Website for Song Title to Song Writer(s)?

[Telly]

In the days of vinyl, you just had to look at the label (while your head went round and round ) to find out who wrote the song.

Are their any websites that you can put in the exact song title, and find out who the songwriter was? Something a lot more all-encompassing than wikipedia, I mean.

Remembering BMI and ASCAP from the vinyl days, I tried BMI.com and ASCAP.com, didn't see anything for that look-up function there. Any ideas?

 

[davemartin88]

Did you see this one?

ACE Title Search

I've used it before but find the search engine brings up matches that make no sense or way more than expected but I can usually find the song I'm looking for?

 

[ERD50]

I'm very curious about the history of this. I also recall that EVERY vinyl record I had would have the composer in ()'s. I always figured it was some legal, copyright requirement. And it was interesting to see who wrote some of these tunes.

However, when CDs came out, this wasn't the case. Anyone know what's up with that?

-ERD50

 

[Telly]

Did you see this one?

ACE Title Search

I've used it before but find the search engine brings up matches that make no sense or way more than expected but I can usually find the song I'm looking for?

No, I didn't see that one! I had poked around the ASCAP website, but some how missed the obvious ACE/Repertory box up in the header . Thanks!
I found very little in their database, and some of the search results made me wonder about the programmers who wrote the code. But I did find a few.

Which got me thinking... in the days of vinyl, I almost always saw BMI listed after the songwriter's name. Seeing ASCAP was a rarity, like 50:1 BMI:ASCAP. So with your helpful direction back to ASCAP, I took a closer look at BMI.com. Lo and behold, if you hover over Search in the home pages' header, you can do a Repertoire Search. After the initial search, it works from a search page which is easier to handle and offers more choices. Found a lot lot more there. But still don't see a lot of songs.

ERD50 - Now with mp3's, we don't see anything!

 

[ERD50]

ERD50 - Now with mp3's, we don't see anything!

I looked into the tags on an mp3 I purchased through Amazon (with EasyTag). There is a COMPOSER ID tag in the ID3 specification, but it was empty in this song. And some players don't display it anyway. (Update - Hmmm, but the CCR albums I bought DO have composer - so some do.)

I don't get it - the composer is a pretty important piece of info, it's available to those selling the music, why not populate it?

Actually, I'm disappointed in the whole tagging system for digital music. I was assuming I'd have the composer and every musician, producer, engineer, etc available for search. When digging through my vinyl, I find it interesting to see that the bass player from one band is now playing on someone else's track, or some famous singer doing backing vocals - I'd love to search for ' all tracks with David Holland on bass' for example. But I can't, and it doesn't seem right. This info would be less than a single second of music in terms of data size. Why not include it?

-ERD50

 

[davemartin88]

Which got me thinking... in the days of vinyl, I almost always saw BMI listed after the songwriter's name. Seeing ASCAP was a rarity, like 50:1 BMI:ASCAP. So with your helpful direction back to ASCAP, I took a closer look at BMI.com. Lo and behold, if you hover over Search in the home pages' header, you can do a Repertoire Search. After the initial search, it works from a search page which is easier to handle and offers more choices. Found a lot lot more there. But still don't see a lot of songs.
/QUOTE]

Will take a look at the BMI search, thanks for the update. Like you, I found the ASCAP search function hard to fathom and basically only used it once or twice.