New Site on the way - comments wanted

[roddy]

I'm working on a new site. It'll be a database of Chinese song lyrics, with Chinese, pinyin and English (rough translations only, I'm no poet).

The songs won't be downloadable directly from the site, but there will be links to sources like Baidu's Mp3 search and so on.

Things I'd like comments on:

1) Indexing. Currently I've got it set up so you can browse by artist, genre and album. I'm not sure if this is best. Most Chinese sites seem to divide songs by Male / Female / Group and 大陆 / 港台. Ideas?

2) Content: What artists / songs would you prefer to see?

And any other comments welcome

Roddy

PS Cross-posting to Music. Hopefully Quest won't ban me for this

[trevelyan]

If you're putting this all in a database, you should put up a way to search the Chinese lyrics. I'm usually more likely to know a line or two from any song that the title or singer.

Search on: 爱

Found: 4,231 out of 4,231

[yonglan]

Mighty ambitious, Roddy. I would guess that this would run at least into the hundreds of songs? You're going to type them all in? Users will need to contribute to your physical therapy for the carpal tunnel syndrome! I'm sure many people will like it though.

[roddy]

Ambitious! Ha! My ambition knows no bounds!

Just my actual implementation, that's the problem . . .

Lyrics searches will be possible - I hadn't planned them, but it shouldn't be much extra work to put them in.

At the moment I'm doing the input to check it works and so on. I'm automating it as much as possible, and once it's running smoothly I'll either do it myself over a period of time (say one album per week or something) or pay someone else to do it.

Also, at the moment I'm just putting in the hanzi and pinyin - the English translations were just coming out too silly. I might skip the English and instead have an explanation - this is a song about XXXXX, and some of the difficult vocabulary is AAA, BBB and CCC.

Roddy

Roddy

[yonglan]

Roddy, Three categories. I bought a bunch of CDs in Taiwan, particularly during my year and a half in Kaohsiung (1999-2000) and some during my year in Taipei (2002-2003). Of course, that necessarily means that those are primarily the time periods represented (in this pop/rock section), though there is some older stuff -- and I did buy other older as well as new stuff that I haven't listed here. I bought earlier CDs for most of the folks listed in 'Recommended', but frequently was not satisfied. On that note, this is a list of my recommendations, so I have only listed what I think is good stuff, the stuff I would buy again if I lost it.

Recommended

莫文蔚 Karen Mok 你可以 You Can

Solid album.

莫文蔚 Karen Mok 我要說 I say

Some decent songs.

林憶蓮 Sandy Lam　　林憶蓮's

Some really good songs (and some so-so). Two have Cantonese versions.

張惠妹 (aka 阿妹, A-Mei) 我可以抱妳嗎？愛人

Good.

阿雅 照過來

Of course, I bought this for track number 1, but I also like track 6. Track 8 is cute. Tracks 2 and 3 are decent. I bought it with the VCD which is funny.

陶喆 David Tao I'm Okay

Tracks 3, 4, 6, and 7 are best. Most of the others are also decent to good.

張宇 雨一直下

The best are tracks 5 and 6.

伍佰 and China Blue 白鴿

Decent rock'n'roll.

伍佰 and China Blue 樹枝孤鳥

Sung all in Taiwanese.

One hit wonders (at least according to Greg)

蕭亞軒 Elva 愛的主打歌 。吻

Track 1.

杜德偉 Alex To 99情人

Track 1.

周華健 現在 Now

Track 2.

游鴻明 五月的雪 Snow in May

Track 2. From a TV series, I'm told.

范曉萱 Mavis 我要我們在一起

Track 1.

I dunno

伍佰 and China Blue 愛情的盡頭

Not sure if I would buy this again.

[roddy]

Thankyou! I think I might skip the stuff in Taiwanese though . . .

I'm finding the lyrics to be more problematic than I thought - what you get of Baidu's lyric search isn't as accurate as I'd hoped.

Roddy

[TSkillet]

if you buy legit copies of the CDs, most (if not all) Chinese artists throw in lyric sheets. But that's an awful lot of typing.

From what I see in Chinese music stores, they index their artists by number of strokes in their family name.

[in_lab]

Personally, I could find songs fastest if the index was organized by artist name in pinyin.

It seems like a lot of work to type in the Chinese song names. Maybe you could just have songs that you're able to find on the web.

Translations would take a lot of time. A key to difficult words would suffice.

You could limit your selection of songs to songs that you can find in a KTV.

Good luck! Sounds interesting.

[roddy]

Ok, a VERY early version of what will one day be

PinyinLyrics.com

is up at

http://www.dreamsofwhitetiles.com/pinyinlyrics

As you can see, it's a mess, but I'd like to let anyone interested have a look so they can tell me what I'm doing wrong.

My current major problem is that I was planning to have links to Baidu's mp3 searches. However, I've found that I can't successfully pass my utf-8 encoded search string into baidu's GB23121232134231 or whatever it is encoded search engine, which is giving me headaches at the moment. For the meantime I've put in a link to a Yesasia.com search, but please don't buy anything as I haven't got an affiliate ID in there yet

At the moment there's not much on there - one Jiang Xin album and I've put one Faye Wong song on just now, and will do a few more now (unless I get bored). Or maybe I should organise the index page a little better. Anyway, thanks for all comments so far, and keep them coming . . .

Roddy

PS Only Jiang Xin's Pandora has English so far

[roddy]

After many many moons . . .

PinyinLyrics.com is sparsely populated, but functional. You'll find

1) Character and Pinyin lyrics for a (currently very narrow) range of songs

2) Links that take you direct to Baidu's Mp3 search result pages for the song title

3) Ability to contribute songs you want to see on the site, and

4) Comment / discussion on songs where you can talk about the song, offer corrections or ask about anything you don't understand.

Early days, and there'll be a hefty redesign in the near future so criticize the layout now, rather than later. I'm particularly interested in how to handle indexing. I'm going to keep it simple and do it by artist only, but what combination of characters, pinyin, and English name should I use?

Comments welcome

Roddy