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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!"
Listen to *one* Britney Spears track out of curiosity, get distracted by something to do in another room, forget that it's playing repeatedly for 3 hours in the meanwhile, get labelled a teen music sheep by the system and get recommendations for more degrading music. Arg!
Recommendations are nice, but what I want is a tie in to Fast Track. I want a list of DATs that I can plug in to Kazaalite and download based on what I play.
Wow, I guess they can make really nice profiles of their users.. and then sent the customized advertisements. Nice ;-)
Can you imagine just how valuable the kind of information generated by a project like this might be to the RIAA? They somehow gain access to a server and now they know everything you're listening to
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.
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.)
Argh, why's there no support for Winamp 3? Now i have to choose between having my Media Library, or goin old-skool, but bein able to use this cool plug-in
Everything sucks except musicandstuff
While it might seem cool at the first sight to produce such a tool which creates recommandations from other people's playlists, it's in fact counterproductive at pratical applications.
What we have here is a stabilizing feedback loop, songs often heard will be heard more often. This can be described by the following simple equation (h(t) - hear rate):
dh(t)/dt = h(t) * c + sin(h(t)) * phi(dt,H(t)) where the last term is a stochastic diffusion corrector which models connection drops etc. This means that after a 3c/pi annealing time new injected songs (c1,...,ck) have no chance to be heard at all, because the system reenforces to old songs. The only possibility to get something new into the playlists, is to get an external stimulation at e.g. t0: phi(c-h(t0). Such a high current can be only injected be a very strong source covering a large part of the system.
In simple words: after some iterations an equlibrium is reached and all new song turning up in the recommendations are the top 24 played at MTV.
In fact, you are just replaying the shitty MTV mainstream taste.
I can't think that this is very good, first you don't need a computer program to recommend the MTV top 30 when you have a TV and secondly you only get boring mainstream stuff and nothing like exciting french chansons or so.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
That is what XMMS is.
- PS. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R where eliminated.
Suffice to say the article is now a post-mortem, at least if the suggestion servers etc are on the same server as the web site. ;)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
How about a Linux program that's not an interface clone and picks up toolkit themes?
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!
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.
You might be tempted to say, "Oops, I did it again."
Ok, you can slap me now.
I must say though, my friends have always been more reliable at alerting me to things I might like than any program, and they're more, well, friendly too. I've never yet seen any automated system that didn't, sooner or later, get messed up. Which would be ok, except I've never known one to make particularly valuable recommendations when it *wasn't* messed up either.
Hey, you watched a car racing movie. Here's some other car racing movies you might like to watch.
Well, I *know* that you moron. I'm into car racing movies. Get it?
KFG
For just a second, just one second there I thought this was talking about the Firefly TV show and somehow it was being brought back. sigh time to wander about aimlessly again.....
ransack it.
Just imagine: you'd be illegally telling people what you like...
My other
What i would like is a window that lets me rate a song the first time i hear it, or just add a rating to the ID tag thing.
And also maybe keep track of the amount of times i play it..
That way it could find songs that i like, and i could have a category by which to order my songs when i can't decide what to listen to..
Wasn't that the bogus sci-fi show that only survived for 3 episodes?
I stole this sig.
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.
can someone post a mirror to the downloads? The site is painfully slow.
- Joe
I think that associations, in computing, is a great idea for user interface.
A program like this (lets disregard the Big Brother for one second, and look at computer+user alone) tells you what songs it thinks you'll like, based on what you've heard before.
It could also tell you what songs you'd like to hear NEXT, based on order of songs you had before, and make these easier to access on the playlist (like, on the recommendation list. I'm getting out of hand aren't I?)
The whole idea of associating user actions can be great. Suppose you work on a project. Slowly, the computer (the brand-new GPLed Associator program) associates a certain directory, where all the files are, with the files themselves, your favorite editor, the compiler for that language, and certain sites you visited researching for it.
via some UI, it'll make all these accessible when 'triggered' - when it is pretty sure you're working on the project right now, or going to.
In some sense (in a small amount of cases), the computer will be 'one step ahead of you' - holding the line when you're just about to ask it to call...
My other
How is this different from spyware?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Don't worry, they won't. The RIAA has no power in the UK and none over the government.
Part of the fun of being British these days is the RIAA can't bribe - sorry, fund - polititions in Westminister nearly as easily as in Washington.
This is my sig.
Hah. Kids today. I remember HOMR and its e-mail based predecessor RINGO.
NO! Then they might start releasing music I like instead of the stuff they're pushing now.
