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

It tracks every tune you play?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:It tracks every tune you play?

[cioxx]

Listen to *one* Britney Spears track out of curiosity...[]

What in the hell are you doing listening to Britney in the first place? It's like saying "I found this virus and decided to infect few of my computers.. you know, out of curiousity"

Go further!

[NineNine]

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.

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

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.)

But ...

[halftrack]

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.)

Re:But ...

[tmark]

Think about it; it profiles your music taste and make recommandations. That's what spyware does (or says it does.)

I don't know about anyone else, but I can't see how a system could possibly make intelligent recommendations without profiling me. If I happen to like listening to (say) Britney Spears, Metallica, and Herbie Hancock, I'd like to see what other people who also do the same are listening to. I DON'T want to know that people who listen to Britney Spears is likely to also listen to N'Sync.

To me, the value-added here is precisely in the profiling.

Re:But ...

[Subjective]

What I really don't get, and sounds a bit fishy to me, is the whole username/profiling thing.

I mean, this can be done without it:
Have an anonymous user handle on that site. No email, no nothing. (sure, they can have your IP. They can have mine, too, if they want, it's a dynamic one)

Whenever you hear a song, it sends the info: a user who heard (set of songs) decided to hear (new song), and of course heuristics of how much any song is heard, bla bla bla.

The server keeps this huge database. When you want recommendations (downloaded every 15 min? or something) your program asks what the database recommends for someone who listened to (the set of songs you listened to). You're not giving away an email, no personal info, just an anonymous username (created automatically, or something. There is alot of 'or something's here)

There's no real reason for the server to know who you are or what you like for this to work.
Perfect profiling is also not nessecary, in my view, but that's a different issue altogether

Re:Winamp 3?

[NineNine]

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.

Re:Group think, bad taste and braindamage.

[Subjective]

There is no real reason why that would be a feedback loop:
You're listening to a set A of songs. So, you recieve a reccomendation from someone listening partly to A, partly to another set (all the songs he heard which are not in A), B.
You exercise your own taste (which is not included in your text at all), and integrate part of B. (You might also give up a few over-played songs of A)
Now you have new recommendations...

There's absolutely no reason why this should gravitate towards the MTV play list: it'll gravitate towards "music you like and music people who like that, likes"

I'm also not sure where that equation comes from. There's absolutely nothing which allows you to derive math from the situation.
A person recieves a recommendation, and may choose to take it or not. He may listen to part of the song, decide to remove it, and the program will disregard that song.

You cannot write an equation to tell what that person is going to do...

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

Beyond the music realm..

[Subjective]

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...

Re:Next to be subpoenaed... RJ

[PoshSpod]

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.

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

[jamie]

"All the source code will appear on the site soon (GPL)."

Why not today?

Don't be embarrassed about it being crappy code, all code is crappy in the early stages. :) Put the GPL LICENSE file in the root directory, and follow its directions for adding notification to your source files. Then tar it up and call it 0.01.

Put it up and keep putting it up as you update it. If you think you might have security issues, best that you open the code now before your user base gets any bigger -- let people review it and send you suggestions. If you don't think you have security issues, you have no reason not to release it.

For a project that demands community participation, a promise of GPL code in the future is worthless. What's valuable is the code itself.

Licenses, releases, security feedback, other feedback... this is all part of doing a project like this. It's something that isn't normally taught in a university, but if you really want to run a project that depends on its community, this is not extra-credit, this is a prerequisite.

Just my opinion :)

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

"Free" but apparently not Free

[jamie]

I can't find any licensing anywhere that tells me the terms under which their collected information will be used.

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.

firefly

[Hubert_Shrump]

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...

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