The Echo Nest Blog

Novelty playlists

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 09:26:00 -0400

We’ve been building a new playlisting engine here at the Echo Nest. The engine is really neat – it lets you apply a whole range of very flexible constraints and orderings to make all sorts of playlists that would be a challenge for even the most savvy DJ. Playlists like 15 songs with a tempo between 120 and 130 BPM ordered by how danceable they are by very popular female artists that sound similar to Lady Gaga, that live near London, but never ever include tracks by The Spice Girls.

I was playing with the engine this weekend, writing some rules to make novelty playlists to test the limits of the engine. I started with rules typical for a similar-artist playlist: 15 songs long, filled with songs by artists similar to a seed artist (in this case Weezer), the first and last song must be by the seed artist, and no two consecutive songs can be by the same artist. Simple enough, but then I added two more rules to turn this into a novelty playlist that would be very hard for a human to make. See if you can guess what the two rules are. I think one of the rules is pretty obvious, but the second is a bit more subtle.

 0    Tripping Down the Freeway - Weezer
 1    Yer All I've Got Ttonight - The Smashing Pumpkins
 2    The Most Beautiful Things - Jimmy Eat World
 3    Someday You Will Be Loved - Death Cab For Cutie
 4    Don't Make Me Prove It - Veruca Salt
 5    The Sacred And Profane - Smashing Pumpkins, The
 6    Everything Is Alright - Motion City Soundtrack
 7    The Ego's Last Stand - The Flaming Lips
 8    Don't Believe A Word - Third Eye Blind
 9    Don's Gone Columbia - Teenage Fanclub
10    Alone + Easy Target - Foo Fighters
11    The Houses Of Roofs - Biffy Clyro
12    Santa Has a Mullet - Nerf Herder
13    Turtleneck Coverup - Ozma
14    Perfect Situation - Weezer

Here’s another playlist – with a different set of two novelty rules, with a seed artist of Led Zeppelin.

0    El Niño - Jethro Tull
1    Cheater - Uriah Heep
2    Hot Dog - Led Zeppelin
3    One Thing - Lynyrd Skynyrd
4    Nightmare - Black Sabbath
5    Ezy Ryder - The Jimi Hendrix Experience
6    Soulshine - Govt Mule
7    The Gypsy - Deep Purple
8    I'll Wait - Van Halen
9    Slow Down - Ozzy Osbourne
10   Civil War - Guns N' Roses
11   One Rainy Wish - Jimi Hendrix
12   Overture (Live) - Grand Funk Railroad
13   Larger Than Life - Gov'T Mule

(Find the answers at MusicMachinery)

The Music App Summit

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 08:37:00 -0400

Billboard has long been known for tracking the hottest artists, albums and songs. Now they are moving into new territory - Music Apps. In October Billboard is hosting a Music App Summit - a day focused on the world of mobile music apps. The summit will focus on new companies and technologies that are now building the next generation of music applications for mobile devices. The summit has some awesome speakers and panelist lined up from a cross section of domains (technology, business and music) like Ge Wang, Ted Cohen, Dave Kusek, Brian Zisk and The Echo Nest’s CEOJim Lucchese.

At the core of the summit are Billboard’s first ever Music App Awards. Billboard is giving awards to the best apps in a number of categories:

Best Artist-based App: Apps created specifically for an individual artist
Best Music Streaming App: Apps that allow users to stream, download or otherwise enjoy music, such as Internet radio or on-demand.
Best Music Engagement App: Apps that lets users engage in music in various ways, such as music games, music ID services, etc.
Best Music Creation App: App that lets users make their own music.
Best Branded App: App that best incorporates a sponsor with music capabilities to promote both the sponsor’s message and highlight the music
Best Touring App: App created in conjunction with a specific tour or festival

Judges for the apps include Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired, Ian Rogers of Top Spin and Grammy Award winner MC Hammer.

Winning developers receive some modest prizes - but the real award is getting to demo your app to the attendees of the summit - the movers and shakers of the music industry will be there looking for that killer music app - the winner in each of the app categories will get to show their stuff. If you have a mobile music app consider submitting it to the Music App Awards. The submission deadline is July 30. (Reposted from MusicMachinery)

Echo Nest Remix at the Boston Python Meetup Group

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:18:00 -0400

Next week Paul Lamere, Director of Developer Platform at the Echo Nest will be giving a talk about remixing music with Echo Nest remix at the Boston Python Meetup Group. If you are in the Boston / Cambridge area next week, be sure to come on by and say ‘hi’. Info and RSVP for the talk are here: The Boston Python Meetup Group on Meetup.com

Here’s the abstract for the talk:

Paul Lamere will tell us about Echo Nest remix. Remix is an open source Python library for remixing music. With remix you can use Python to rearrange a track, combine it with others, beat/pitch shift it etc. – essentially it lets you treat a song like silly putty.

The Swinger is an interesting example of what it can do that made the rounds of the blogosphere: it morphs songs to give them a swing rhythm.

For more details about the type of music remixing you can do with remix, feel free to read: http://musicmachinery…

Version 4 of developer.echonest.com has been released

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:55:00 -0400

We have just released the first official (i.e. non-beta) release of Version 4 of the Echo Nest API. There are lots of new features in V4 - too many to mention here, but to highlight just a few:

Faster
JSON Support for all APIs
song/identify - Identifies a song given Echo Nest Musical Fingerpint hash codes.
artist search - now supports extended constraints and sorts, query by description
artist similarity - now supports extended constraints and sorts
more artist data
improved song search (with super powerful boosting)
Data Feeds - we’ve got rss feeds for nearly everything

There are updates to our client libraries to support all the new features: pyechonest and jEN.