What's wrong with the Winamp/XMMS interface? It's fairly intuitive and simple. XMMS itself is reliable and well-written to boot. Even on my ancient K6 mailserver/jukebox, it uses almost no CPU and almost no memory.
Forget all the bogus attempts to move your antique business model online. What you want to do is license this technology from its creators, and build a mechanism to sell digital copies of the recommended tunes.
Imagine a dialog box comes up and says: Hey, people who like Weezer and Radiohead are also listening to Wilco. Want to download their latest single for 50 cents?
Combine that with some fair-use-friendly DRM software, and you've got THE application that gives the recording industry legs for the digital age.
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.
http://casper.zvdk.nl/~casper/audioscrobblerinstal ler.pl
Please be gentle, only 16Kb up.
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
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
I think CDNow bought the guy out so they could use it for the 'If you like this artist, buy these!' links on their pages.
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.
But this is cool, they need more metalheads in there so I'm gonna try this out. I doubt it'll be able to recommend me anything useful because it won't have many people listening to my stuff.
Berto
A pox on fox for cancelling a show that rox!
Seriously - I thought this was going to be about how the music you then upload helps you have adventures in Reaver territory.
Ok! Ok, I'm moving on...
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
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
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
How about a Linux program that's not an interface clone ...
You have to try mpg123/ogg123 !
theefer
How bout a Windows one that does that? Christ, I just want applications to use the *standard* GUI toolkits, whether it be on my XP box, my OSX laptop, or my SuSE box. Christ on a stick, is it that hard? To keep this on topic, man this sounds like a neat plugin, doesn't XMMS support using Winamp Plugins somehow? and doesn't Winamp3 have a similar feature?
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.
"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.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Congratulations on a nice project. Could you answer the question which is entitled, '"Free" but apparently not Free'? I'm sure many readers here would be interested in the answer.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
I used to listen to Launch so much that when I listen to songs now, I have this reflex to rate them, and then am always diappointed when I can't.
I run Winamp 3 at work and have the NonStop skin on it, so I'm not sure if this will work with it or not since it says Winamp 2 there. I'd go and read the article, but it appears dead, I assume a slashdotting.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I had to edit the script a bit toget the wget function to work, I removed the '-q' flag so I could see what was going on. I brougth this line up to the same line that wget was one... "http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/%7Erwj100/controlcentr e/queryxmmsinstall.php?option=currentversion"
I did this in the instance below that one too...
The script downloaded this file:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/%7Erwj100/controlcentre /xmmsplugin1.2.tgz
=> `/usr/X11R6/lib/xmms/General/xmmsplugin1.2' ...as you can see, it doesn't have the .tgz extension...
I did a tar -zxvf on it, and audioscrobbler.so was the result...
So, I have audioscrobbler.so in: /usr/X11R6/lib/xmms/General
When I open up XMMS, and look under General plugins, it is not listed, I really don't know what I could be doing wrong... Any ideas?
- fsckd
> 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?
is this by ID3 tags or by filenames or what? i have a great deal of digitized (ogg) LPs that are named "~/albums/Artist/AlbumTitle/xx - trackname". there's not even playlists, because i'm lazy and added xmms to open-with for directories in nautilus. how will audioscrobbler respond to me playing those tracks?
> Any other old Firefly people on Slashdot?
I was responsible for, afaik, the only operational installation of the initial version of Firefly's software. It was for a Ziff-Davis project, rating shareware in their software library. In that version they used parsed html to do everything; I'm not familiar with how the later versions worked.
I've never met him, but I was apparently implementing designs created by a guy named Bob Sweeny. His site has some screen shots.
As Bob says, the project fell apart sometime after it was implemented. I don't know the story behind that.
I was at the company meeting when they were first discussing MS's interest in them. There was a lot of talk about how MS was just looking at them, and not getting ready to pull a Borg. A few months later, the company was broken up and moved to the West coast.
Sometimes, redesigns work out (Mozilla), and sometimes... they don't.
But how many years was it that Mozilla was a bloated crashy piece of shit? Netscape released the code in March 1998 and we finally got a usable browser around early 2001 (0.9.0 was May 2001) and there was plenty bitching in between about how the project would never turn out anything useful. I believe we started seeing early winamp3 builds in late 2000 so maybe they'll put out something good late this year. One can always hope.
At last! A word to rhyme with cobbler.
Hmm... cobbler
I would use it if someone hacked up a Noatun plugin for it. I love using Noatun because it integrates so nice into my KDE desktop.
hey buddy... ummm... what sort of bribe would it take to get an iTunes version?
