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Music Media Software

Audioscrobbler (Anyone Remember Firefly?) 200

Posted by CmdrTaco from the distributed-recomendations dept.
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!"
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Audioscrobbler (Anyone Remember Firefly?) More

Audioscrobbler (Anyone Remember Firefly?)

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  • It tracks every tune you play? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:08AM (#5313815)
    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? (Score:5, Funny)

      by cioxx ( 456323 ) on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:17AM (#5313850) Homepage
      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"
      • 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...
    • 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

  • Go further! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NineNine ( 235196 ) on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:08AM (#5313818)
    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.

  • Nice user profiling (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:09AM (#5313821)
    Wow, I guess they can make really nice profiles of their users.. and then sent the customized advertisements. Nice ;-)
    • There's nothing wrong with customized adverts. If I got those, I'd turn off WebWasher. I don't want personal ads, I don't want a 100% legal smoke. I want hardware, games, anime, and industrial music.

  • Next to be subpoenaed... RJ (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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

  • oh swell.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by deanj ( 519759 ) on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:11AM (#5313829)
    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.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by David McBride ( 183571 ) <david+slashdot@ d w m.me.uk> on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:53AM (#5313981) Homepage
      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:oh swell.... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by BlueUnderwear ( 73957 )
        Software patents are not (currently) valid in the UK.

        Correct. They are currently valid nowhere in Europe, although there are unfortunately plans to change that.

        However, this doesn't prevent an unethical company [teles.de] to sneak just such a patent past a sleepy patent office clerk, and once it's on the books, they can bully whoever they want [www.dtag.de] with it. True enough, eventually the judge will decide in favor of the defendant, but until that date the defendant has to cope with a number of hassles (lawyer's costs, and more importantly: injunction to force him to change his software, so as not to use the disputed features, etc.). Just let's hope nobody patents the light switch!

    • Re:oh swell.... (Score:2, Informative)

      by David Leppik ( 158017 )
      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?

      I haven't looked into their patent on "this sort of thing" in particular, but I wouldn't be concerned.

      First of all, collaborative filtering, a.k.a. "this sort of thing" was developed at about the same time at a few places, most notably MIT (hence Firefly) and the University of Minnesota (which lead to Amazon.com's recommendation systems, among others.) The U of M's research, which I was involved with, started out with recommendations/filtering of Usenet, but later moved into movie recommendations [umn.edu]. They then formed Net Perceptions, Inc. which worked on Amazon, CDNow.com, and others.

      I've done the occasional patent search on collaborative filtering, and all the patents cover particular methods and algorithms. The technique itself is not patented, and anyone can do it. See http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~karypis/suggest/index .html [umn.edu] for one implementation.

      This is significantly different from what Firefly was doing. For one thing, Firefly was based on explicit ratings: you would explicitly tell it what you think of a particular item. The song recommender in this case uses implicit ratings: your behavior is used to infer a particular rating. That was pioneered at the U of M.

      In any case, this sort of stuff is used by everyone from Netflix to Tivo to Amazon, without patent issues. So you can too.

      David

  • Winamp 3? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 5lash ( 589953 )
    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

    • Re:Winamp 3? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by NineNine ( 235196 ) on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:25AM (#5313876)
      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.
      • Yeah, shame they don't add just the lightweight cross-fader to winamp2. I know there's plugins that do this for winamp2, but the ones I tried tend to make winamp2 suddenly more bloated and nasty (cause they have to work by buffering the next song, so you don't get the ability to switch between songs quickly and skip ahead easily anymore because there's a five-second delay - and if you decrease the delay the fades aren't so nice anymore).

        Daniel

      • Re:Winamp 3? (Score:4, Informative)

        by RussGarrett ( 90459 ) <russ.garrett@co@uk> on Sunday February 16, 2003 @12:34PM (#5314130) Homepage
        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 :).
        • Winamp3 has MUCH more development potential.

          I agree, its energy is much more potential than kinetic. I have over 1,000 CDs in my collection, and I've ripped most of them to mp3s. Every time I tell Winamp3 to catalog my collection, it ends up leaving a ton of stuff out.

          Sad to say, but MS's Media Player catalogs it correctly.

