About covertrek.comWhat it doesYou've probably come across the idea of "six degrees of separation" - that each person on earth is usually no more than six acquaintances from any other person. Some people play it in the guise of "six degrees of Kevin Bacon", in which they try to link various actors to Kevin Bacon, by finding movies that pairs of actors have both been in. Covertrek tries to do the same thing with cover versions, by finding a chain of covers linking two artists. I think it's much easier to give an example than to explain, so... What's the secret link between Kate Bush and Metallica?
You can use the 'FindLinks' button to automatically find a pathway of cover versions between any two bands - but beware: so far we only have 50,000 cover versions in that section of the database (with a total of 23,000,000 links between them), so not all possible links are covered. If one of your favourites is missing, please tell us. The 'Explore Links' button lets you manually search out the pathways between bands, finding things out for yourself rather than letting the 'Find Links' button have all the fun. Type in a band to start, and then clicks on songs they've covered, or songs of theirs that have been covered to extend the chain - and remember, you can always retrace your steps with the 'Go Back' buttons at the top and bottom of the list. The 'Artist' button will tell you all of the songs an artist has covered (well - all the ones we currently know of tell us any more you know) and the songs of theirs which other people have covered. The 'Tracks' button will tell you who originally performed a track, and who has since covered it. Thanks- Thanks to Adam Koford (aka Apelad) who drew the excellent banner artwork for this site, helping to give it some charm it wouldn't otherwise have had. To see more of these two cats, follow their meandering adventures at hobotopia.com. - Thanks to Philip Yarra, who knows more about SQL and PostGres in particular than I am ever likely to learn, and who patiently answered so many questions about query optimisation and database tuning. - Thanks to Tim Anderson who leapt at the chance to help solve the mystery of The Ajax Command Which Only Worked Sometimes, and to my dad, who was the most patient of testers as I phoned again and again to ask "Well how about this time?"
- And finally thanks to the many fine volunteer contributors to Music Brainz and other databases around the net. Without the foundation they built, this site couldn't exist. What's wrong with CoverTrekOh don't get me started. For unavoidable (at least with the data I have access to) reasons, I've had to build the database code on the assumption that if two people have the same name, they are the same person, and that if two songs have the same name, they are the same song. This is just not true and I know it, but I have no choice at the moment. As examples of what can go wrong, there's the Tony Martin who had a hit record in 1949 with "I Said My Pajamas (and Put on My Prayers)" and there's the Tony Martin who sang for Black Sabbath. In a similar vein, there's the famous Lou Reed "Walk On The Wild Side" and there's the utterly unrelated gospel track. At least in the current version, we're stuck with that - I'll be putting some thought into how to get around it forthe next version of the database. There's also some more easily fixable database fluff. Often bands are entered under variations of their accepted name (i.e. - "Rolling Stones" instead of "The Rolling Stones"). We have a list of aliases which is used to auto-correct these names. This can also be used for common misspellings, such as "Olivia Newton John" instead of "Olivia Newton-John". Unfortunately, no force on earth can protect us against the many ways people try to spell "Einstürzende Neubauten". If you think of any aliases we should have, but don't, please contact us. Other things which need cleaning out in the next build of the database:
Technical StuffThe prototype version and database generation were written in Dolphin Smalltalk, using PostGres as the database. The links table, which is at the core of the system, holds about 23,000,000 links between bands, and is sure to grow as the system matures. The runtime code is written in Ruby (but not Rails) and uses mySql as the database. My monitor has a small blue soft-toy turtle on top of it.
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