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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 ;-)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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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
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.
NO! Then they might start releasing music I like instead of the stuff they're pushing now.
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
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.
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
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
"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
At last! A word to rhyme with cobbler.
Hmm... cobbler