We give it to you real
Flex a little skill, maybe pay a couple bills - Brother Ali
In many ways this version of the API is what I alway envisioned Kapell could be: A vast network of music I could lose myself in.
Today’s blog post is backed by Gitit feat Slug and Brother Ali (on Kapell) from BK-One’s Radio de Canibal (on Kapell).
Searching Songs
Search — which powers the retrieval of artists and albums when booping around in the client — now covers all 15.2 million Apple-resolved MusicBrainz recording and indexes the names attached to a track: the producer, the engineers, the players, and the studio. Searching for Quincy Jones (on Kapell) finds the tracks he produced, not just the ones with his name in the title. The track actually called “Quincy Jones” still wins, because a hit on the track’s own title or artist is still best.
Storefronts
Kapell was, until now, not really worried about the storefront your client was in (e.g. us &c) and was therefore prone to returning content you couldn’t play. 7.1% of the albums the API served pointed at an Apple id that doesn’t stream in us.
Every client call now includes a storefront argument, such that storefront-appropriate content is returned and popularity-ranked lists re-rank by that storefront’s score. Ask for the wrong id and you get not_in_storefront rather than a dead track.
Popularity
Oh, I mentioned popularity above: Kapell’s API now has a proper, storefront-specific relevance score. Artist coverage went from 7.4% to 97.9%.
Genres and Karaoke
Artist, album, and song now contain a genre. It’s based on Apple’s curated taxonomy, about 440 hierarchical nodes, so filtering on Dance matches Dance > House.
Two more helpful bits of data came along with this work: explicit, and traits (compilation, live, remix, karaoke), both filterable.
Artists and More
The Artist API has now moved to GraphQL and it has more: Wikipedia prose and link-outs, ListenBrainz listen counts and similar artists, and more from Wikidata. Stuff like active since: MusicBrainz’s begin date for a person is their birth date, so “recording since 1969” wasn’t representable until now. Also birthplace with coordinates, formation place for groups, family, influences, associated acts, occupations, instruments, the labels an artist founded.
Albums and songs got full structured Wikipedia articles, sections in document order and the CC BY-SA attribution included.
Small Things
- ISRC collisions. When two MusicBrainz recordings share an ISRC, the resolver now breaks the tie on the song’s own resolved album instead of picking the orphan. 316,283 songs resolve through the new tier; 11,382 of them landed on a different recording than before.
appleIdsis ordered, best first. A name-matched Apple id was sorting ahead of a UPC-exact twin whenever it happened to be numerically smaller, on 47,964 albums. Now.firstmeans our best id.- Various performance improvements, including efficiency improvements to the materialization pipeline from July that cut down daily updates to minutes.