Knot My Line

As a classical music lover, I am very disappointed in the data retrieved by Windows Media Player.  Microsoft has done a really good job of creating software that allows us to maintain our music on our computers.  Media Player serves all of my needs for this.  But what is lacking is data about the recordings.   The information is minimal at best and often meaningless.  I.E. I have a number of “Track 1″ titles in my WMP library.  But based on what I can find by searching the web and reading quite a few blogs and articles WMP does this as well as anyone.

The problem is that Microsoft and the recording industry want the bucks and will do the least needed to make the most money.  I don’t really blame them too much, but as a result we enthusiasts are left to our own devices.   I have a database for my personal collection, but WMP player knows nothing of it.  I doubt that I am alone in maintaining my own music database.  Because I am not much of a PC programmer, this database was written using FOCUS which is very user friendly.  My knowledge of it came from my days on large IBM mainframe systems.  My version of this software is very outdated and so my database  leaves a great deal to be desired. 

It would be wonderful if there was a common repository for all of the data about a recording.  It should be a repository that everyone could contribute to and that would be assessable to Windows Media Player as well as any other software that wanted to use it.   It would be a collaborative web site for maintaining all kinds of information about a recording and the people that make music.  Here is just some of the information I think should be included.  Someone, please do this.

• Album Name
• Artist Name
• Additional Artists
• Instruments
• Orchestra
• Conductor
• Track Number
• Track Title
• Label
• Album ID
• Opus
• Time (length)
• Recording Mode
• Cover Art Front
• Cover Art Back
• Engineers
• Where & When Recorded
• Reviews (with all of the information about the review)
• Ratings (same as reviews)
• Narrative
• Links to Web Sites