"The ideas are incredible. I can access information easily, and it is right before my eyes... To introduce a song on the radio and to create your playlist around an idea or name, you need to make a previous research, and your tool is very well suited for the job." Duygu Ateş, Radio Programmer "I see that MusicDigger emphesizes exploration rather than consumption (recommendation) as current tools aim. It is a nice way to dig into details." Ahmet Güneş, Radio Programmer/DJ "Music has many connections within, and it is nice to see them reflected over your tool... With the visual aesthetic improved a little, I am even willing to pay for it." Evren Ulusoy, Musician/DJ "I would love to browse a movie database with your interface." Ferhan Türe, Graduate student, UMD CS department

News

We are currently looking for users to evaluate us!. To offer your help, watch or download the video below to see what we are doing for you to discover music. You can then fill our simple user evaluation form (doc - docx), and send your answers to adil.yalcin [at] gmail (dot) com. Thanks to all who participate!

Overview

MusicDigger is a tool that lets you "discover discographies" and "browse artist networks". The music metadata source we use is discogs.com, which offers public domain, high quality and detailed release, artist and label data based on community contributions.

The data that MusicDigger excels at are the following:

• Artists: An artist has a list of albums released, collaboration information with other artists, appearances in compilations, etc.
• Releases: A release can be an album, a single, a CD+DVD set, etc, it is anything that is sold as a cohesive product of an artist. It includes a list of tracks, credits (additional artists worked on this records), collaborations for specific tracks and includes basic information such as release year, type, format, etc.
• Labels: Record labels are the companies that deal with marketing releases, they can be used to categorize music into styles and artist communities, especially for independent labels. A label has a list of albums released within this label, and also can include sub-parent labels.

Discovery in MusicDigger comes in two forms:

• Searching through the releases of an artist or a label (albums/singles/appeared compilations/other contributed releases, etc).
• Browsing through the artists, releases and labels using a music collaboration network.

Video

To download the whole video in high resolution (e.g. for viewing in GOM Player), use this link.

Screenshots

Features

• Browse a large music discography database, distributed by discogs.com. (public domain, database of user contributions)
• Easy-to-use time-line visualization with advanced filtering options( find what you are looking for and discover releases easily).
• "Explore", rather tham consume what is recommended by other recommendation systems.
• See how two artist are connected instead of only knowing that they are somehow related to each other. Explore the connections yourself in depth!
• Main data is stored in an offline database to let you search fast and query detailed music network information, which is not generally not possible/practical using online APIs/queries only.
• Online web query services are used to get additional information about releases on-demand (reducing the amount of data that needs to be off-line, including album art.)
• Explore label information as well, which conveys a lot of information about style. You probably cannot find a visualization tool that allows you to discover music through connections of labels!
• Built using cross platform tehcnologies (Windows & Linux)
• Switch between effective 2D and 3D layouts, enable fish-eye lens view, etc. Find out which display suits you.
• Display and filter hundreds of releases interactively and easily.
• Appropriate use of direct manipulation with the visualization.
• Ability to differentiate between different artists releasing under the same name.

Reports & Additional Notes

• Course wiki
• Project Proposal
• Final Report

Download

• The source code is hosted at sourceforge. Download, build & extend it yourself . We use Apache License, version 2. (We cannot claim building the source code is going to be easy, but it is possible...)
• You can grab a binary package for Windows here. Extract the archive and run MusicDigger.exe to see the magic happen (hopefully). You also need to download music database file here. Place this file next to in the extracted directory. ( We did not test the application in many machines, and we cannot guarantee that it will work on your machine, yet. Sorry about that. )

Team Members

• M. Adil Yalçın
• Preeti Bhargava
• Sravanthi Bondugula
• Varun K. Nagaraja
• Marcelo Velloso

Contact

If you don't know how to contact any developer personally, you can send an e-mail to adil (dot) yalcin, under gmail domain.