Consider implementing more flexible database schema

[Chris Wagner]

NOTE: Be sure to see http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/NextGenerationSchema before digging too far into this. It would probably be wise to use a similar/same vocabulary and schema as MusicBrainz, and we may wish to grab data about albums, artists, and et al from them.

There are many cases for albums/tracks/etc that we cannot represent in easyweaze's database, where tracks have multiple artists or an album has multiple artists and each track is by those multiple artists.

Examples include . . .

  * there's no proper way to represent an album where multiple artists have collaborated. for example, Chester, by Josh Rouse & Kurt Wanger.
  * there are many tracks where multiple artists have collaborated, even though the album may be released under the name of one particular artist.

We will also want to consider allowing for "random tracks" in the database, when considering this spec.

Here are some thoughts about how the schema might be changed . . .

  * Albums are mapped to artists through some sort of "artists_for_albums" table, which would allow multiple artists to claim a single album.
  * Same goes for songs to artists -- have a "artists_for_tracks" table.
  * An artist would continue to have a name stored in his database row, like he does now, but we could also allow each album to have an optional "artist_name" field; the field would usually be NULL, but, for an album such as Chester, mentioned above, we could have "artist_name" filled as the name(s) appear on the album's cover: Josh Rouse & Kurt Wagner.

Right now, i don't think even huge music databases such as MusicBrainz and AllMusic support such features. It seems they just treat multi-artist tracks as single-artist tracks labeled with artist, e.g., "Artist A & Artist B". In cases where you have tracks that have, e.g., "featuring Big Rappa Z", I think they either completely ignore it, or place it in comment for the track or the track's title string. (MusicBrainz is clearly working on a more flexible schema, but I have not researched the details at this point.)