The Joe Frank Wiki talk:Music

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Let's Talk!

Let's talk about music in Joe Frank's programs. Specifically:

1. Should we attempt to be a comprehensive resource for identifying music on JF programs? (I think the answer is yes.)
2. Are there existing resources on the web that already do this? (I think the answer is yes.)
3. Would the owners of those resources be willing to let www.jfwiki.org shamelessly reproduce their painstaking research? (This is the question I feel needs the most attention as we begin to consider this.) (the answer is yes.)
4. Assuming we move forward, how should this content be incorporated into the wiki?

Let's go! Spblat 23:54, 16 May 2005 (PDT)

Feel free!

You can use whatever data you'd like from my page, I can provide it in excel format or whatever you'd like for ease of incorporation.

Beau.

It Begins

Awesome, thanks Beau.

I have added a sample music snippet to Karma (part 1). Let's discuss format and approach before going too far with filling in music information, 'cause it would be unfortunate to have to go and do 'em all twice.

My current approach has the following attributes:

• Pro: simple. Amazon links can be altered someday to serve as a revenue source for either www.jfwiki.org (to defray hosting and server costs naturally), www.joefrank.com, or (more likely) neither.
• Con: by not creating a page on the wiki for each song, we lose the ability to convey which programs might share the same tune (or artist), or to discuss an individual song independently from its use in a specific program.

If we use Amazon links, truncate this:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00003OP8E/002-1787188-8532014

To this for a pure, sessionless, free-of-amazon-associates-referral-data link:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00003OP8E

Thoughts? Spblat 08:15, 17 May 2005 (PDT)

Thoughts on music references

Hi all -

Thanks, Beau, for adding your stuff to the wiki. It will be a great addition.

Chances are I will have very little to add to the music catalog, so weight my comments appropriately. I'll happily go along with whatever policy comes out of this discussion.

First, I've got some minor reservations about linking to Amazon. But, those reservations are driven by political rather than technical or aesthetic concerns, and I don't expect anyone else to agree. I'm also unable to point to an equally useful non-commercial music database to which we could refer. There are clutsy workarounds such as, "available at (link:amazon.com) or your local, independent record store" - but I'll readily admit they've ugly compromises and would mar the text of articles. To summarize: amazon sucks, but I can't really think of a better option, and the link is more useful than no link at all.

Second, here's an idea which may turn out to be totally impractical. What if we created an individual page for each song and then included them as templates in the program articles? That way we could easily re-use the same link in multiple pages and adjustments or corrections would only need to happen once. Also, it seems to me there could be some nifty wiki-featureful way to create master lists from that structure. (For example, with a big page that has each template followed by a template inclusion of the WhatLinksHere page for that template.) If there's a way to include only sections of a page in a template reference, then the template page could also be a place for discussion of music.

The drawbacks are obvious - every music entry requires creating a new page and remembering template syntax, and our wiki will become clogged with hundreds of short music articles which will forever ruin our articles-sorted-by-length list and generally muck up page statistics. Also, so far WhatLinksHere seems buggy and prone to choke on template-related stuff, so trying to do something useful with it may be a long shot.

I'll fiddle around with a couple dummy pages to see if there's an elegant way to make something like this work. My guess is that the answer is probably "no" and that we ought to go ahead with Spblat's proposal. Shiro 23:13, 17 May 2005 (PDT)

I like Shiro's way

I think it's more work, but I like your idea better. "Spacebeach (Arling & Cameron)" appears in at least 6 programs, and I have a strong preference for what seems "elegant", whatever that means. In this case I think it means not typing the same stuff over six times.

Get this: a template can contain a category tag. So a program that contains "Spacebeach (Arling & Cameron)" could have a music section like this:

== Music ==

{{Music-Stub}}

{{Spacebeach (Arling & Cameron)}}

(The {{Music-Stub}} is only for programs where we're not sure we know the name of every song played.)

