Databases needed for looking up song years of release

December 14, 2004 2:49 PM

I have been given the task of looking up the year-of-release for a large number (~8000) songs. Many of these titles are European, Latin American, and South American. Allmusic.com is okay, but slow and not as comprehensive as I require--esp. for uncommon titles. I'd bet that I have to find some specialized databases. Anyone have a suggestion?
posted by mdpc98 to Media & Arts (9 answers total)

There's no way of using the same "data base" that, seemingly is used by iTunes to label songs for this purpose? Just thinking...
posted by ParisParamus at 3:02 PM on December 14, 2004

GraceNote could be helpful. Also, there's FreeDB, which is similar.

I'll also note that, if you have to do this 8000 times, it might be worth your time to look into some way of automating the process. There's a lot of software out there that will query these databases for you.
posted by kickingtheground at 3:18 PM on December 14, 2004

Given the amount of titles you're right about specialized databases: it's a tough search if you want free, accurate info. The info you need is certainly held by national performing rights societies/associations/organizations such as ASCAP in the United States (searchable database here but alas with no dates that I can see) and others (I found a couple of lists here and here). For many releases the Gracenote CDDB that kickingtheground suggests works well (and is what iTunes uses), but AFAIK it isn't definitive as users can add to the DB for unlisted titles. I could be wrong there. Interesting question and I'll keep looking around.
posted by Cryptical Envelopment at 5:00 PM on December 14, 2004

Can you tell us anything more about the ~8000 songs? Are they all more recent songs and if not how far back do they go (if you can guess)? Are they "popular" songs that you are sure were officially released or are you dealing with folk music and perhaps self-published recordings too?
posted by Cryptical Envelopment at 5:37 PM on December 14, 2004

AllBrazilianMusic
posted by iamck at 6:35 PM on December 14, 2004

Take a look at the musicbrainz client, which will re-tag individual songs (as opposed to the CDDB and clones, which only recognize complete albums), with about 70% accuracy, in my experience.
posted by signal at 6:07 AM on December 15, 2004

The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles might be worth getting hold of, since it contains the charting dates of every Top 75 hit ever, and its index should be quicker to use than searching a website.
posted by cillit bang at 8:12 AM on December 15, 2004

Response by poster: all: thx for the feedback--have been slammed today @ work, but will jump into these suggestions within the next day.

cryptical envelopment: i'm not an expert, but will do a bit of digging and get back to you. as an off-hand guess, i'd say that most are 'radio' songs or deeper cuts from a 'radio' artist
posted by mdpc98 at 12:52 PM on December 15, 2004

Response by poster: okay, lots to look at in these suggestions :) nothing to do but jump in and get dirty. if i find that one of these (or a different resource) works wonders, i'll report back.

kickingtheground: i'm sure i can find something, but do you recommend a client or app that will automate the lookups? i don't have the audio files for these titles--just a flat table of artist & title info.

cryptical environment: i looked over the list and found ~300 elvis songs (meticulously listed with actual label/song id info), a bunch of what i believe to be hungarian, lots of german stuff, some south african bands... it's a mixed bag, and i'm no expert on most of it.
posted by mdpc98 at 8:02 AM on December 16, 2004