting up administrative hoops, is to streamline the input.
As mentioned in my post, freedb can provide a starting point for those restrictions by acting as the authority of existing content. Your site then acts as a linking mechanism between all of freedb's content with the side benefit of extra data that freedb provides (track length, year, etc). You then only have to worry about the validity of those links. Anyone would be welcome to submit a link, and programmatically some error checking could occur (e.g. the system would not allow the linking two songs that did not share the same name). It could be submitted into a queue for approval by admins (although this, once again, introduces some baby-sitting, a lot of the work has already been done).
In the end, this may be a just a "dream" system... thoughts?
Re:CoverDB
Waereghem on 2003-05-07T19:02:56
What you describe was indeed one of the possibilities. However, we have chosen from the start not to work like this. We chose to focus on quality and not on quantity.
If you look at the defunct Covers Project, you can clearly see why. It has become very unreliable due to the lack of control, and due to the lack of background information on the songs.
You know, on the internet, it's not the quantity of information that matters. On the contrary even, we are flooded with information! In my opinion the scarce good has become reliable and ordered information.
However, even with a lot of moderating we still hope to get a large database by the end of the year. Imagine what 10 or 15 motivated people could do during 6 months... Let's now hope our forum will start to be used and once the ball starts rolling...;)
