Gracenote's CMI: Many audiophiles are joyously embracing high-end music servers in their systems, but one vexing little problem has remained for serious music listeners: The metadata tags that work so well for popular music are completely inadequate for identifying classical works.
In most cases popular music can adequately be categorized with three pieces of information: album title, track title, and artist. This breaks down with multi-movement classical works, multi-artist ensembles, and compositions that are distinguished by category (symphony, quartet, concerto, etc), movement, and opus numbers. The lack of consistency in entering that data means that what does get posted is frequently garbled, as well. I have ripped CDs to my music server, only to find the "artist" tag as frequently given to the composer as to the soloist—and forget about including conductor and orchestra info in addition to a concerto's soloist.
At CES 2007, Gracenote announced the Classical Music Initiative (CMI), which it describes as "the industry's first system to accurately and consistently present all of the key elements required to identify a classical music track within the standard three-line display." Gracenote says that CMI "has received support and endorsements from classical artists, experts, critics, and customers including symphonies such as the San Francisco Symphony, London Symphony Orchestra, New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra; music labels Naxos and Harmonia-Mundi; and top classical music scholars and authors."
Gracenote says that to date it has formatted more than 100,000 of the most popular classical recordings to the CMI standard. This represents more than "half of the classical music look-up queries" Gracenote has logged in the last 12 months. The service is adding more daily, based on "data feeds [harvested] directly from labels, artists, and other content sources."
The Gracenote Media Database bills itself as "the world's largest and most comprehensive repository of digital music data, containing information on over five million CDs and 60 million tracks, spanning the entire universe of music." Gracenote's data is employed by Apple iTunes, Yahoo Music Engine, AOL Winamp, Real Rhapsody, and Napster, not to mention consumer electronics brands Panasonic, Samsung, and Sony.
AMG adds LyricFind: When I used to work at a record store, the dreaded customer question was: I'm looking for a song, but I don't know its name, or the artist who recorded it, but it was about love. Where do you file it?
All Media Guide (AMG) just came a step closer to helping those poor souls by announcing its January 16 partnership with LyricFind. LyricFind offers two services: a lyric search service, which can identify songs by matching lyrics or lyric fragments, and a lyric display service, which gives consumers the complete lyrics to songs searched by title or artist.
"LyricFind's technology provides AMG with a powerful new tool to help users find new music," said Andrew Stess, AMG's vice president of consumer electronics. "Now our customers will be able to offer consumers the ability to search our database not only by traditional artist and title methods, but also by the one thing that people tend to remember from a song: the lyrics."
Not always—that's actually where LyricFind's ability to recognize incomplete lyrics will probably prove most useful.
Harbeth at 30: Harbeth introduced its first loudspeaker, the HL Monitor almost 30 years ago, but managing director Alan Shaw is fairly certain that many original HL Monitors are still in use. "Such is the longevity of the brand’s loudspeakers—and we are keen to track them down in what is a very special year for us."
Shaw may be right. I remember encountering the HL Monitors in a demonstration from around that time that pitted them against a pair of Spendor BC-1s. Rather than pick an overall best, I emerged convinced that if I ever owned either loudspeaker audio nirvana would have been achieved. Had that happened, three decades of audiophilia nervosa might have been avoided. (Oh, who am I kidding?)
"Anyone who thinks they might have the oldest working pair of Harbeth speakers should contact us at once," said Shaw. "They are sitting on a piece of audio heritage."
