Link to tracks that aren’t on Funkwhale

petitminion

I think most of the time the link is added to releases in musicbrainz.
We could associate the release links to the fw album, to the fw tracks and to the fw artist to display them where we want.
In the UI I would add an external link in the tracks page, the album and the artist page.

In the artist page we could use the musibrainz artist links and if there is none we could suggest some links from the artist track/album.

mjourdan

Let's take a real life example, like the title "No, not me" by The Blasting Company. It is part of an E.P., alongside six other titles.

The title has this recording page on MusicBrainz. We observe that the right sidebar has a button "listen on ListenBrainz", which send to a separate site, which itself streams content from Youtube. The page is said to be an "Instant Playlist" with only one track in it.

The E.P. has a release page on MusicBrainz. This page also has a "listen on ListenBrainz" button. The later sends to a release page on ListenBrainz. In addition to this button, there is also an "external link" section in the sidebar, which holds links to Discogs and Bandcamp.

Do you have any idea:

why there aren't links to Discogs and Bancdcamp right from the "recording" page on MB?
why there is no link to Youtube from MB, while there is one to LB which actually knows a URL pointing to Youtube?

As the title page on MB seem to not even have external links, I wonder if it would not make more sense to have no track page at all for tracks that are not hosted on Funkwhale? Then we would simply have an album page with a grayed out list of tracks, and a section below that to find the album on external platforms.

For the album page, as Discogs doesn't have the actual data, shall we blindly fetch all external links, or if we should allow only a specific subset of known streaming platforms?

Same question for the artist page, which has no less than 12 external links on MB?

petitminion

mjourdan

There is links to bandcamp or discogs. It just depend if a user added theses links into mb database. In the exemple you provided, you can add the link yourself if you want.
I don't think using Listenbrainz link is what we want here. We want to use the external link attribute. Lb use the youtube api to guess the youtube url of a tracks. This explain why the have a link. This is something we could do on our side, but the guessed dimension of the link should be displayed in the ui.

As the title page on MB seem to not even have external links

Recording page have external link too.

if there is too much external link we can add a arbitrary limit and only display streaming or download links (mb api display the type of link but I didn't find any doc)

mjourdan

where? I can't find them on the recording page?
I don't think either. Thanks for the explanation for how the Youtube link works!

If I take a few other tracks as exampless, none of them seem to have external link either:

mjourdan

Mockups have been updated to cover the special case of external links, for both track and album pages:
https://design.funkwhale.audio/#/view/e3a187f0-0f5e-11ed-adb9-fff9e854a67c?page-id=6ca536f0-0f5f-11ed-adb9-fff9e854a67c&section=interactions&index=0&share-id=0b1bb873-5fc1-8192-8003-09085485d750

Please tell me what you think of it!

petitminion

I just added the bancamp link for the example you provide : https://musicbrainz.org/recording/11fcae7c-c48f-465a-ac77-f972188ab195

Please tell me what you think of it!

I don't have acces to the linked page.

mjourdan

petitminion

My bad, half the timeI copy the wrong link. I've edited the previous post with the right url.

petitminion

its nice ! I would only change the wording to something like : "This track could not be found by this instance in the Funkwhale network. Probably..."

petitminion

maybe we could even be more verbose and explain that if the pod is not federated a lot, lots of content might be missed

mjourdan

petitminion

Such explanation seems interesting for the admin panel. For users without privileges, it's best to keep it short as there is not much they can do anyway.

petitminion

If nobody has has something to add I think we could start coding this next week.

petitminion

mjourdan I think its important that the user understand some instance a not globally federated while some others are. They can try and use another instance

mjourdan

Migrating from one instance to an other is a bargain. Advertising such possibility will make more sense the day we offer the proper tooling to find a better instance, and to actually migrate the data and account information.

petitminion

mjourdan For me it's not advertising for such a thing. Saying "this pod cannot find this content" is just describing the reality while saying "there is not such content in the network" is maybe telling a lie. I'm only suggesting to be accurate.

