Many Artists

I've been working more lately on Tagfriendly. I've decided to ditch Tomcat/Servlets. I don't know what took me so long to realize it was a dead end. I think I was in denial most of the time.

I am still using Java so, so feel free to kick me while I am down.

Anyway, I've got the database builder so that it can load all 24 million songs in under 8 hours. Not too bad. The indexer has problems though. (It connects to the database and builds a full-text index.) It chokes up on the 43rd artist, which is "Various Artists." And by that I mean that the indexer quickly goes from processing about 30 albums a second down to about 10. Yuck. I cut off each index at 750k songs, so I know the problem is not with index size*.

I knew there would be a lot of albums under that listing, but I didn't think it would be too big of a deal. Apparently, to the postgres JDBC driver, it is. I haven't solved the problem yet, but I will probably chunk the artists that have more than a set threshold of albums. That is, if JDBC is the problem.

The purpose of this post is to document the number of albums assigned to some of the artists. The query I ran was to select the artists who had more than 1000 albums listed. Many I expected to see, but there were a few surprises there. Here goes:

Artist/Album Count

1. Various Artists 125807
2. Varios 6870
3. various 7294
4. Various 277990
5. Depeche Mode 1772
6. The Rolling Stones 1329
7. Various artists 1764
8. Sampler 1957
9. Pink Floyd 2547
10. Beethoven 1819
11. Verschiedene 1121
12. Compilation 1856
13. Miles Davis 1568
14. VA 3595
15. Eric Clapton 1195
16. Led Zeppelin 2000
17. V.A. 1521
18. Bruce Springsteen 1706
19. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1894
20. various artists 1528
21. U2 2185
22. Frank Sinatra 1448
23. The Beatles 2428
24. Queen 1277
25. Various Artist 3298
26. Metallica 2089
27. Mozart 2557
28. David Bowie 1144
29. Diverse 4036
30. Soundtrack 1210
31. V¬?rios 1437
32. Pearl Jam 1155
33. Bob Dylan 2171
34. Madonna 1331
35. Grateful Dead 2032
36. Nirvana 1032
37. Jimi Hendrix 1054
38. VARIOUS 1214
39. Santana 1092
40. Deep Purple 1476
41. Elton John 1044
42. Prince 1591
43. Johann Sebastian Bach 1472
44. Elvis Presley 3101
45. Iron Maiden 1228
46. Louis Armstrong 1266
47. Black Sabbath 1335
48. Bach 1024
49. Ludwig van Beethoven 1013

I was probably most surprised to see Pearl Jam and Nirvana make the list (especially Nirvana). Then I remember that Pearl Jam is probably one of the most bootlegged bands of the past 10 years, and bootlegs certainly show up on CDDB/FreeDb.

It is nice to see that there is still a market for new classical recordings after a century or more. How much of todays pop do you think will stand up to that kind of scrutiny?

* Yes, I take a hit at the end when the indices have to be merged, but believe me, it is worth it.