        • 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.)
          • Their main aim is to get the Windows version functional first, and you can hardly blame them for that. There was an internal linux build released last month - I've tried it and it is indeed fairly functional (skinning works, it plays MP3 and oggs), although it still has a way to go. Unfortunately it's not publically available and I can't give you a date when it will be.
    • If you visited the site you would know that a WinAmp3 version is in progress. Besides, WinAmp 2 is a near perfect MP3 player, WinAmp 3 sucks the llama's ass.
    • "Argh, why's there no support for Winamp 3?"

      Because WinAmp3 sucks, as you'll discover the next time you have to wait 10 seconds for it to load, or have Windows crash when you try to change themes.

    • Pretty much because everyone has accepted Winamp3 as a failure. It's slow, it's interface sucks. About the only cool thing it does it play videos... woooooohooooooo oh wow, look I've got Windows Media Player installed for just that.

  • Group think, bad taste and braindamage. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Krapangor ( 533950 ) on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:14AM (#5313842) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Group think, bad taste and braindamage. (Score:4, Funny)

      by cide1 ( 126814 ) on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:22AM (#5313868) Homepage
      Someone finally proved mathmatically why clear channel is wrong! Quick, send this to the FCC, oh wait, they wont be able to understand it.

      I think, however, that a correction factor is missing, you should have a phi(c - (p*h(t0)) where p is a correction factor for how open a person is to new music. I know for me that it doesnt take much for me to try something new, but for many people over the age of about 18, they know what they like, and arent going to progress with the change in popular music. This is why old people like oldies.
    • I have absolutely no clue whether those equations are correct (I don't even want to have a clue, really), but the tendency you describe certainly would exist. However, since people most likely won't base their hearing habits solely on such a database, I doubt equilibium will ever be reached - this is basically saying the "external stimulation" you refer to will always be quite strong.
      Nevertheless, it's certainly correct that such a system makes is unlikely for rare songs to be put into the main circulation - of course, since the developers are probably aware of this, they can counteract, for instance by adding modifiers for songs newly introduced into the system, or by allowing for user-moderated boosts to certain songs.

    • Re:Group think, bad taste and braindamage. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Subjective ( 532342 ) on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:37AM (#5313918)
      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: Math (slightly OT) (Score:4, Informative)

        by Llywelyn ( 531070 ) on Sunday February 16, 2003 @12:47PM (#5314175) Homepage
        "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.
      • I used to work for a software company that did this sort of thing. While you can't predict exactly what an individual is going to do from an equation, it always amazed me just how good a hit-rate you can get when you test against a larger group.

        The mathematics behind it is actually fairly straightforward & there's a lot you can do to bias the results so the most commonly listened to tracks don't always appear at the top of the list of recommendations.

        The harder part is analysing the data-set & computing the recommendations in a reasonable time frame. Particularly since the quality tends to increase with larger & richer data-sets.

        • So, you're saying, the program should delete the general case (i.e. songs the user probably already heard of)
          Hmmm...

          Anyway, I really don't think the calculations should take long... There are (only... hehe) a few tens of thousands of points with meaningful connections and if you're looking up through a person's history, you only need to check a few hundred points, no?
          The connections themselves are only updated daily (or worse), so the real-time calculation should be really small (in time) per user
    • Is this phenomenon true for other suggestion-based systems, such as IMDB, Amazon, et al?

      I'm always skeptical of suggestion based systems that make simple inferences (eg, if you like X you'll like Y) because they never suggest anything I like.

      But I can buy into *complex* suggestion based systems that do a more in-depth job of matching preferences. For example, knowing that I like Tangering Dream, a simple system may suggest Brian Eno or Kraftwerk. But my personal playlist may go from Tangerine Dream, to the Replacements, to Miles Davis, to Richard Thompson, to the Velvet Underground.

      Someone who also listens to those same artists might also have suggestions that appeal to me since it better reflects the complexity of my taste versus simple comparisons.

    • Re:Group think, bad taste and braindamage. (Score:4, Informative)

      by costas ( 38724 ) on Sunday February 16, 2003 @12:07PM (#5314020) Homepage
      There are easy ways around this: you can age songs (guaranteeing that new songs get priority) or you can use web-of-trust ratings to see what high-trusted peers recommend currently.