mjourdan

petitminion

The mockup reads "this content could not be found on the Funkwhale network", so I don't think it is any less accurate than "this pod cannot find this content"?

petitminion

mjourdan I think it is. Has I said, “this content could not be found on the Funkwhale network” means the funkwhale network doesn't have this content. “this pod cannot find this content on the Funkwhale network” means the content might exist on the funkwhale network, but we can't find it on the actual pod

Sporiff

I think we need to focus on the simplest mechanic here: adding links to content metadata in Funkwhale to make it more useful to users. We can think about adding things later on down the line, but I believe the most important use cases for right now are just giving artists who upload to Funkwhale the ability to:

Link to their website
Link to a store where you can purchase their content
Link to external media such as music videos
Link to social media
Link to external streaming services

From my perspective, the user experience here is:

I am a user
I see a track listing in Funkwhale for "Dancing Queen" by ABBA
I don't own an associated upload, so the track is unplayable
I can look at the links in the track overview to:
- Stream the song elsewhere to see if I like it
- Purchase the song from the artist

I'm drafting a spec for this here to cover how we might want to handle this.

Sporiff

The spec draft is more or less complete. There are probably some edge cases I've not considered or pieces missing, but the main bits are done. We still need to answer the question of how a user who is not a library admin can suggest changes in API v2, but that's something we should spec separately.

Please check it out and leave your comments here.

https://pad.funkwhale.audio/VyGBZFb4T5G57q-99pApGQ

petitminion

Sporiff The spec is great o/

Why implement links edition in funkwhale (post, update links) when users could tag theirs files directly or better edit the musicbrainz page ? This will be usefull for professional that are looking for a standardized way to spread their work. I think we should encourage producer to user a centralized service / tagging convention like musicbrainz to do so. This way their file will be compatible with other services and not only with funkwhale.

In this scenario Funkwhale would only import file metadata or get the links from Musibrainz. This also avoid us a lot of work and do not change the functionality of the feature.

This also have another advantage : we do not need to bother with moderation and scam links. This will be done by the musicianship community. One pod admin that sees a bad link will update the metadata on mb, this will propagate to all funkwhale pods automatically.

mjourdan

petitminion

Why implement links edition in funkwhale (post, update links) when users could tag theirs files directly or better edit the musicbrainz page ?

Because Funkwhale needs so much reliable metadata, tagging is part of the Funkwhale experience. So I think this is something we should handle somehow, rather than setting it as an entry barrier in front of people who just want to have their audio online.

I wonder

how much of a burden it would be if we were pushing the links from Funkwhale to MusicBrainz, in terms of moderation?
would that have privacy implications if we made it a strict requirement to push those metadata to MB for tracks with an MBID?

This also have another advantage : we do not need to bother with moderation and scam links.

The issue would not totally be avoided I believe, as such links could still be placed in channels descriptions or user profiles.

One pod admin that sees a bad link will update the metadata on mb, this will propagate to all funkwhale pods automatically.

What if the admin could fix the link right through Funkwhale?

petitminion

mjourdan

mjourdan Because Funkwhale needs so much reliable metadata, tagging is part of the Funkwhale experience. So I think this is something we should handle somehow, rather than setting it as an entry barrier in front of people who just want to have their audio online.

This wouldn't be a barrier, song still could be uploaded without any problems. From my pov tagging is not part of funkwhale. I use fw to discover music, not to tag my file because their is so better tools for this than fw.

mjourdan how much of a burden it would be if we were pushing the links from Funkwhale to MusicBrainz, in terms of moderation?

I which name this will be done ? The fw pod admin would have to create a mb account and will became responsible for theses links. If we use the user account, the user will have to link his account, instead of using mb directly.

mjourdan would that have privacy implications if we made it a strict requirement to push those metadata to MB for tracks with an MBID?

We could follow the privacy setting of the track for this.

mjourdan The issue would not totally be avoided I believe, as such links could still be placed in channels descriptions or user profiles.

not totally indeed, just partially.

mjourdan What if the admin could fix the link right through Funkwhale?

For me it's just useless, why have a fw ui to make edits to mb when you can make them directly in their website ?

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