I work every day and night on BigBigBook.com. From the outside looking in you may not see that anything changes from day to day… but I assure you… under the hood there are many things happening all the time.
The “search engine” is finally more or less complete… and is pretty forgiving when you don’t spell things exactly right (a personal goal). I still want to make it a SMIDGE faster. I’ll do this by tracking timing statistics and building the unions in optimal order. For example if you search FIRST for a very common word, e.g. “love” the database will find a whole bunch of hits, taking extra time. But if I sort the words you enter and search for the word that is the most-rare, first, then I can get to the end result faster… because I’ll widdle the results down to the minimal number more quickly. I’ll probably implement this optimization in the next week or so… but I want to fry a few other eggs in the meantime.
Next on my list is to sort through some strangeness in the “featured” artist list. For example if you search for “A Great Big World Say Something”…. it should return you a track called “Say Something” with a primary artist of “A Great Big World”, but also note that it features “Christina Aguilera”. All these mechanisms are supposed to be in place… but there are glitches and bugs to iron out. Additionally you should be able to search for “Say Something Christina Aguilera” and get the exact same result.
So there’s be a lot going on “under the hood”. And the site is “usable” currently, but not optimal…and the user experience isn’t what it will eventually become. It will soon know the venue you’re at and present search results based on where you’re singing, while celebrating the tracks that are special and unique where you are.
I’ll be honest, I thought I’d have all this figured out by now. BigBigBook.com is not my ONLY project, however, and the other projects actually pay the bills…. but I’m motivated to get to the point where I can “publish” some paper books for karaoke companies that want them. I have receive a great response from all the karaoke companies I’ve talked to up to this point… and I’m happy to work with all of you!
Cameron Hill:
Hey Subtle Mind-Games, thanks for sharing your karaoke host story! I can imagine how tough it must be to keep track of all those songs and venues. Your comment about artists’ inconsistent naming conventions is spot on – I’ve had my fair share of dealing with that in music databases too. It’s like they think we’re mind-readers or something! Do you have any favorite karaoke deep-cuts that never fail to get the crowd going?
Oh man, inconsistent naming is such a data nightmare! It’s like they expect us to read minds or something. As for deep-cuts, “I Will Survive” always kills it, but I’m also into some unexpected gems like “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Keeps things fresh and the crowd loves it! 🎤