Namespace for classical music, anyone?

[thedarkages]

The preceding post listed my current music as "Neville Marriner; Academy Of St. Martin In The Fields - II. Kyrie" -- which completely omits the fact that I was listening to the Mozart Requiem. For this, we can blame Gracenote CDDB, the proprietary database of CD contents which supplies (under license) Apple, Nullsoft (RIP), et al with track listings for their music players. As any iTunes user who has a significant classical library can attest, this sort of screwup is not uncommon; performers get listed as composers, names of compositions are supplanted by conductors, and so on. Gracenote isn't the only one; Amazon's classical CD database is completely out of order as well.

Why hasn't anyone been able to sit down and design an XML namespace which would enable you to fully and accurately describe any piece of recorded classical music? Is the tangle of is-a and has-a so complete that such a representation is impossible? Who's tried? Musicbrainz has, but I think they squeeze everything into RDF.

Comments

[mcohenmn.livejournal.com]

That stuff drives me crazy. I've spent hours trying to conform dad's collection info so that he doesn't have to navigate Chopin, GF Chopin, G F Chopin, G.F.Chopin, Frederick Chopin, Frédéric Chopin, etc. on his iPod just to find his nocturnes. I also can't stand that the composer isn't displayed on the iPod UNLESS you put it in the 'Artist' field, which is part of why people do that, I think.