TheDataDB Update April 2019

Welcome to the latest monthly update to keep you, our Patreon supporters, updated on the latest and greatest developments across all of TheDataDB sites.

Before we get into the key updates, we realised that most of our supporters will likely only be using, and therefore supporting, one of the sites within the TheDataDB family, which currently includes 4 active sites. While the names of each of these are pretty self-explanatory, as they all follow similar principles for each, we still thought it would be useful to include a short description under each within this newsletter. Who knows, maybe you will be inspired to use more than one in the future!

TheAudioDB
https://www.theaudiodb.com

A community database of music metadata, including artists, songs, albums, artwork, charts, music videos and more, including of course, access to a JSON music API.

TheAudioDB had a big focus this month, particularly on the live event side. We have always leveraged the Songkick service to provide information on when your favourite band is next playing but the display on our site was quite simple. Following the update, we can now show the country the event is in, a full picture of the venue and a link to buy tickets or to browse Songkick further. 

In last month’s update we were pleased to share the improvement to the playlists feature. We have since fixed a few issues, but are pleased to report this is working much more simply and efficiently than ever. Any user can create a playlist of songs or albums, all they need to do is hit the "List" menu item and start a “Collection”. And don’t forget this works for tracks as well as albums. 

We've seen users make some interesting ones already, if you want to listen to some Ghetto rap from the 90's, this is the place!

TheSportsDB
https://www.thesportsdb.com

A community database of sports data, such as teams, player profiles, match results, upcoming matches, artwork and more, including of course, access to an API.

For those of you who use TheSportsDB, did you notice it had a facelift? Along with creating and introducing a new logo, we also improved the homepage info to include popular sports events and tweaks to the TV schedule data. This brings the great benefit of being able to look at the main page and see any events on TV for that day from anywhere in the world! As always, a big thanks to all the users who have been entering this data! 

Another big feature introduction was the expansion of our live-score API to include NFL, Golf, Soccer and NBA sports. These are only available to Patreon subscribers but we believe it’s cheaper than anyone else out there. Couple the live scores together with our huge collection of teams, logos, player profiles and events and you could create some really interesting apps or services via our easy to use JSON API!

TheCocktailDB
https://www.thecocktaildb.com

An open, crowd-sourced database of drinks and cocktails from around the world, with access to an API.

We've added a number of new drinks this month and are actively interviewing photographers to start replacing all our images with better quality ones! 

We saw a huge influx of users after the popular Absolut Drinks API was closed down and believe we are a great replacement going forward. We will add more content and better data going forward.

TheMealDB
https://www.themealdb.com

An open source database of recipes from around the world, with access to an API.

After some great conversations with some of our African users, we have added specific Kenyan and Moroccan categories for these locations and seen some delicious sounding recipes uploaded! As a result, we also added new ingredients such as “goat” and "black beans"! 

To add your own or enjoyed recipes from elsewhere, just find the links in the Patreon news feed below and get cracking! Just make sure you have a nice photo to upload at the end, that is ideally royalty free or one of your own.

Taking our images to the next level
We are looking into paying a professional photographer to start taking photos of cocktails primarily, and perhaps in the future meals and sporting events... We want to be able to license all these photos in the public domain as "creative commons", so that developers and commercial businesses can use all of our data and resell it if they wish. So stay tuned!

NOTE: If you are a professional or keen amateur photographer, why not make up some cocktails or a quick meal and send us a sample shoot!

Shout out to our supporters!
We had a surge of Patreon subscribers last month as we introduced multi-ingredient filters and many new API methods on the lowest $1 level. Thanks to all those who signed up! 

We love hearing about users using the data to write apps and web services all around the world, and greatly appreciate all the contributors who input data and generate new ideas for features! 

As you know, these sites were borne out of passion projects which can now be more financially sustainable, and the support is a huge encouragement for us more to keep developing new features and improving them.