Yea, I've written some similar code to this for fetching the lyrics based on arbitrary parts of the song. It's a fun challenge, and getting the correct lyrics is also hard. Well done on that account.
I see that you are using a flash player to display Flickr photos, presumably appropriated tagged, while playing an mp3 of the song?
And if I take the lyrics from this page, "Just because I'm loosing" or Just because I'm loosing, it doesn't find Coldplay. Am I incorrect in assuming it should find this?
I think it's pretty cool, but I would give the user the option of "playing" the song rather than doing it automatically. In my experience most people are already listening to the songs which they are trying to find the lyrics for.
This page also produces an error, I don't think Sting did a Wu tan song, but I could be wrong on that as well:
Turns out in FullText search In boolean mode, there are many stop words, "it's" "I'M" are just 2 of them. Seems I have hit a limitation there on the tech. It will have to be as good as it gets I'm afraid. Short of putting in a custom search engine, that's as fas as the tech allows for them moment, unless I build in a workaround to change all single quotes something else then change back. I will sleep on that...
Found all three songs I looked for first try, but site is getting pretty slow. Might try whittling down the number of results returned. Also saw text encoding funkiness. Really nice tho, bookmarked. How are you getting the songs and pictures in the flash on the left?
hmm, site getting slow. I have to be careful about robots, they can kill it, as its all generated dynamically thus memory is an issue and I just downgraded memory as I like to run a tight ship.
The flash widget I built, its all custom, Images from Flickr and MP3s sourced through Seeqpod, both have shit hot APIs.
Well the flash thing is really cool, it's awesome to have the song to listen to and because the images are pulled from wherever sometimes they're hilarious :). Really nice piece of work!
Pretty sweet service. Where did you get a lyrics web service? I was looking for a lyrics web service some time ago for the following idea: certain times when listening to a song it would be useful/more entertaining if the lyrics would follow along with the song similar to karaoke, this could be done by running the song through some speech recognition software such as nuance to get the approximate words/time during the song. You would then tie that into the lyrics through the web service and would be able to display the lyrics along with the song for almost any song. This would be helpful to me anyway, and I think add an extra level of connection and understanding to your songs.
By default, if the search string consists of more than 1 word do you do an OR or AND search? It seems OR from the results I'm getting, but most people now are conditioned by Google to expect an AND search (which really makes more sense..)
yeah i liked this. searched for hooker in minneapolis, and not only did i get the correct lyrics but i also got sweet version by neko case to hear. i have been looking for it for ages..whata bonus. nice one. just to nit pick. i would out-source your logo. try 99designs for $150-$200.
Sorry m8, I know the logo might be a bit cheap (30 mins work) as I am, but I really could care less about the logo, I'm more fanatical about making it actually work well.
I would highly suggest you get a license to feature the lyrics on your site if you intend on going mainstream. Aside from legal troubles you could face, I think intellectual property should be respected. Using someone's copyrighted material without their consent is never ok.
It seems the norm in this sector is to be open about this data (lyrics), all of the main sites have same and none are in license agreements. Plus others are opening shop with APIs for access.
Are we supposed to comment on the coding or the business model? Not bad for four weeks coding. Might have a little trouble making money with the copyright issues involved.
The work is good. The interface isn't very polished, but it sounds like you haven't really worked on it yet, so I assume you'll polish it up later.
On the copyright side, there have been issues in the past (http://news.cnet.com/Lyrics-site-negotiates-copyright-issues...). I'm not sure how they were worked out, or if a defense of "everyone else is doing it" justifies reliance. You should look into any updates in the area, and also be aware that one day someone might disagree with you on if its ok (and by disagree I mean sue).
