I made 'Apple Music Classical' - but for Jazz. Beta testers needed.

[joeleblanc]

Sessionography lets you go on crazy jazz discography deep dives. 

• View chronological recording order timeline as leader and/or sideman
• Personnel listed for every album- tap to jump into their career
• Combine artists and see every session they have done together
• Explore entire record label or studio discography
• View entire recording history of a tune in chronological order
• Play every track via apple music
• Create smart playlists based on artist/group size/Era/instrument 

 

Install the beta: https://testflight.apple.com/join/EAPvdrEu

It's a simple enough idea- and I was surprised that absolutely nothing like it exists. I would love for as many people to take a look and let me know what you think! Please report any bugs or data errors as well- it's early and I'm making significant improvements daily for both the app UI and the data parsing. 

Thanks!  

-Joe

[Kevin Bresnahan]

If I paid for Apple Music, this seems like it would be a great tool. I never paid for it because I have so much of this music in my own music library, it seems like a waste of $10/month.

I wonder if it would show up on Apple CarPlay in my car? That would be cool (from the passenger's seat). That alone might make me change my mind. The media player in my 2025 Toyota Crown Signia sorta sucks. It has limited playlist ability and searching for an album or song is a tedious process that is so screen-intensive that I never do it while driving.

[joeleblanc]

The app is fully browsable with previews even without an Apple Music sub and it will play full tracks in your iTunes library. The only thing that won't work is playing full playlists. Sessionography does have a CarPlay app- but it doesn't have the fully functionality of the app due to restrictions around car apps. You can however view personnel on any track in from the now playing screen in CarPlay.  

[AndreyHenkin]

What is the source of the discographical information?

[joeleblanc]

Two main sources- MusicBrainz and Discogs. In some cases we are also scraping wikipedia to fill in some missing data- but that doesn't get us too much. Sessionography isn't simply presenting this data in a nicer UI though- I've merged the databases on a hosted server with over a hundred parsing rules, correction layers and validation passes. For example on Musicbrainz- most of John Coltranes discography is dated AFTER his death. We recover true session dates from a chain of sources — session-date relationships, recording-location dates, even dates parsed out of bootleg titles ("Konserthuset, Stockholm, March 22, 1960") and album liner-note annotations. On top of that we parse out a number of signals to determine which releases are compilations(this data is frequently missing) so those can be filtered out. 

It's still early though and I'm working like crazy everyday to keep cleaning up the data- if you see anything off, email me through the app. 

 

[Jim R]

On 7/10/2026 at 8:39 AM, joeleblanc said:

Two main sources- MusicBrainz and Discogs. In some cases we are also scraping wikipedia to fill in some missing data- but that doesn't get us too much. Sessionography isn't simply presenting this data in a nicer UI though- I've merged the databases on a hosted server with over a hundred parsing rules, correction layers and validation passes. For example on Musicbrainz- most of John Coltranes discography is dated AFTER his death. We recover true session dates from a chain of sources — session-date relationships, recording-location dates, even dates parsed out of bootleg titles ("Konserthuset, Stockholm, March 22, 1960") and album liner-note annotations. On top of that we parse out a number of signals to determine which releases are compilations(this data is frequently missing) so those can be filtered out. 

It's still early though and I'm working like crazy everyday to keep cleaning up the data- if you see anything off, email me through the app. 

 

Discogs is pretty good overall, but not always ideal depending on the level of detail that you're looking for.  I'm not familiar with "MusicBrainz", which sounds like something that should be avoided if one is at all serious about accuracy.  This unfortunate trend where release dates are given as recording dates is all too common  these days.  In case you may not be aware, in addition to the many dedicated artist and label printed discographies that have been around for decades, there are also some similarly excellent sources of discographical data available on the web.  Here are a few examples:

https://www.jazzdisco.org/

https://jazzdiscography.com/  

https://jazzmf.com/

https://www.plosin.com/milesAhead/Main.aspx



 

[joeleblanc]

Discogs is great for new releases. Discogs is also a sales platform so artists tend to list there way more reliably than MusicBrainz. MusicBrainz has a much more rigorous data structure with more data points. It's been quite good for cataloguing the classic eras. The options you listed- I've looked into them and there are licensing issues with scraping that data so it's largely a no go right now. Thanks for the suggestions - I'm all ears for suggestions, feature requests- anything at this point. 

There isn't really a completely perfect solution at least yet, but what we have a pretty close and the connections we are graphing in the app can lead you pretty deep, pretty fast. There is just so much on Apple Music that is simply impossible to surface via search, but with Sessionography you can drill down pretty easily and discover some really interesting tracks.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

I have created a few entries in discogs and I don't think I've ever seen an artist contributing to their own release. But then again, I've been mainly inputting Jazz LPs & CDs, so maybe they are less savvy about this?

[Niko]

39 minutes ago, Kevin Bresnahan said:

I have created a few entries in discogs and I don't think I've ever seen an artist contributing to their own release. But then again, I've been mainly inputting Jazz LPs & CDs, so maybe they are less savvy about this?

Some artists sell their own music there, in parallel to bandcamp like this entry for instance was almost certainly made by the artist / someone working for him and the only seller is also linked to him (it's a really nice album btw, best South African Jazz band in the Northern part of Brabant)

https://www.discogs.com/release/34472905-Eric-Van-Der-Westen-Songs-from-the-Vault

[Big Beat Steve]

On 7/14/2026 at 2:04 AM, joeleblanc said:

The options you listed- I've looked into them and there are licensing issues with scraping that data so it's largely a no go right now. Thanks for the suggestions - I'm all ears for suggestions, feature requests- anything at this point. 

I'd venture a guess that it all depends on how you approach this subject. I cannot imagine that licensing isues will be all that problematic in each and every case because the basic data that constitute the entries in such discogrpahies are HARD FACTS that OBJECTIVELY are as they are and exist as such (and not as someone's personal property). 
But of course this would be a matter of creating/compiling session entries yourself and not just siphoning off data and all their formatting by whatever tools there are out there for this. 
(BTW, I'd be surprised if Tom Lord had been totally above siphoning off data from the discographies that existed before him. )
Beyond this, I'd second the advice to avoid the pitfalls that Jim R mentioned. 

[joeleblanc]

Yes- I think the problems come when simply hoovering up all the data, or scraping sites that don't allow it. MusicBrainz and Discogs do explicitly allow it and I'm finding MusicBrainz is quite robust. Discogs is not quite as organized but just today I worked out a way to get 2700 more albums labeled with recording session dates(sometimes down to the day, but at least to the year). For each of these methods I'm cross referencing the approach with album sets with proven data to have a pretty high confidence that it's being categorized correctly. The most difficult part I'm finding though are the compilations and reissues. Those are often not well documented- even by Tom Lord(which honestly though makes sense he's not covering these). There are a number of heuristics though to parse these. That's most of what I'm working on right now. 

[hopkins]

Nice idea! 

I build my own app to do pretty much the same thing - but of course for my personal use. I created a website with some of my albums (the search function on that site is very limited - on my local server I have a more extensive search, and can play tracks from the album pages)

 https://storage.googleapis.com/cloudplayer/collection.html

Good luck with your app!