We've just committed a new version of OneMusicAPI - 20140401. There are no API changes, as such, so you should see all the benefits without changing your code. In this release we've concentrated on accuracy and coverage improvements: bringing back the correct results, and more of them!

Accuracy improvements

This release focused on improving accuracy - when you make a search query to OneMusicAPI, the likelihood that you'll receive the results you expect.

Why wouldn't you receive the results you expect? Well, one example is with audio fingerprint queries. It might be surprising for some, but it's not unheard of for the same set of recordings, making up the same tracks to an album, to be released under different names. For example, compare Classic Cinema to Classic FM at the Movies. The first CDs are not identical but similar. If a query was sent with the fingerprints for a subset of these tracks we may still want to return the metadata for both.

However, if the client of the API knows a little more about the release they are querying (maybe they already know some of the metadata for the release they are attempting to query) this can now be provided alongside the audio fingerprints to further refine the scores. We now accept album, artist and track names in addition to the audio fingerprints to help score the results better.

Coverage improvements

We recently included barcode and catalog numbers in our aggregated database to make linking releases together easier. This allows us to find more metadata about a particular release, even if it only "matches" against data from one source.

We actually released that code a few weeks ago, improving accuracy without announcing it. In this release we are going further and using barcode matching for more queries, and being more intelligent about how that information is used. This is slowly pushing up our match rates!

For name based queries we are also now stripping out some additional artifacts supplied in names. We always used to strip out "disc artifacts" passed to OneMusicAPI; for example "(Disc 1)" or "- Disk II". Now we also strip out "year artifacts" such as "[1968]" or "(1973)". This helps achieve more matches.

In our scoring for matches we were also being unkind to multi disc releases - we realised that certain factors that were lowering the scores for multi disc releases were being applied too strongly, so we relaxed them.


Remember there are no API changes in this release, so your code will benefit from the changes immediately!

To give OneMusicAPI a try all you need to do is sign up and you'll get 1000 free queries. Further queries can be purchased on a rolling monthly basis or as a credit top-up. When you do sign up, use the new reference documentation that has been released.

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