Getting Data About Your Audio Files (And Not Using Metadata)?

Early on the OP was asked "how will you get the data about your music?" and it went into a whole other direction, but that's what I'm here to show: Another way to get the data about your music without dependence on the metadata.The music that I have has fairly extensive tags embedded but as I've discovered, that's not the case with all of them. It's a good starting point I suppose but is there another way? Let me jump to the end, then in the next several posts, we'll dissect the parts of it. My goal was use "only out of the components and methods" and this is what we end up with: Aside from the rudimentary things like song duration, how about if we could get a host of information about the songs, including the cover art? As shown in the example above, some also will have a link to additional information. The additional information may even contain a way to watch a music video for that song like this: Further, some will even contain what I call "Liner Notes" like this:

If this interests you, read on ...This isn't a new thought at all; I've explored this area before. Have a look at this on Code Project. Now before you go thinking that you've found the keys to the kingdom, I should explain a little minor issue about that - it doesn't work! In that, he relies heavily on three web services: Amazon Web Service MusicBrainz LyricWiki Amazon has significantly modified their service such that his methods don't work now. If you follow the posts following the thread, you'll see a few people have tried workarounds but over the years, even those stopped working because apparently they (Amazon) are in a state of flux regarding their API. LyricWiki is still alive and well, but - the music recording industry forced them to no longer offer their service to developers. MusicBrainz is in fact a heck of a resource and if you're at all interested in this topic, I would encourage you to have a look around. It's odd to work with, but it's chock full of good information and they're constantly adding to it or so it seems. All that said, this example won't use any of those but rather a different service all together: Last Dot FM. I can't say that I know much about them, but I happened onto them a few months back when I was first experimenting with all this stuff.