Advice for Building a Multi-Platform Lyrics Database?

AntonOnymous,Cowherd asks: "I am in the process of designing an application for general public use. The application will allow end users to search and display a large collection of songs (both lyrics and tunes) with annotations, all in text format. The intent is for this application to run cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac, and whatever else), so I want to avoid platform-specific binaries as much as possible. I also believe that the program should be Open Source. The end users will not necessarily be computer experts, so I want to avoid as much additional setup on their computers as possible. The application (data and program) will all be stored on a CD or DVD, and it should be able to be run locally. The most important part of this application is the data, not the program, so the guts of it should be fairly simple with a decent user interface. Does anyone have any suggestions as to general approach to setting this up, or have any pointers to existing open source programs which already perform a similar function?" "One way to implement this would be to set up each song (with lyrics, tune, and annotations) as a single record in a database. I would like to avoid the inherent security issues and overhead of setting up and running a database on a user's computer.

Another possibility, which is fairly appealing, is to use a Web Browser to provide the user interface, and to use Open Source text indexing/searching programs (such as Lucene or Egothor) as the engine. It is probably safe to assume that most users have a Browser. However, most users probably would not have a web-server (even a local one) on their computer, and going by the principle of as little messing around with the user's computer as possible, I would like to avoid having to set one up, even a local one."

Comments

Internationalization

[CRCulver]

Whatever you do, please store everything in UTF-8 encoding, since most of the lyrics of the world's music are not in English. I was outraged the day I discovered that the old CDDB system required everything to be in ISO-8859-1. What is someone to do with music in foreign scripts? ISO-8859-1 doesn't even have the necessary characters from standard Latin transliterations (such the characters with carons for Cyrillic transliteration).

If you don't have any experience with Unicode issues, a problem shared by a regrettable number of developers, try Gilliam's Unicode Demystified .

Copyrights

[AuMatar]

Music lyrics, unfortunately, are copyrighted. Every db on the web thats gained real size has been shut down by the RIAA. Whatever you do needs to be hosted out of a country that doesn't do copyrights, or you're dead in the water.

Re:Copyrights

[Kelson]

You're assuming he's going to be distributing copyrighted material -- and that he's going to be distributing it without permission. (You can distribute copyrighted material all you want, if you've gotten permission to do so. Otherwise, the publishing industry would be vastly different, and GPL software wouldn't exist.)

The story doesn't tell us anything about which songs he's going to be including. For all we know, it could be a collection of folk songs or hymns that are already in the public domain.

Advice to watch out for copyright issues is good. Assuming he's violating copyright (even if it's the safe way to bet) is still jumping to conclusions, and ignoring the technical questions posed in the story doesn't help anyone.

Congratulations on having an idea...

[topham]

Now you've reached the point of actually needing a clue to accomplish it.

Just pay someone, you obviously don't have a clue.