Audioscrobbler (Anyone Remember Firefly?)

asciirock writes "RJ, a University of Southampton grad student in the UK has just put his final year project online. Audioscrobbler is a free plug-in for Linux XMMS and Windows Winamp2. It tracks every tune you play, cross-references with others in the Audioscrobbler community and serves up recommendations. There's also msging, stats and user homepages. In other words... Firefly lives!"

Comments

oh swell....

[deanj]

Great.... Firefly.com has a patent for this sort of thing, and now Microsoft has it (Microsoft bought them). Is this another case of something getting off the ground and then squashed because of lawyers?

Eech.

Re:oh swell....

[David McBride]

Software patents are not (currently) valid in the UK. Hence this is unlikely to be immediately squished by a megacorp from across the pond.

Re:oh swell....

[David Leppik]

Great.... Firefly.com has a patent for this sort of thing, and now Microsoft has it (Microsoft bought them). Is this another case of something getting off the ground and then squashed because of lawyers?

I haven't looked into their patent on "this sort of thing" in particular, but I wouldn't be concerned.

First of all, collaborative filtering, a.k.a. "this sort of thing" was developed at about the same time at a few places, most notably MIT (hence Firefly) and the University of Minnesota (which lead to Amazon.com's recommendation systems, among others.) The U of M's research, which I was involved with, started out with recommendations/filtering of Usenet, but later moved into movie recommendations. They then formed Net Perceptions, Inc. which worked on Amazon, CDNow.com, and others.

I've done the occasional patent search on collaborative filtering, and all the patents cover particular methods and algorithms. The technique itself is not patented, and anyone can do it. See http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~karypis/suggest/index .html for one implementation.

This is significantly different from what Firefly was doing. For one thing, Firefly was based on explicit ratings: you would explicitly tell it what you think of a particular item. The song recommender in this case uses implicit ratings: your behavior is used to infer a particular rating. That was pioneered at the U of M.

In any case, this sort of stuff is used by everyone from Netflix to Tivo to Amazon, without patent issues. So you can too.

David

Re:I don't get it

[yandros]

FireFly was a rating, preference-matching, and suggestion system developed at the MIT Media Lab long before anyone had really heard of Joss Whedon. :-)

There were a couple research versions of the multidimensional matching system run out of the Media Lab (one for music, then an expanded one for music, movies, and books, as I recall). FireFly was the name used for the spinoff company. It went through a brief period of excitment during the internet boom, then (iirc) was purchased by some large corporation or other. (I have a friend who worked on the research project.)

MoodLogic anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

MoodLogic provides this service, at a cost. It works based on paid subscriptions, or submitted data, as tokens. It only does mp3/wma (despite some of us asking for ogg support), but it seems to work pretty well. I believe it's currently only for Windows, and has a WinAmp plugin, but I may be wrong.

Why submit this to ./?

[Anonymous Coward]

RJ is already having hosting trouble, slashdotting him is not going to help audioscrobbler.

At least it happened before it moved to the new hosting service. Now only his university is going to be pissed, and he has a server to move to in the near future.

Re:Ideas.

[Mark Hood]

If you're on a Mac, iTunes does both of these things

And with smart playlists, you can have 'most heard', 'never heard', top or bottom rated....

Easy!

Mark

Re:Group think, bad taste and braindamage.

[costas]

There are easy ways around this: you can age songs (guaranteeing that new songs get priority) or you can use web-of-trust ratings to see what high-trusted peers recommend currently.

BTW, I know this as my newsbot does the same sortof filtering for news articles, and although there is some feedback reinforcement for recent news, it does work suprisingly well.

Re:I don't get it..

[Anonymous Coward]

Spyware is unwanted and dishonest with users about its purpose.

Re:I don't get it

[axolotl_farmer]

Firefly.com was also a good internet community back in 96-97. Then they build a new bug-riddled javascript bloated system that was so slow the chatrooms and community pages became unusable.

Spent many many hours chatting on FFly. You had to refresh the window to load any updates!

Any other old Firefly people on Slashdot? My FFly id was Assar, and I used to hang out in the Save Ferris and Witty Repartee venues.

I build Audioscrobbler

[captainclever]

Hey, RJ here-

I was kinda hoping NOT to get slashdotted for a few days - i'm moving to a bigger better server soon. :P

The site is currently hosted by my Uni, no wonder the webserver ground to a halt..Oh well at least i dont have to pay for the bandwidth used at uni :)

The site's gonna be pretty slow for a few days, but please bookmark it and revisit soon- should have much more bandwidth and a faster server..

I could do with some help developing the XMMS plugin and the winamp 3 plugin. All the source code will appear on the site soon (GPL).

RJ

Re:I build Audioscrobbler

[captainclever]

The reason the code is not available under the GPL right now is that the project is not "finished" with regards to my university degree course.

