Everything is everything
What is meant to be, will be - Lauryn Hill
Ok, I said last time that Kapell is what I finally wanted in a music player, but I was full of it. We needed more!
Today’s post is backed by Everything Is Everything (on Kapell) by Lauryn Hill (on Kapell).
The Whole Apple Catalog
The genre browse that shipped two weeks ago had a ceiling: it only showed records MusicBrainz knew about. That sounds like a lot until you measure it. Of the albums streaming in us, just 3.9% were matched. Italy’s Hip Hop/Rap page had 214,589 albums against roughly 18.3 million you could actually play. Eww!
To rectify this Kapell’s API now operate against a number of new indices: well over a hundred million songs, tens of millions of albums, and all manner of facets and filters. You can now speedily browse Apple’s entire catalog in all its glory even if we don’t have a proper MusicBrainz match, updated hot and fresh, daily.
Ranked Where You Is
Popularity is now per-storefront, returning what’s hot all over the world, wherever you are.
Genre pages got smarter, too. Before, Taylor Swift’s (on Kapell) Cruel Summer (on Kapell) was showing as the #1 Hip Hop/Rap song because one of its seven (really, seven?) Apple editions was filed there. Now a genre page puts the records that mostly live there first, and strays like Cruel Summer, which is Pop on the other six, fall down the list. Sorry, Tay-tay!
Sorting and Filtering
Catalog pages now sort 6 ways: popular (for your storefront), newest, oldest, title, artist, and shuffle. Shuffle is a random order that still paginates, so you can walk all of Jazz without seeing a record twice. Newest-first over 41 million Hip Hop/Rap songs comes back in about a tenth of a second. I’m lk proud.
You can narrow these jawns down, too:
- Everything: subgenre, year, decade, a release date range, explicit, and trait (compilation, live, remix, karaoke).
- Albums: album, EP or single.
- Songs: language, instrumental, and length, from under two minutes to over fifteen.
- Title and artist prefix, which ignore accents, case and a leading “The”, so “be” finds The Beatles.
Every filter shows how many records you’d get before you pick it. Search picked up the same sorts, and every Apple genre is now reachable, including ones like Urbano latino that used to come up empty.
People Behind the Records
Tapping a credit sometimes landed on an artist page with no discography. A friend and I were discussing a mutual love of Pino Palladino (on Kapell) only to find no discography. Shame! Apple lists Pino as a primary artist on 120 songs, including a live We Are The World (on Kapell) with 23 names on it. We were matching an artist by looking for the name their records have in common, and his records are all fronted by someone else, so there wasn’t one. Bleh!
Kapell now also matches artists through albums it already knows (about 21,700 artists) and through songwriting credits, which is how session players like Pino finally connect (5,531 more). And 2,561 artists stuck on MusicBrainz placeholders like [unknown] got unstuck.
Small Things
- Faster big genres. Opening a large genre used to spend 3.5 seconds counting. These counts are now precomputed and speeeeedy.
- Client caching headers. The Kapell client can now make decisions about caching thanks to
cacheUntilinformation.