The narrow path
Tryin' to tell my folks that flow, it ain't easy - Blu
Kapell’s underlying API is usually moving in lock-step with the client, but the nature of the queries and such mean that sometimes I’m fixing things unrelated to specific client features. The 1.4.1 release’s banner track-level credits feature was already supported by the API, for example.
Small Accuracy Improvements
I don’t remember what triggered this investigation, but I bumped into some problems that caused about 28,600 incorrect matches (0.12% of the 24.1 million Apple albums, songs and artists Kapell matches). Most of the problems stemmed from ISRCs.
- Albums - Albums sometimes do not have a barcode, at which point Kapell has to deploy heroic measures to match it. Specifically, looking for a collection of ISRCs as the big hint of an album’s identity.
- Tracks - ISRCs are sometimes duplicated (or incorrect) and point to wildly different songs.
These duplicated ISRCs confused the various matching strategies Kapell’s API uses to tie Apple’s catalog to 3rd-party data. I added song duration and title checks to avoid picking the wrong things.
Unrelated, attribution of some works were being lumped under the composer or the writer was being lumped into the performer or attributed to the wrong person. I added guards around the life of an artist, making sure long-deceased composers don’t occlude modern performers and being more specific about artist name matching band names.