Archive de Poitrine: a live music archive built on Discourse
I wanted one place to find Angine de Poitrine shows, setlists, and recordings. Somewhere to find a tape, talk about the show, and hear from people who were there.
That's now live at archive.depoitrine.com.
At launch it had 176 shows, 214 recordings, and 48 media items. Getting it off my machine and onto an actual hostname felt pretty damn good.
The software underneath is Taper, a Discourse plugin. Which probably surprises nobody who has read this blog for a while.
A show is a topic
I keep finding reasons to build things inside Discourse. With the itinerary plugin, a trip was a topic with other topics attached to it. Here, each show has a topic, and the plugin stores the structured music data alongside it: band, date, venue, setlist, recordings.
The topic gives people somewhere to talk about the show. Someone can add a memory, point out a mistake, or explain that the recording labeled Austin is actually from a different night. Accounts, permissions, moderation, and the discussion itself are already there.
The public pages are rendered on the server with Rails templates. You can browse the years, songs, shows, and recordings without loading the Ember app. The review queue and administration use Discourse's app, and a theme component gives this particular archive its look. The plugin owns the music data and behavior; the theme owns the Angine de Poitrine presentation.
Finding videos is the easy part, sort of
Taper checks YouTube, Archive.org, and setlist.fm. They each host different things. YouTube has performances and clips. Archive.org has recordings and their metadata. setlist.fm has dates, venues, and what the band played.
The hard part is deciding whether two pieces of information describe the same night.
A video might have a date in its title. It might have an ambiguous date. It might have no date at all, but mention a venue. The venue might be spelled three different ways. And the upload date tells you when somebody uploaded the video, which is not necessarily when the show happened.
Searching for the band also finds interviews, official videos, reaction videos, and news reports. Some belong on the media shelf and some don't belong in the archive at all. A search result is evidence to inspect, not enough on its own to call something a recording of a show.
The queue had to get better
An earlier version grouped recordings into bundles. That was convenient for importing but annoying for reviewing. A bundle could contain several good recordings and one thing that clearly wasn't a show. Accepting the whole thing was too coarse.
The review flow now groups work by band and date, but lets a reviewer split recordings into separate suggestions and choose the show each belongs to.
Next
Angine de Poitrine is the first band I'm running this for, but Taper already keeps bands separate. I'd like somebody else to put it to work for a band they care about. Their shows, their recordings, their own look.
What I'm looking forward to now is someone showing up with a recording I haven't found, or recognizing the venue in a badly labeled video because they were there. That's a pretty good reason to build an archive on a forum.