{"id":136,"date":"2006-06-07T10:11:27","date_gmt":"2006-06-07T10:11:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.gregbueno.com\/wp\/sakufu\/2006\/06\/07\/musicbrainz_mys\/"},"modified":"2006-06-07T10:11:27","modified_gmt":"2006-06-07T10:11:27","slug":"musicbrainz_mys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/2006\/06\/07\/musicbrainz_mys\/","title":{"rendered":"Musicbrainz: MySQL mirror vs. web service"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember how I toiled away at loading a Musicbrainz mirror into MySQL<\/a>? Well, I deleted that mirror.<\/p>\n

Running queries on a database as large as Musicbrainz was remarkably sluggish with PHP, and joins were practically impossible.<\/p>\n

Musicbrainz does offer an XML web service<\/a>. So it wasn’t a terrible leap to write a simple class in PHP to query the service and parse the results.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I didn’t find much PHP development out there for Musicbrainz — Last.fm<\/a> is probably the most visible Musicbrainz user developing in PHP — so I had to start from scratch. Want to see the source? Of course you do<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Note:<\/strong> I use the Snoopy class<\/a> to connect to the web service, and the XMLParser<\/a> class to parse the results. I couldn’t get the SimpleXML<\/a> library to work with my Windows installation of PHP (my development environment), so I went with a library that mimicked SimpleXML.<\/p>\n

To query Musicbrainz for a list of artists matching a particular name:<\/p>\n

$mbSearch = new Musicbrainz_WebService;<\/p>\n

$mbSearch->QueryArtist("Number Girl");<\/p>\n

$artistList = $mbSearch->results->{'artist-list'}[0]->artist;<\/tt><\/p>\n

If you know the GID of an artist, you can also query for the artist’s releases:<\/p>\n

$mbSearch = new Musicbrainz_WebService;<\/p>\n

$mbSearch->GetArtistById("808fe413-ff00-4a68-99fe-0ab265a7e2be", "sa-Official release-rels");<\/tt><\/p>\n

And you can limit the number of results:<\/p>\n

$mbSearch = new Musicbrainz_WebService;<\/p>\n

$mbSearch->GetArtistById("808fe413-ff00-4a68-99fe-0ab265a7e2be", "sa-Official release-rels", 100);<\/tt><\/p>\n

You can also query by release or track and their respective IDs:<\/p>\n

$mbSearch = new Musicbrainz_WebService;<\/p>\n

$mbSearch->GetReleaseById("92348049-331a-480c-921b-61e420b98d2d", "release-events");<\/tt><\/p>\n

The web service does not offer all the relationships in the Musicbrainz database — no Amazon ASINs, no freedb indeces — but it is a quick and easy way to leverage the power of Musicbrainz. I use the web service to retrieve track information for Musicwhore.org<\/a>. The Japanese track listing for this release<\/a> is provided by Musicbrainz.<\/p>\n

At some point, I’ll have to write some more thorough documentation, and I need to investigate ways to cache requests to the service. For now, I’ll let Musicbrainz power part of my content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember how I toiled away at loading a Musicbrainz mirror into MySQL? Well, I deleted that mirror.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technophilia-professional"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Bkjq-2c","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregbueno.com\/sakufu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}