      BTW, I know this as my newsbot [memigo.com] does the same sortof filtering for news articles, and although there is some feedback reinforcement for recent news, it does work suprisingly well.
    • If I understand correctly, this system strikes me as somewhat similar to how google ranks pages. the google system obviously works... I have a feeling this will work too.

      the feedback only breaks things down if users limit their selections to received recommendations. since many people continually update their collection, we have enough input to avoid "the one giant recommended playlist." most people search out new music.
    • Let's see what you are saying:
      dh/dt = c * h + stochastic diffusion corrector
      So, in words, you're claiming, that the change of the hear rate (h) is mainly proportional to the amount one currently listens to the song?

      Don't know about you. But for me, listening to a song usually peaks after a certain time, and then declines.

      So, more something along:
      h(t) = c * e^(k*w) * cos(w*t) ; k > 2*w
      The problem with MTV is, that they're targeting the largest audience (hence mainstream). A large audience is less flexible in accepting new music.

      The program (without reading it, due to /.ing) seam to cluster the usership based on their preferences, thus creating smaller communities, which are more suspectible to new influences.

  • But ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by halftrack ( 454203 ) <jonkje@gEEEmail.com minus threevowels> on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:21AM (#5313860) Homepage
    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 ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tmark ( 230091 ) on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:26AM (#5313881)
      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 ... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by NineNine ( 235196 ) on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:31AM (#5313901)
      Everything that send out your info to the net isn't "spyware". That's a ridiculous term. If it's useful, then it's certainly not "spyware". Would you call SETI@Home spyware? How about email?

    • Re:But ... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Subjective ( 532342 ) on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:44AM (#5313944)
      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

      • How does it know my IP address isn't dynamic? If it is then that information becomes worse than useless, because it might tell you that I like Metallica, Jools Holland and Eden Burning while telling you the next person to get allocated that IP liked Queen, Why? and Tchaikovsky. Now, as it happens, I like all those artists - but you can't deduce that at all. And without that, if you're limited to IPs then you're also limited to sessions and are going to have a job tracking them.

        At the very least you need a unique key on your machine, such as a GUID, if this function is to be any use at all.
      • 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)

        I mostly agree with you, but who says the profiling has to be personalized at all? Take, for example, the way IMDB does recommendations. It combines user-supplied recommendations with a Bayesian network that correlates the movies together based on a number of characteristics (e.g. genre, rank, director, actors, etc.). I think it works pretty well, and you're also welcom to read the reviews of anything it recommends to form your own opinion before investing your time or money.

  • MoodLogic anyone? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:25AM (#5313873)
    MoodLogic [moodlogic.net] 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.
    • 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.

  • Damit! (Score:2, Funny)

    by twfry ( 266215 )
    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.....

  • Ideas. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by EnsilZah ( 575600 )
    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..

  • Why submit this to ./? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

  • Beyond the music realm.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Subjective ( 532342 ) on Sunday February 16, 2003 @11:51AM (#5313975)
    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...

  • How is this different from spyware?

    • Re:I don't get it.. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Spyware is unwanted and dishonest with users about its purpose.
  • Hah. Kids today. I remember HOMR [mit.edu] and its e-mail based predecessor RINGO.
    • I thought HOMR was the episode of the Simpsons where they remove a crayon from Homer's brain and end up making him as smart as Lisa... kind of contradicts the episode about the "simpson gene" though.
    • Yeah, I was a RINGO user, so I was quite amused years later when not only the technology, but their initial data set went commercial. I could log into Passport and the obscure music I was into 6 or 7 years earlier was still related.

      Then again, back in the day I also contributed information to a system run by Dave Datta at UWP.edu. The system let you email a formatted list of links -- say, for instance, Tony Levin plays bass with Peter Gabriel -- and it would create symbolic links in an FTP structure. This was in the days when Gopher was fading, but HTTP didn't have many options in browsers yet. Kind of a cool system.
  • 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.

    • Nope, will never fly.. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by schon ( 31600 )
      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.