I'm not sure if i'm allowed to (university regulations) put the code up as GPL until i hand in the final project on May 8th this year.

I will find out tomorrow when i go to uni, and post an article on audioscrobbler.com explaining the status.

RJ

Re:Go further!

[captainclever]

Hi, i'm the guy who's writing Audioscrobbler.

i want to steer clear of filesharing to avoid getting savaged by the RIAA etc.. but i'm planning on exposing the data so other people can write "unofficial" addons to do stuff like this, which hopefully won't get me in trouble :)

RJ

All data to be made available

[captainclever]

I've been talking with robert from musicbrainz (audioscrobbler will be using TRM technology soon) and ben from agentarts. I'm gonna be using some agentarts data, and i will make all my data available freely when i've implemented the TRM system to sort out badly named songs.

i also want to syndicate the data (xml/rss) so ppl can stick live info on their blogs/websites.. this wont happen till i move servers tho.

i'm not gonna run off and give the data to the riaa or start emailing you crappy adverts. its a uni project that's about half way thru. the project will run and run tho- i'm not gonna shut it down.

Should i ever get border of it (unlikely) there are plenty of ppl that will take over. i'll just slap it on sourceforge.

RJ

Re:Winamp 3?

[RussGarrett]

Winamp3 is an attempt at completely rewriting Winamp so it's cross-platform (there is a linux version). Also, the component/plugin architecture is much better - Winamp3 has MUCH more development potential. However, it was released much too early by management (even the developers agree with this). Version 3.1 should be much improved. Perhaps calling it version 3 is a misnomer - Winamp 2 is still very much under active development, and a new version will be out soon.

If Winamp 2 is perfect for you, why is there any reason to try anything different? (heheh, there will be soon ;))

Yes I am a Winamp3 apologist :).

Consideration for Commons

[mrmiasma]

I would ask of people to check with grassroots startups before posting things on very influential entities like slashdot. RJ was recently bombarded with a huge amount of new users due to the publicity of Audioscrobbler from other blogs and news sites. His hosting service had shut down audioscrobbler.com because of the sudden surge of bandwidth usage. He then relocated the server to his own webspace, but with a slashdot hit, I don't see how it's going to survive. He's looking for cheap webspace for PHP/MySQL. If you can get to it, Here [www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~rwj100/] is the news posting about it. Here is the same posting but google-cached.

Re: Math (slightly OT)

[Llywelyn]

"I'm also not sure where that equation comes from. There's absolutely nothing which allows you to derive math from the situation... You cannot write an equation to tell what that person is going to do..."

Hence the stochastic part of the equation--it is kind of a "fudge factor" to take guesses.

What the original poster confused was ranking and searching. A tool that ranks the songs and plays those more frequently that you play more frequently can be bad, depending on implementation, and cause you to continuously play through the same playlist of < 20 songs. This is particularly true of the self-reinforcing designs where it counts when it plays it as well as when you select it.

Mathematics can also be used to tell what *people* will do, rather than any one individual, through the techniques of social modeling, group theory, and other methods.

That being said: I haven't checked his equation for correctness, though the formatting is standard.

Re:I don't get it

[deepsky]

> then (iirc) was purchased by some large corporation or other

Yes. This particular large corporation is known as "Microsoft". And Firefly Networks' flagship product was called "Passport". Ever heard of it? :)

Re:Firefly?

[jaysedai]

Bogus?? How about the best sci-fi TV ever made. Try downloading some episodes off Kaaza and come back with an informed opinion.

There were 12 episodes aired and 15 made. It didn't fail because it was bad (it wasn't), it failed because, as usual, Fox TV failed to get behind it, they barely advertised it, they bounced it around (because of baseball coverage), and they played it completely out of order (like playing the pilot LAST!)

Excellent Firefly discussions at:
http://forums.prospero.com/foxfirefly/messages

As for the actual Firefly software thingie, I liked it, too bad Microsoft smothered it. :(

Re:Go further!

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried to install the xmms plugin with the perl script you wrote, but it didnt work: The $nameoffile variable contains the string "xmmsplugin1.2 - Temporary version until new servers available.tgz". Its easily fixed, of coures :-)

posting as AC because I am too lasy to ask for my forgotten password :-)

Cross-platform my ass.

[Doktor Memory]

Winamp3 is an attempt at completely rewriting Winamp so it's cross-platform (there is a linux version).

Ahem. There was a "Linux Alpha" version of winamp3 released almost two years ago now, which was completely and totally unusable, as was the alleged MacOS version. There has not been a linux release since, and it is not even currently obvious how to download the linux version. (Understandable, since it was not in any way useful.)

Re:Firefly?

[Anonymous Coward]

farscape anyone?

I prefer farscape - but that said firefly was okay too. But it used steady cams far far too much. like blair witch.