Free is Hard
Sometimes even words can’t be free.
I always thought I had a handle on a lot of things in the realm of computer science, especially understanding API in the coding languages I learned, but this whole venture into text analysis has opened my eyes into a whole different use for computer science. It is no longer just coding with the resources I can get myself, but I can now pull information from all across the web!
However, in the world we live in today, nothing can be free or easy anymore. I learned that the hard way, after spending about an hour trying to pull lyrics to 1,500 songs from the web that some people are greedy, and only gave me 30% of the data I needed. So, I then went on to finding a new API, one that was more budget friendly(so free), and one that had a large enough database for my uses. After trying about 10 different APIs, and getting hit with millions of errors, bad gateways, or outdated sources, I think I have found defeat. Without paying $2,500 for the full set of lyrics, I’m lost as to where I can get the lyrics with code. So instead, I think the plan is to go back to the original plan, limiting the songs to the top 10 songs of each year, and going to google, searching for the song names, and copying and pasting the lyrics into .txt files and writing code to search for any vulgar language.
All in all, it was a good experience learning about different ways to access information on the web, it just sucks that I will not be able to utilize any of it in my project.
But please, by the grace of god, if anyone who reads this has any idea on how to get song lyrics without having to manually do it and paying more than my life savings, please let me know so I can be spared of the pain of hours of manual labor.