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
If you can download it in the US, look out for a lawsuit there... could potentially be considered "doing business" there or whatnot. Don't forget they wanted to put DVD-Jon on trial in California, because MPAA is based there, even though he had done nothing in California or US at all. (And hopefully he'll be acquitted here...)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's not so much the interface I don't like as much as the fact that there's no option for it to use my GTK themes. (Well, that and the XMMS developers have said that it'll always be tied only to GTK1, which occasionally gives me grief with non-ASCII characters in filenames and metadata.)
I also have to choose between an mp3 input plugin that has bad artifacts on stream errors (mpg123), or one that crashes consistently when it loads certain files ^^; And I could bitch a little bit about its source code layout, but, eh. Stylistic differences.
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.)
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Don't you Limey bastards have any balls? Where's your bloody pride, damnit?
... says the Anonymous Coward.
I agree. The reason I've never gotten use of systems like this is that they often make recommendations that are too obvious. If you listen to a particular style of music, you get all of the major bands from that style recommended to you. Not helpful. A balance needs to be reached between just recommending things that are too obviously related to what you are already into and recommending things that are completely unrelated.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
...why did they remove the very useful ability to control the app using Windows messages? I'm the developer of an app which controls Winamp 2 using the fairly fully-featured Windows messaging API, but the only way people can use it with Winamp 3 is by getting hold of a third-party plugin.
As proven by Mozilla, what most people want is an application, not the world's geatest plugin architecture!
given the complexity of human taste, that such is even really possible.
For music I have found nothing so effective at finding things I like but haven't heard of as simply listening to college radio stations.
KFG
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.
Umm... He says that. Above. The part where he says it's not GPL'ed yet because he's not done using it as a dissertation.
counter preductive, the program is mearly to aid the listener?! - people only have to listen to what they want, and it would be great if audioscrobbler would one day link present bands in its database to new ones in development thus creating some kind of breakthrough point for them.
MoodLogic, whilst an excellent app, is aiming to provide something slightly different.
MoodLogic is all about helping you organise your music collection. It provides extensive metadata on your tracks, and allows you to create playlists based on artist, genre, mood, etc.
If I'm reading right, Audioscrobbler is about providing you with suggestions of new artists based on your current listening preferences. Something that (last time i checked) MoogLogic doesn't do.
That's news to me -- the product that FireFly worked on when I knew about them (and the research project it came from) had nothing to do with what MS's Passport does.
Maybe because the production work on some of her later records is done by the Neptunes and is simply amazing? Problem is that, rather than send you to listen to other Neptunes projects like N.E.R.D and Clipse it might very well send you to listen to other bubblegum artists. Then again, if (human) Slashdot readers make blanket assumptions about Britney listeners, what is a stupid program supposed to be able to do...
Let's patent courtrooms :)
Surely eveyone in north america is familiar with the Air Miles ( canadian version) card, and the business model behind it.
To my understanding, passport is similar. It's supposedly a data mining operation.
Now, in that case FireFly was probably purchased because it provided a framework for the data mining capabilities that would make Passport profitable
Just my thoughts, what does everyone else think?
What? Me? Worry?
An old friend of mine went over `to the Dark Side', becoming one of the founding members of MS's Business Data Mining & Intelligence (or somesuch) group, well before the days of FireFly, so I kind of doubt this.
Certainly, FireFly's MD preference-matching system could be used with passport-style marketing information for things like ad-targeting (my friend more or less told me they were working on this sort of thing), but this use equires, rather than provides, the sort of technology that Passport represents. Shrug.
and the reason that matters is?
the site is up again :-D and fast
i understand there were some glitches which under ./ load became a little more than minimal
Yea, the B&N development server was seven feet from my desk after Firefly moved to the Kendall Square office. I forget the name of the guy that was working on it. They came into the game a few months after Ziff-Davis, afaik.
Iirc, the B&N site was developed using a newer version of the software, one that had moved away from the parsed html model.
I don't remember Lauch.com at all. There were also a couple of other sites, BostonEats and a movie rating site, although I think those were both internal projects.
At what point should any given project release their code? I'd want to clean up any obvious blunders or "ugly" code before having others examine it. I often get phone calls while coding and put hte messages in as comments. Sometimes I forget to transfer them elswhere and leave things like "// mtg @ 5 Ash" in the code.
You seem to be suggesting that it would be good to release code even if it has errors and junk like that comment in it. Can you identify a lower limit? At what point between an empty file and a completed 1.0 version should the code be released to the public?
t'nera semordnilap