TheAudioDB.com: The story of half a million edits!
When we started TheAudioDB.com it was a fun project that filled a need in the HTPC community, 8 years later and its still great fun to run and even better than ever. We set out to provide musical data and artwork for free, to anyone who wanted to “scrape” their music libraries. Today, many more apps use our API and we’ve been evolving ever since to support new features and services.

New site design
We worked hard over this summer to redesign the entire site to a dark theme with many improvements in user interface and responsiveness. The site should now work on all devices as well as being easy to navigate and use. We also moved permanently over to secure HTTPS protocol with the latest TLS encryption. Trending music and the newest artwork also take a much more prominent place on the homepage. There are also large “Edit” and “Upload” buttons on each content page and overall the site should be much easier to work with for contributors.

New Artwork types
TheAudioDB.com has always been at the forefront of creating beautiful images to be associated with music, so when some users suggested we add some new artwork types, it seemed like a great idea to push things forward. These new artwork types include “ClearArt” which is a transparent art type that must contain the artist or band as well as their logo, and Landscape which is a much wider fanart and logo type, similar to Netflix displays their shows. This adds to the original content such as Artist images, fanart, banners, Album and Track covers.


Charting
Another thing we have always been passionate about is keeping up-to-date with trends and charts for different types of music. For this reason we introduced a trending section on the main page. For now it just tracks the iTunes charts for particular countries, but in the future we hope to add more data points such as scrobbles or downloads from streaming services. The idea eventually is to filter it down to different styles and years.
Internationalization
Our international users have always been important to us and we love the fact that many people from all over the world contribute to the site. We support 15 different languages for Artist and Album Descriptions. This feature still needs a lot of work from users, so if you speak German, French or any of the other languages then why not get back to editing? This not only improves the site for native speakers but benefits millions of people around the world as the translations are available from our API forever going forward.

Ratings
Charts are useful to see what other users are listening to right now, but what about historically good music? Well another feature we introduced was to rate tracks or albums. Each user can rate an item out of 10, this score is unique to a user and can be updated at any time. The best thing about users rating music is it builds up a picture of the best songs on an album. If you are an advanced HTPC user, why not create a node filter to only play for example songs over rating of 8? Its a great feature that can only improve discovering new music.
We also expose these ratings for users on our API as well as automatic user rating submission which is possible with a Kodi service Add-on similar to how Trakt.TV works. Imagine storing all your music ratings in the “cloud” never to be lost again and synced between clients. Pretty Cool! We also now show the top 5 songs from any artist on their front page allowing quick access to the best of their works. Lastly we imported global ratings from metacritic, rateyourmusic.com, allmusic and last.fm to really fill out the sites ratings.

Music Videos
YouTube is a huge resource these days for discovering, browsing and playing music. We collect all the Music Video links for each artist and these are constantly updated by our users to stay current with existing and new releases. Simply click through on the main artist page to any music video to launch Youtube. Kodi also has a music video scraper so you can download additional data and covers for your Mvid collection.

Song Hashing
A feature we have always hoped to improve was the identification of music without the need for editing tags or renaming files. File hashing solves all those issues but is hard with music due to the different files available on the internet and tagging changing the hash. We looked at current solutions such as AcoustID and OpenSubtitles implementation but they either lacked accuracy or took too much performance away from the app. Luckily the file tag issue is solved by taking a 2 hashes from the first and last megabyte of a file. Since ID3 tags only use a small part of the file at the start or the end, theoretically music can be identified no matter how its tagged. A program called Zoomplayer helped us develop this system and I believe they are already using it to identify music in their app. Today after lots of user submissions, we are happy to report we have 175,000+ hashes for music in our database. This has lookup feature is available on our API for any developer to leverage how they see fit.
Support
We don’t accept donations any more as they were infrequent and we felt like pestering users every so often wasn’t the best way to go. For this reason we setup a Patreon campaign. If you like the site, just subscribe to our Patreon for $2 a month(or more) which keeps us running long term with a steady income and lets us concentrate on building some great new features. In fact we have linked the campaign to releasing new features such as an improved API or specific requests. We’re also looking at giving Patreon subscribers special VIP features and benefits. Saying that, if you have an idea for the site, feel free to post on our forums, its likely that it will get implemented whatever your contribution.

Conclusion
8 years is a long time on the Internet and we are happy to report we are still going as strong as ever. We would like to thank all our users, past and present for their contribution on the site, we would be nothing without them!
