From: mingus@usl.com (Simon M.F.)
Newsgroups: rec.music.bluenote,rec.music.misc
Subject: Announcing RECDB 0.4
Date: 25 Jan 1993 23:30:31 -0500
Organization: The Poto Mitan In The Houmfor
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: rahsaan.usl.com

Bluenoters may have noticed me and some other people talking about
recdb, and may have wondered what that was all about. Some of you
even sent me mail, and got responses on the order of "Real Soon
Now." Well, I guess it's ready now for public consumption.

So what am I talking about? RECDB is several things. Fundamentally,
it is a format for encoding and cataloguing information about
records, and thus a tool for record collectors. There are also
some programs that implement this format for various specific
functions. When you see a post containing something like "here's
the recdb for Foobar Musician", the author is referring to the
recdb command, which queries a database of records that conform
to this format, for example. Other programs let you print such
a database, convert such a printout to PostScript(tm), sort one
database and merge it into another. already-sorted one, and so
forth. I'm sure many other programs can (and hopefully will) be
written that use the data format to do other nifty things.

I hear you say, what a bizarre idea, and why would anyone be so
obsessed with records as to do such a foolish thing? Well, I'm
crazy about records, and collectors do crazy things, I guess :-).
I got the idea for RECDB sometime in fall 1989. I was very active
on the net at the time, and found myself answering lots of mail
and news asking for discographical information and critiques of
various artists. While doing this is fun, it's rather hard to
remember about some obscure record, and a pain to search manually
through a collection to find what this or that tenor player
did. Then someone asked for the list of all songs with "Love"
in their name or some such inanity, and I got to fantasizing about
how neat it would be.... Many nights and weekends later, you have
this post :-)

Personally, what makes this newsgroup fun is that it's all about
a bunch of people telling each other exactly why they like or hate
some music. I much prefer discussions of how a given person listens
to harmolodics, or how musicians comp behind soloists, or the foibles
of this or that singer, to the 9,275th listing of Coltrane records.
But you can't get out of doing the latter without being an elitist
pain in the ass. RECDB attempts to fill in the void, to make the
record listings easy, so have time and energy for the real interesting
stuff.

The RECDB format is ASCII, and requires no external DBMS package.
This is primarily because at the time my group did not have a DBMS
package :-). Over time, I made a virtue of that deficiency, when I
realized that an ASCII format made it possible to use vi or other editor
to fix mistakes, and to mail recdb data to other collectors. This
last is really important; Ron Roberts, Sandeep Mehta and I have been
entering our collections, and shipping each other stuff where we have
overlap. You don't know how useful and important this is until you've
spent 5 hours entering all of 35 records... Doing this right is s l o w.

Speaking of other people, many deserve credit for helping make RECDB
happen. Sandeep Mehta <smehta@nynexst.com> ported the code to SunOS,
and has relentlessly searched after other platforms to test it on.
Sandeep also wrote the PostScript pretty printer, which is really nifty.
He finally had the patience to sit through core dump after core dump
(Sparcs are MUCH less forgiving of NULL pointer dereferences than
either 3B2s or x86s :-)) while I slogged through bug fixes.
Other people who contributed their ideas, pointed out bugs, and labored
through early versions include Jerry Bulyk, Ron Roberts, Kevin Long
(did you ever implement those extensiosn you were talking about?),
Mark Linimon, Joe Hellerstein (nothing like a database jock to convince
me of the wisdom of the original decision *not* to implement a full
DBMS :-)), Vince Kargatis, Alan McKay, Marc Wiener, Sol Douglas,
Robert Campbell, Nou Dadoun, Bill Hsu, Glenn Lea, and others whose
names I did not record (sorry y'all).

WHatever RECDB may be, one thing it is *not* is a discographical
tool. As used in jazz at least, a discography describes a series
of recording sessions, each of which takes place on exactly one day,
with a given (possibly variable) lineup of musicians, where one or
more tunes were recorded, that appear on zero or more records. A
RECDB database, on the other hand, describes a series of records,
that may have been recorded at more than one recording sessions,
on an arbitrary list of dates. As you can see, RECDB is the exact
complement of discographies.

RECDB is copyright 1991, 1992 by me, Marcel Simon <mingus@usl.com>,
except for psprintdb which is copyright 1991, 1992 by Sandeep Mehta
<smehta@nynexst.com> RECDB can be used anyway you want provided you
retain this copyright notice. The only exception is that the code
MAY NOT be sold or in any way exchanged for money or anything else
of value.

Our anonymous ftp server is not up yet (Real Soon Now :-), so to
get RECDB you'll have to send me email. You'll receive 8 50-60K
shell archives. If someone has an ftp server and wants to put up
RECDB, just let me know.

Michael Hayward asked about plugging RECDB data into gopher, so people
can connect to a database and do their own searches. This is a great
idea (more bandwidth here for discussions of the *why*). Unfortunately,
I know zero about gopher, and my attempts to learn were unsuccessful;
the machine at umn.edu that the news.answers FAQ points to is not
answering in time for my telnet attempts to succeed. Anyone who can
help here, just drop me email.

This is getting way too long, so I'll shut up now. If you have some
great idea for extending RECDB, or writing a program that does
something nifty with RECDB databases, just do it. Just remember to
send me your code when you're done, so I can share in the fun too :-)
-- 
Marcel-Franck Simon                     mingus@usl.com, usl!mingus

        " Papa Loko, ou se' van, ou-a pouse'-n ale'
          Nou se' papiyon, n'a pote' nouvel bay Agwe' "
Newsgroups: rec.music.bluenote