Release 20140520

Another week, another new release. This release includes a new API version to clean up of our returned JSON and also some accuracy improvements.

A new API version

We're introducing a new API version in this release: 20140520. We're doing this because of some API changes... see below. As ever, we won't shut down the old API versions until all paying customers have stopped using them.

The reason we are introducing the new API version is that we are cleaning up some of our JSON. The first item to be cleaned are empty genre and year data:

{
  "title": "Head Music",
  "artist": "Suede",
  "year": "1999",
  "genre": "",
  "media": [...]
}

Where there are blank fields these are now no longer present in the JSON. So the above example appears as so:

{
  "title": "Head Music",
  "artist": "Suede",
  "year": "1999",
  "media": [...]
}

In a similar manner, extraneous JSON arrays were returned for releases' image attributes even when inc=images was not specified:

{
  "title": "Head Music",
  "artist": "Suede",
  "genre": "Rock",
  "media": [
    ...
  ],
  "images": [

  ],
  "score": 1
}

This now appears as so:

{
  "title": "Head Music",
  "artist": "Suede",
  "genre": "Rock",
  "media": [
    ...
  ],
  "score": 1
}

This only affects the new 20140520 version. Previous versions continue to return the empty image arrays and blank year/genre attributes.

Accuracy improvements

We keep a constant eye on coverage and accuracy of OneMusicAPI results. We operate a minimum allowable accuracy of 98% when measured against a "model" music library test fixture. This recently dipped below 98%, so this new release contains some improvements. Whereas we went as low as 95.89% last month, we're now back up to 98.18%.

The accuracy improvements include a better way of handling releases with generic track names ("Part one", "Track three" etc) and a better way of interpreting the country of release.

These accuracy improvements apply to all versions of the API.

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.

Thanks to Mostad who made the the image above available for sharing.