Sunday, May 30, 2010

Musicbrainz Proxy service over DBus

I have just finished another building block on my quest to taming my music library: a Linux based application serving as 'proxy' (with caching of course) to Musicbrainz webservice.  The service is exposed through DBus.

Why?
Correlating music tracks across disparate applications / services can be daunting. For example, suppose one  scrobbles his/her tracks to Last.fm. Furthermore, let's say one wishes to keep his/her favorite Music Player in sync with his/her Last.fm profile.  This goal appears, on the surface, to be an easy one but as it turns out, support for finding & cataloging music tracks coherently across various applications / services remains elusive at the moment.

Also worth noting:  access to Musicbrainz's webservice is monitored.  Webservice API access is limited to 1call/sec: if many applications make uncoordinated access to the service, the user's machine might get blacklisted.  As I intend to make the track mbid a central piece of information for correlating my music tracks, I needed to address this issue.

Solution
With this application, it will be easier to integrate the various other building blocks of my music management arsenal. See the other project SyncLastfm that will benefit from this addition.

Project
The project's home page can be found here.  The associated Ohloh page can be found there.

Update:  the application will be installed under Applications / Other.
Update2: more information is accessible here.