Slashdot Mirror
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!"
I'm getting this plug-in and I'm going to test it because it sounds great, but it sounds creapishly like certain other pieces of software and licensing clauses.
Think about it; it profiles your music taste and make recommandations. That's what spyware does (or says it does.)
I don't doubt that this piece of software is completely innocent (it being made by a student,) but who knows when someone makes a "new and improved Audioscrobbler." That really profiles you and stores this information for resale and profit without you really knowing it. Sure you might prefere targeted music adwertising, but be warned such advertising would only come from a preselected, narrow artist pool.
Now, I'm using Audioscrobbler, but if it ever becomes mainstream I would be careful using any commercial equivalent (or even a commercial Audioscrobbler.)
Look a monkey!
It's probably because Winamp 3 is a bloated, nasty mess. I've tried Winamp 3 many times, and I always remove it to go back to Winamp 2. Most software reviewers tend to agree. Winamp 2 is pretty close to the perfect MP3 player.
As far as I can tell from prowling over the site's FAQs and other documents, the student who put this together might collect a ton of data about your personal listening habits for a year and then (A) get bored with it and shut the project down without releasing that data back to the community who might want to actually keep the recommendation-system running, or (B) sell it all to marketers who promptly turn it into a paid service.
We've learned from CDDB what happens when users volunteer to build something that isn't Free: if it becomes popular enough to do any good, someone will buy it and shut out the very people who built it.
The creator has a good idea but needs to think it through before he'll get my participation.
Maybe one reason for not putting the source online now is that he is being slashdotted enough and putting the sources online would probably increase the slashdot effect.
Forgive me, but I've never used the system, just reading slashdot :). Anyway, what I was wondering, does it only collect the titles, or do you have some way of rating them too?
Otherwise it seems to me there could easily become a self-feeding loop, song gets recommended to people, they play it, and even if they don't like it, it'll get recommended to other people with similar tastes.
Having some kind of rating system also makes a alot more sense when recommending, otherwise you might be recommended the same music (that you dont like) time and time again. Loves Britney Spears, hates Nsync is a lot more info than just Loves Britney Spears.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Forget all the bogus attempts to move your antique business model online.
They're bogus for a reason.
What you want to do is license this technology from its creators, and build a mechanism to sell digital copies of the recommended tunes
No, it most certainly isn't what they want to do.
The RIAA represents the recording industry, not the music industry. Their entire existance relies on tying music to physical objects. Doing as you suggest would be simply hastening their own demise.
A recording session used to cost huge $$$ - but due to advances in technology, now costs relatively litte (it's possible to build your own recording studio for a few thousand dollars.) The internet has started a similar revolution with regards to distribution.
The RIAA knows this, and they know that it dooms them - with cheap recording and distribution, the artists no longer need them (and their lop-sided contracts). The problem is that the artists don't know this yet.
The recoding industry's whole "this is theft" mantra is basically a smoke screen to prevent artists from finding out they have an alternative to being a slave to a record label.