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: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.)

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

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