[mb-users] additional CoverArt AR necessary?

[Lauri Watts]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 10:15 PM, Philipp Wolfer <phw at rubyforge.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 4:07 PM, Johannes Dewender <brainz at jonnyjd.net>
> wrote:
> > The reasoning is basically:
> > Some people (including me) would like to have some kind of API for
> > plugins/programs etc. where the CoverArt URL can be retrieved directly
> > (without knowledge of special websites) if the server somehow knows
> > about it.
> > We don't have something like that know, so the CoverArt AR could be seen
> > as the API right now.
> >
> > This is the point where we actually have a disagreement.
> >
> > I personally think, that the CoverArt AR like it is used now is pretty
> > useless and redundant if we already have a Jamendo (or CD-baby, ..) URL
> > provided through some other means and it is an unnecessary effort to
> > create it and unnecessary information to display at the release page.
> > If we see a Jamendo download and a cover, we have all the information
> > we need already.
> >
>
> I think that I (outsidecontext) already made my opinion pretty clear in the
> discussion about ticket #3189. Let me summarize it here:
>
> 1. A CC license AR is *not* a cover art AR. They are semantically completely
> different. You can't logically derive a cover art from a license URL. That
> it is possible in some cases is irrelevant.

I agree and disagree.

I 100% agree that they are semantically different, but that is an
implementation detail as far as users are concerned.

Where we _can_ derive these automatically, we probably should.  The
users shouldn't have to enter the exact same URL 3 times to cover the
three relationships, they should enter it once, where possible, and
the back end should take care of duplicating it if necessary.

What would be ideal imho:

User need only enter: 'Release has a CD Baby page at'

Since we can easily know from a CD Baby URL what's there, the server
creates: Has cover art at, Is available for mail order at, Is
available for download at (where applicable), and has a review page at
AR's.

For the majority of sites, it is entirely possible to derive most of
these from the base page, for the others where it isn't, or cases
where artists are letting us deep link to art on their sites for
example, users can enter them separately as needed.

The current result is, few people actually add all of the possible
AR's to sites.  I've been working through the CD Baby 'needs toc'
report, adding toc's and cover art, so I've seen first hand, every
album _could_ have all of these URL's, but it's tedious to keep
pasting the same URL in, so most releases have only one. Further,
which one is a bit random based on if whoever added it felt the cover
art or the fact you can buy it is more important, so about half of
them have cover art only incidentally because the download link was
there, and the other half only incidentally have a link to the store,
because someone added the cover art.

So I'm on the side of  "yes we should have separate AR's", but I don't
think we necessarily should expose that to the users.

Computers are supposed to help make things easier, after all.

-- 
Lauri Watts