A wide range of music related software requires access to music metadata and cover art.
SongKong is a music organization and tagger application designed to simplify the task of managing your digital music collection.
Early in 2014, SongKong's author, Paul Taylor, faced a challenge. SongKong had used the previously-freely available Discogs image database to download images so they could be added to users' music collections. However, a change in the terms of use of the Discogs image database meant that image downloads were more restrictive and would not be able to satisfy the demand from SongKong.
That's where OneMusicAPI stepped in. OneMusicAPI offers a cache of Discogs images. Instead of accessing Discogs directly, calls to download Discogs images can be made via OneMusicAPI. If the image is in the cache, it is returned to the client. Otherwise, OneMusicAPI downloads the image and returns that to the client, populating its cache at the same time.
I was looking for a way to reliably access the covert art archive that Discogs previously provided, it would have taken time to build my own and OneMusicAPI provided a ready made solution at a reasonable cost.
Paul Taylor, Director, JThink
Now, SongKong attempts to download Discogs artwork via OneMusicAPI when its own daily allocation is exhausted. The result is that SongKong is able to serve up many more Discogs-sourced images than it would otherwise.
