Mavrix Monthly Update May-2011

We finished cataloguing information for 2 decades of Bollywood songs, from current day to 1991. Good news – We were making good progress! Bad news – We have to started listening to the songs from 1980s – probably the worst ever to come out of Bollywood. Please excuse our team members if they’re posting weird videos of like this on FB – I think they find it cathartic. Good songs are few and far-between and hog the office music system, when we do find them.
Online stream vs CDs. Since we analyze songs at a fairly detailed level, we find it difficult to do a good job of analyzing songs when the stream quality is not good (“Was that a dholak or a tabla?”) – which is a lot of the time. We therefore try and buy CDs if they’re available. We didn’t have any trouble sourcing CDs for the 2000s (we used Flipkart for the most part) but beyond that, sourcing CDs has been a pain. Recently though we were able to get in touch with some helpful folks at Saregama who put us in touch with a distributor who is now supplying us with a large number of CDs. We are not getting the entire set but it’s a lot more than the small numbers available on Flipkart. The conversation with Saregama was interesting – they made sure we were not pirates (or just plain dumb) before they gave us the distributor’s info.
Cover Art. We’d like to be able to display album cover arts on our website but we still haven’t been able to figure out a way to secure rights to do that. If you have any pointers, please send us an email at admin AT mavrix DOT in.
Tech work . After a few iterations, we are getting to the UI we want. Finalizing the designs next week. Thej is working fast and furious on finalizing the architecture and technology decisions. (Check out his post on Github vs Bitbucket). We’re shooting to start development work on Jun 20. Our quest to find a smart and dynamic Python/PHP/MySQL developer is still on.