One of my projects for the year is to digitise my “photo albums”.
Like many people of my generation I still have genuine photo prints from the analogue childhood days, along with school class photos and others received from friends and family through the post. These were stuck into carefully assembled photo albums.
Then there’s the proverbial shoe box full of other random pictures that never made it into photo albums — not to mention slides, negatives, and CD-ROMs from when photo labs started to give you image files instead of the negatives from a roll of film. Everybody has photographs of some sort and in some form(at) stashed away somewhere.
The time has come to finally digitise and consolidate the lot.
While we’re on a roll with music and metadata, let’s throw coronavirus and statistics into the mix because, like many people, I spent last year working mostly from home.
It’s an arrangement I’ve grown very fond of which, due to the work I do, the location of the colleagues I do it with, and the flexibility it offers, has actually increased my productivity. The ability to choose my “background music” may have also been a contributing factor.
Last year I also revised my audio hardware and ended up purchasing and processing more audio than I had in recent years — in both analogue/physical and digital formats, and I’ve been messing about with MusicBrainz and ListenBrainz. In hindsight, I went on a much further musical trip than I had remembered — but that’s not what this is post is about.
This post is about distorted data and false analyses.
Furthering the previous article on music metadata, today I’d like to describe my recent observations about ISRCs.
ISRC is an acronym for the “International Standard Recording Code”.
It’s a 12-character, alphanumeric code that looks something like USS1Z9800123 (hyphens are often added for readability), and it aims to uniquely identify a sound recording — irrespective whether it’s a song, spoken word, or a music video.
[It] helps to avoid ambiguity among recordings and simplifies the management of rights when recordings are used across different formats, distribution channels or products. The ISRC for a recording remains a fixed point of reference when the recording is used across different services, across borders, or under different licensing deals. — IFPI
An ISRC does not identify compositions/musical works, music products or performers; that’s the function of the ISWC: The International Standard Musical Work Code.
According to the official handbook, a song’s album version will have a different ISRC to, for instance, a radio edit or a dance remix. By extension, each live performance (if recorded for “commercial exploitation”) must be assigned its own ISRC, as would a re-recording or certain remasters. It is also largely media-agnostic: the codes don’t differentiate between vinyl, cassette, CD or download (there are caveats such as with format-specific mono/stereo/multi-channel mixes).
In December I had to give a presentation on a topic of my choice.
Are you following? Yeah, you know the type!
Predictably, the topic I picked involved Discogs. Yeah, you know me too well!
At first I considered simply showcasing some Venn diagrams or random insights and fun facts gleaned from its raw data but, alas, it turns out that data is only interesting if it has more than one dimension. Prose is not data. Discogs isn’t exactly “Big Data” either. Privacy was another aspect worth diving into.
Months of research via discussions, webinars, videos and articles for inspiration later, I had to conclude that the individual topics were far too deep and convoluted to condense into an informal one-hour presentation for my colleagues.
But at the very heart of this contentious data there was a message I could easily convey: Where does it come from, and why is much of it garbage?
Data is useful only if you have control over it.
As it turns out, many others have realised this too, and there are several organisations vying for this position of power while Discogs, along with other music databases such as MusicBrainz, have been at the forefront all along — perhaps even without knowing it.
What follows is a redacted and updated version of the original presentation.
Testing, testing, 1 – 2 – 3!
OK, let’s get going. Let’s rock.
In this presentation I’d like to point out something that’s been lacking in the modern music business.
It’s not content. It’s not variety, and nor is it sales. There’s more music out there than has ever been before. We listeners, music fans, consumers, customers — we’ve got so much to choose from that it’s impossible not to get lost in the selection of music and songs and anything else that you might want to listen to. It’s overload!
In all honesty, sometimes I’m not sure what even happened this year because I was cooped up for most of it. I felt disconnected, as if my head was stuck in sand for most of the year — but some noteworthy events did take place after all.
On January 6th, a mob of Trump loyalists rednecks storms the U.S. Capitol in Washington in an attempted insurrection.
Five people die in what is effectively a declaration of civil war against democracy. Facebook and Twitter kicked @realDonaldTrump off their respective platforms.
A few days ago I made a mistake: I opened a cabinet door.
Behind that cabinet door lay my stamp collection.
The last time I spent any real time with it was in the year 2002 when I bought a range of new stockbooks to replace all those loose and haphazard ones I had amassed as a child. The stamps were revised and neatly rearranged, and I also used the chance to integrate the collection of an ex-colleague who had been kind enough to donate hers some years prior.
Since then all I did was occasionally flip through the albums but paid philately no further serious attention. This changed when I discovered a certain box of spare stamps and I emptied its contents over the scanner.
That box of spares and duplicates was my stock from back when us kids used to sift through each other’s stash of extras for trading and swapping. It’s about 40 years old.
Earlier this month I finished my wife’s artist portfolio website. Check it out here.
Obviously it includes a store.
Obviously you check out the competition while setting up shop, and obviously it doesn’t take long to discover the stranger side of Etsy. Even books have been written about certain regrettable products.
One of the more interesting items I stumbled across was this Hi-Fi rack.
So there’s this puppy, and it likes to chase cars.
Not just any car, mind you, this puppy goes after certain black cars and occasionally silver cars too. It has no interest in other colours because pink or green cars cannot be taken seriously — but also because dogs are colour blind. The puppy is informed; it learns what is desirable from the adverts and reviews it sees in the newspapers laying on the floor while it is being house trained, and because it observes the adult dogs in the neighbourhood chasing after similar cars.
However, our puppy never quite manages to catch up because cars are fast.
As the puppy grows up it gradually gets side tracked by other interests and new chew toys. Pussies, too, become an instinctive pursuit. Still, our dog looks up and occasionally gives chase when it sees a flashy black car go by — but loses interest after a few metres.
“Nah, another time,” it thinks to itself, “every dog has its day.”
One sunny day our dog was basking in the front yard as a particularly flashy black car cruises by. The dog gives chase. The car slows down. The dog catches up. The car comes to a stop. The driver leaves the engine running and jumps out to quickly drop off something at a neighbour’s house.
Yes, the dog has finally caught a car!
So now what? Seriously… what’s a dog to do with a car?
Oh, this dog knows. It jumps in the seat, closes the door, and drives off. The dog is happy.
Or is it? After a few spins around the block the dog returns the car and scurries off home. It is not fulfilled. It wants more. A flea bug has bitten. The dog wants a better car.
