This web application is designed to browse through music metadata from a third-party database. My inspiration for it came from the All Music Guide, which is an amazing resource if you are a music fan of any kind. The site has had a colorful history. For a long time it was maintained by RoviCorp, and they had a native iOS app for accessing all the music info available on the site. It was fast, easy to use, and had a nice UI. The problem was the searching was wonky and had a tendency to crash the app. Eventually they updated the main website to be mobile-friendly and the native app was taken away. I didn't like the new mobile incarnation of the site, so I decided to create a mobile-optimized web app that was like the native app (i.e. uncluttered and fast).
Version 1.0 was built on AngularJS and used an ASP.NET Web API back end that wrapped calls to Rovi's RESTful service for getting metadata. Sadly, that service was shut down at the end of 2020, after Rovi merged with Tivo, then later with a company called Xperi, and the APIs got consolidated and modernized. I would love to keep using them but they cost way more than I can spend.
Version 2.0 will have a new React-based front end and a Python back end that talks to MusicBrainz to retrieve music metadata.
The new version will have the following features:
- Search for an artist, album, or song
- View artist details as well as their discography, members, and related artists
- View album details and the track listing
- Include artist images and album cover art
- View other releases from an artist like singles, EPs, and compilations
I'm making the back end such that MusicBrainz is just one provider that could easily be swapped out for a different one, just by changing an environment variable and re-starting the service. They seem to have the data that I want so that's what I'll go with for now.