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: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: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...

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