I’m not sure if it is unique to the subcontinent, but Hindi songs need to be tagged differently since we like to search the songs by their singers, music directors, lyric writers in addition to albums they belong to. I explored musicbrainz with this in mind but I found it lacking to the best of my understanding. I’ll have a look at it and the other databases once again. Maybe it is time to be the change I’m looking for. Thanks for your suggestions nonetheless.
The aspect ratio crime was something I wanted to write in my comment too but it was getting too long already. For the amount of money these music companies earn the least they could do is to create/fund a proper database and digitize from master recordings wherever available before it is too late. It was so nice to see the restored versions of Satyajit Ray classics like Charulata but I am afraid most Hindi films will never get that kind of love ever.
I will explore the Russian site that you mentioned and see if I can find something useful there. I’ll also look again at musicbrainz, as suggested in the other comment, to see if it can serve the purpose I want to use it for. Meanwhile, will it be okay if I DM you to stay in touch regarding this common pursuit?
I’m with you in loving hindi songs from 50s and 60s and want to build a collection of best possible versions available. The saddest thing is that even the companies owning the rights (Saregama et al) don’t care at all. They don’t even seem to have a definitive catalog of movies/songs/artists.
I tried looking up for such songs through nicotine but it is a futile pursuit. The few hindi songs available there are a jumble of artists that seems impossible to make use of.
A while ago, i poked around in the saregama endpoints that appear in their website through developer options and was able to scrape metadata for around 200k hindi songs. I need to clean it up and maybe try to download them using the JioSaavn APIs that are floating around.
I have come to respect YouTube users like TommyDan who are digitization and cleaning best possible versions of old movies that are out of copyright (he’s reached into 60s now). There are people who are digitizating vinyl records and I wish they would also upload them in places other than YouTube.
More than anything, i want to compile a database of the songs/movies/artists but don’t really know where to begin so that others could also collaborate.
/RANT
I’m curious about your Bollywood folder. How big is it? I want to build a structured collection of old songs, and new ones too in as high quality as possible. I have nicotine+ installed but so far I couldn’t find anyone with an authoritative collection.