Artist's Tracks Search Procedure

[Nate Wickstrom]

Hello,

What's the best way to search for tracks by a particular Artist?  For example, if I want to search for One by U2.

Things I've tried:

A. Use the Track/search API and query "One". 

This returned a list of about 190 results, but none of them were a track by U2.

B. Use the artist/topTracks API and then search for a tracked named "One".

TopTracks for U2 return 1825 items, so scanning the list, which would require 37 calls to the API, is impractical.

C. Use the Track/search API and query "One U2". 

This worked, as One by U2 was the first item in the response, but seems like this method could be error prone - like when a track by some artist equals a track name plus the artist name of another artist.  As a second layer of precaution, I could then check the artist name and track name with each list item, and hope to get lucky early in the list.  But, I was hoping there's a simpler way.

So basically, C. works but is there a better way ???

Thanks in advance!

Nate

[Alex]

Hi Nate,

Option C is your best option. I recommend you implement the "second layer of precaution" you mention, to make sure you really do get the artist + track you're looking for.

I realise this is not ideal, but we are continually improving our search functionality and your example has been noted so we may one day add a feature to make that search easier.

Thanks,

Alex

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[Nate Wickstrom]

Hi Alex,

Thanks for the reply.  OK, I see.  

As a note for future readers, I also noticed that searching "guns and roses sweet child of mine" returns the Artist as "Guns N' Roses" and the track title as "Sweet Child O' Mine".  So a simply comparing strings wont work some of the time.  One option is to calculate the edit distance using Levenshtein distance algorithm, which measures the number of edits you would need to make one string into another.  Most likely there's already code for it in your preferred language somewhere on the web.  The trouble is that you still need to guess how many edits steps are acceptable.

Hope this helps,

Nate