BandNavi 1.4

This application, BandNavi, serves as a tool for exploring musical connections by analyzing relationships between musicians and bands. It offers an interesting approach to discovering new music and artists through iterative tracing of these relational networks, such as member changes, collaborations, and guest appearances.

The process begins by selecting a track from your iPod library within the "Library" tab. Once a song is played, the "Navigation" tab displays the musicians involved in that track's band. By tapping on a musician’s name, you can see a list of other bands they have participated in, enabling you to follow links from musician to band and vice versa. This creates a pathway to uncover related artists and groups.

Additionally, if recordings of a band are available, a Play button appears beside the band name, allowing immediate playback. Users interested in further exploring specific bands can access related video clips on YouTube or music available on the iTunes Music Store by tapping the Option button next to the band name.

Regarding its technical aspects, BandNavi relies on network connectivity and pulls information from a web-mined database. The accuracy of musician data depends on publicly available web sources and may include inaccuracies. Users can verify source pages via the Option button. When member names are not available in the primary database, information from MusicBrainz is used as a fallback.

The application has been developed as part of academic research conducted by the Music Information Technology Laboratory. More details about this research can be found at http://gttm.jp/hamanaka/en/.

Users should note that artist names from your device are transmitted to the server during usage; however, this data is not stored on the server. Due to its web-mined nature, the reliability of musician information is not guaranteed. The developers do not accept liability for any damages resulting from the use of BandNavi or its data, including actions such as purchasing music through third-party services.