The dumps released by Discogs are great for datamining, but they are only published once a month. Because they are also not released on the first day of the month (usually on the 4th) it means that you are at minimum a few days behind, or possibly up to 30+ days. The Discogs data can also be accessed through their API, allowing monitoring of releases in a more continuous way: as soon as something is added it can be downloaded and checked. The JSON coming from the API exposes more information than the XML from the data dump. For example it contains a timestamp when the release was added and when the last change was. It also contains some information about who contributed to it, and some elements (like labels) contain a bit more information that is not present in the XML The structure also seems a lot more sane than the XML, which I can only process with SAX because building a DOM of a 32 GiB XML file is just insane. Accessing the Discogs API for the purposes I want to use it ...
A blog dedicated to two of my hobbies: vinyl records and digital data and exploring where the two intersect. This blog is not affiliated with Discogs, but uses a lot of its data. On Discogs you can find me as metalmijn. I also get a lot of help from a friend you can find on Discogs as gerjolp Check out my Discogs cleanup scripts at: https://github.com/armijnhemel/cleanup-for-discogs/