  • mirror (Score:2, Funny)

    by CAPSLOCK2000 ( 27149 )
    http://casper.zvdk.nl/~casper/audioscrobblerinstal ler.pl

    Please be gentle, only 16Kb up.

  • I build Audioscrobbler (Score:5, Informative)

    by captainclever ( 568610 ) <rj@NoSPaM.audioscrobbler.com> on Sunday February 16, 2003 @12:24PM (#5314087) Homepage
    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

    • 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.

    • Re:I build Audioscrobbler (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jamie ( 78724 ) <jamie@slashdot.org> on Sunday February 16, 2003 @12:59PM (#5314224) Journal
      "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 :)

      • 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.

      • Re:I build Audioscrobbler (Score:5, Informative)

        by captainclever ( 568610 ) <rj@NoSPaM.audioscrobbler.com> on Sunday February 16, 2003 @03:33PM (#5314972) Homepage
        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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jamie ( 78724 ) <jamie@slashdot.org> on Sunday February 16, 2003 @12:25PM (#5314092) Journal
    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.

    • Well, instead of spouting off, there are other options:

      Check out what the creator has to say on Slashdot [slashdot.org].
      Ask him a question in email [mailto].

      Either of these would show that the creator wasn't ready to be slashdotted, and was still a few days from really being ready.

      And how was anyone hurt by CDDB being bought out? I use freedb myself, but if I couldn't, big deal. CDDB is not a good comparison for Audioscrobbler anyway. With CDDB, you had to actually spend a few minutes punching in title and track information. With Audioscrobbler, you just install a plugin. Yeah, I'm sure the users of the plugin/service put in tons of uncompensated work.

      The possible shutdown of Audioscrobbler is of no consequence at this point. It's similar to how the shutdown of Napster didn't matter in the end. The *idea* is out there. The implementation is a minor detail.

      Loosen the tin foil hat and send a few emails before you lay in with this hippy shit. RJ did all the work. He wrote the plugins. He wrote the backend. He's serving up the bandwidth. All the users did was install a plugin. If he closes it, or cashes in, fine. But maybe you could have asked him first.
  • This guy's taking a slashdotting for the ages, but still plugging away! We're tearing his entire service apart...

    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.

    • Well, seeing as he's hosted by the ECS department at Southampton University, they own a B-class subnet and are the best Electronics and Computer Science department in the UK (5*s and 24s for both Electronics and CS, if you know what that means), I would expect the servers to be able to deal with a Slashdotting!

      I'm only pissed because it's slowing down my webpage... =o)

  • firefly (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hubert_Shrump ( 256081 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {tenarboc}> on Sunday February 16, 2003 @12:32PM (#5314123) Journal
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by captainclever ( 568610 ) <rj@NoSPaM.audioscrobbler.com> on Sunday February 16, 2003 @12:33PM (#5314126) Homepage
    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
  • 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 [soton.ac.uk] [www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~rwj100/] is the news posting about it. Here [google.com] is the same posting but google-cached.
  • 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?

  • Now I can finish that poem (Score:4, Funny)

    by scotay ( 195240 ) on Sunday February 16, 2003 @01:57PM (#5314522)
    At last! A word to rhyme with cobbler.

    Hmm... cobbler

  • Can you rate what you listen to? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Sunday February 16, 2003 @02:36PM (#5314735) Homepage
    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
  • a similar collaborative-filtering system for porn.

    My online and real-life friends share their music recommendations with me all the time. I get to hear what other students listen to when I'm around their dorm rooms. Some of my friends are even able to guess accurately what parts of their music collection they should play for me based on a single "I like that song, what is it?". Hanging out in a friend's room is a more efficient way to find music than getting recommendations from a collaborative filtering system and illegally downloading each song through a P2P service.

    But I can't use a similar strategy to find porn I like. While I like listening to songs I've heard before, individual porn images get boring quickly. Most students close their doors when they look at porn. Except for members and opponents of the "adult entertainment enthusiasts" club, most students don't like to talk about what porn they look at when people they're talking to can determine who they are. I think many people don't even like to think about porn after they're done looking at it.

    Ninenine and autopr0n, are you listening? Both of you collect "votes" on your sites, so why don't you do something useful with those votes? (Pseudonymous forums to discuss porn would be nice, too.)

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