Then the template gets this:

* ''"[[:Category:Spacebeach (Arling & Cameron)|Spacebeach]]"'' - 
[[:Category:Arling & Cameron|Arling & Cameron]] (from
[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00003OP8E 
"Music for Imaginary Films"], 2000)
[[Category:Spacebeach (Arling & Cameron)]]
[[Category:Arling & Cameron]]

Then a few words in each category page, which automatically gets populated with links to programs containing either the song or the artist in question. Ultimately, each new song we add to this system means creating a template page, an artist page, and a song page. But the cross-indexing benefits are sort of neat. Pro: it's neat, Con: it's a lot of work.

I've tried all this out in Karma (part 2). (I'm not certain Spacebeach is played in K2 but it's a good bet.) Have a look and tell me what you think. Spblat 08:41, 19 May 2005 (PDT)

Humph. The category pages contain links to the template itself, which is sort of annoying but unavoidable. A minor strike against this approach. Spblat 08:44, 19 May 2005 (PDT)

Making a Decision

We have a few things to decide:

1. Which of these two approaches (1) (2) do we like? Or is there a third approach we haven't considered? Or a tweak to one or the other?
2. What syntax should we use for naming songs?
   • Spacebeach (Arling & Cameron)
   • Arling & Cameron: "Spacebeach" (from Music for Imaginary Films, 2000)
   • ...
3. Should we link to Amazon (even if it sucks) since it seems to be the most comprehensive database which includes audio samples? (Allmusic is a decent alternative, but you have to create a (free) account in order to listen to samples).

Spblat 10:46, 19 May 2005 (PDT)

Re: decisions

My votes:

1.Approach #2 looks good to me. It's a bit of work to create pages, but arguably easier to maintain them. Besides, I'm all for elegance, even when it threatens to be impractical.

2.I like the format "Arling & Cameron: "Spacebeach" (from Music for Imaginary Films, 2000)" or something with an equivalent amount of detail - but I'm not passionate about that.

3.Amazon seems like the best option to me, despite my grumbling. If we ever find something better, I suppose we can change it. Allmusic's forced registry is a pain in the neck.

Two more questions:

4. How do we handle albums that aren't on amazon?

5. Do we (or how do we) accommodate additional links to more detail? Should we add a standard format for that?

As a test case, consider the Portsmouth Sinfonia clip. Both amazon and allmusic turn up nothing. Should we just replace the amazon inline link with something like www.portsmouthsinfonia.com ?

So Be It

Cool, let's do it.

1. Approach #2, templates, extra work, "elegant".
2. Syntax: Arling & Cameron: "Spacebeach" (from Music for Imaginary Films, 2000)
3. Albums that aren't on Amazon get a link to whatever you think is most appropriate.
4. There should be a way to link to extra information. Not wanting to engage my brain on that just now, I will assume our present approach can be amended gracefully to permit such a thing.

I'll update the style guide and maybe even update a music link or two.

Spblat 10:45, 29 May 2005 (PDT)

there *is* a place to discuss songs in detail

Ah hah, there is! Additional detail about "Spacebeach" can go to its category page, here. Discussion or commentary about it can go here. Spblat 17:54, 30 May 2005 (PDT)

Joe frank music page content is done.

We now have everything from the joe frank music page (as it was on 2005-05-22 21:13 PST) added to the wiki, with the help of a few mostly automatic scripts.

Links are to Amazon's page for the CD when I could find it quickly. A few links are to external official pages for artists, or for the amazon artist page in the case of missing albums.

There are a few formatting cleanups - perhaps renaming the "N/A's" and the unknowns, but it's a start.

Thank again, Beau, for donating your content to the wiki.

Now what? First lines?

Shiro 03:57, 4 Jul 2005 (PDT)

WOW!! That rules. Yeah, it seems like a "first lines" project would be neat. I guess I'd like to see both a) The first line at the top of each program, as in In the Dark (remix), plus b) an actual index of first lines. Should it go in Index of first lines? Further discussion on the first-lines project could be conducted in Talk:Index of first lines.

Spblat 15:12, 4 Jul 2005 (PDT)