Ode to the music catalogue

I was thinking that I would resume work on my music catalogue program at long last, but alas, it seems that it will remain dormant for a while now. After finally breaking down the very counter-productive, "real programmer" idea of not using external libraries for anything and coding everything myself, I thought that instead of writing my own AllMusic parser, I could see if some nice folks had done it all for me. There wasn't anything except an old Perl module, and so after a bit more searching, I came across some interesting information. The new terms of service at AMG don't allow data-scraping/mining from the database without a license, which would make my proposed catalogue features (like lookup and playing song samples) illegal. Granted, the program would only be for my use alone (selfish son of a gun that I am), but it was enough to make me seek out alternatives to AMG.

I went out looking for a freely searchable alternative to the AMG database, but I was a bit disappointed with the results. The ones with the most potential are community-edited ones, such as MusicBrainz and MusicMoz. The latter provides very useful XML versions of the data, while the former has album covers. But there were small things that made me think twice about the whole operation - for instance, the lack of song samples, which is something I was really keen on doing. Also, MusicBrainz doesn't seem to have an "Original Release Date" field for albums, which is what I usually use for my albums. Also, there are (understandably enough) no set reviews for most albums on either; this was something I felt I could do without, but again it is a small inconvenience.

Finally, I decided that I would seek the most sensible alternative - Excel. Yes, like the great Cap'n before me, I thought that the simplest solution would be best. It isn't as pretty without the album covers and the nice GUI, but darn it, it's good, honest stuff. Converting the old database to Excel was trivial (as you might expect, when pasting, Excel interprets a tab as the start of a new column), and so some ten minutes later, I felt the matter was resolved for the time being.

I should say however that MusicBrainz does seem to be rather active in terms of ongoing growth, which means that in the next few years it may well provide all that I ask of it. I'm torn between helping improve it, or helping improve Wikipedia's own repository on music. Perhaps this is the biggest problem with community-driven enterprises - there's too many of them!

(Yes, I realize the post title makes no sense)