Tag Archives: standardisation

The ISRC conundrum

Posted on Saturday, 12. February 2022 by hmvh

Furthering the previous article on music metadata, today I’d like to describe my recent observations about ISRCs. It’s a 12-character, alphanumeric code that aims to uniquely identify a sound recording — irrespective whether it’s a song, spoken word, or a music video. 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. Knowing the ISRC and understanding its implementation can be useful in identifying and differentiating between versions of a song recording. This was important to me last year when I set out to “archive” a batch of CDs (mostly singles and promos). Continue reading →

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Music. Meta. Madness.

Posted on Saturday, 1. January 2022 by hmvh

In December I had to give a presentation on a topic of my choice. Predictably, the topic I picked involved Discogs. 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. 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? Continue reading →

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