So what does this mean to you? Well, if you are using our APIs, you don’t have to do anything right now, everything should work the same as it did before the release. Version 3 APIs will still be available and will still work exactly the same as they did last week. If you’ve been using the V4 beta APIs via ‘beta.developer.echonest.com’, these will continue to work as before as well. However, you will also be able to use the new V4 APIs directly via the URL ‘developer.echonest.com/api/v4.

The Transition Plan If you are using the V4 beta, you should switch your URLs from beta.developer.echonest.com to developer.echonest.com within the next month. We will stop supporting beta.developer.echonest.com by August 15. If you are using V3 of the APIs, you should think about transitioning to V4 in the next 6 months. We do not plan to support the V3 API beyond 2010. If you are using V2 of the API (is there anyone still using V2 of the API?), you should plan on transitioning to V4 by the end of July. V2 has been deprecated for a while and support for V2 will stop in the very near future.

New V4 beta API pushed tonight

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:22:22 -0400

Tonight we are pushing an update of our V4 beta APIs at beta.developer.echonest.com. This is major milestone - the V4 APIs now implement all V3 functionality (along with much more). Here’s what’s new in this beta release:

song/identify - Identifies a song given Echo Nest Musical Fingerpint hash codes.
track methods - upload, analyze and profile - are now fully supported
artist search - now supports extended constraints and sorts, query by description
artist similarity - now supports extended constraints and sorts
more artist data - like top terms (still very much in beta)
improved song search (with super powerful boosting)
Data Feeds - we’ve got rss feeds for everything

There are updates to our client libraries to support all the new features: beta_pyechonest and jEN.

The Swinger

Fri, 21 May 2010 06:45:43 -0400

The Swinger

One of my favorite hacks at last weekend’s Music Hack Day is Tristan’sSwinger. The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing. It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half. It has quite a magical effect. Some examples:

Every Breath You Take (swing version) by TeeJay

Money for Nothing (swing version) by TeeJay

Cream (swing version) by TeeJay

I Will (swing version) by TeeJay

Swinger uses the new Dirac time-stretching capabilities of remix. Source code is available in the samples directory of remix.

(Reposted from Music Machinery)

Earworm and Capsule

Fri, 14 May 2010 00:33:00 -0400

Over the past month, Tristan and I have been hard at work adding some new features to The Echo Nest Remix API, which is now at version 1.3. Here’s what’s new:

cloud.py - functionality to search for analyzed tracks to remix. No need to have your own audio.
pydirac - a new, great-sounding time-stretcher, which is stereo, and sample accurate. It’s a Python wrapper around a C module that makes use of the Dirac LElibrary.
action.py and cAction - crossfade, crossmatch, fadein, fadeout, and jump, with C implementations of core functionality for speed.

We’ve developed two cool new examples to show off the new functionality: Earworm and Capsule.

Earworm

Earworm (thanks to Jonathan Feinberg for the name) makes it possible to extend or shrink a song to any length you might desire, without changing the tempo. It does this by constructing a network graph of the piece, using The Echo Nest’s analysis data. Each node in the graph is a beat in the song, and an edge exists between two nodes if the two beats, and the several beats that follow them, sound similar (close in timbre and pitch).

One possible rendering of a song graph.

The graph shows us where we can make seamless transitions between different parts of the song. Stretching (or shrinking) the song is then just a matter of minimizing the number of “loop” points to reach a requested duration.

Tristan took If I Ever Feel Better by Phoenix and made If I Ever Feel Longer, seamless 10 and 60-minute renditions of that track using earworm. He also made a track I call I Can’t Get Any Shorter, the shortest path through the song with reasonable transitions (about 25% as long as the original). And if you just can’t get enough of If I Ever Feel Better, you can have If I Ever Feel Better Forever, a 200-second version of the song that ends where it starts. If you loop it, you can listen to the track nonstop, seamlessly, forever.

It’s easy to make your own earworm, even without audio. Install beta pyechonest, install remix, and cd to the earworm example:

> python earworm.py INXS ‘Need you Tonight’

Wait a moment for the audio and analysis to download, and before you know it, you’ll have a 10-minute version of ‘Need you Tonight’ by INXS. What you do next is up to you …

Capsule

Capsule takes a list of tracks, and automatically arranges and mixes them together. You can specify the transition time, and how long to hear each song. First, it searches for the best location where to make a transition and aligns beats. Because the songs may have different tempos, it uses one of the new actions, Crossmatch, which simultaneously cross-fades and beat-matches audio in the transitions. Crossmatch uses pydirac, the new time stretcher, to smoothly speed up and slow down the two song’s tempos. Crossmatch is an incredibly powerful tool for making great-sounding transitions. So if you pass in two songs, with the default parameters, you’ll get 8 seconds of the first one, an 8 second crossmatch, 8 seconds of the second song, and a 6 second fade-out.

Hear it transition between two Bob Marley songs (Jamming -> Everything is Gonna Be Alright).

The capsules render pretty quickly, due to cAction, the Python C Extension that handles some of the most computationally intensive code. So why stop at two songs? You can pass as many as you like.

Try it out, and post your results. I can’t wait to hear them. I’ll leave you with some examples to get those creative juices flowing:

Bonus Earworms:

Bonus Capsules:

(reposted from Running with Data)

Here come the music apps

Wed, 12 May 2010 08:59:00 -0400

As a music application developer, I have long been vexed by a problem that has made building and releasing a music application very difficult –where do I get the music? A music application needs music – but adding music to an application is very hard. I really have just a few choices: (1) I can use unlicensed content and hope nobody notices, (2) I can try to make the deals with the labels, (3) I can restrict my app to non-demand radio and pay per-stream royalties, or (4) I can just skip the music. None of these options is very appealing to me – If my application gets popular I will either get sued by the labels or swamped by music licensing fees. It is better for me if no one notices my app at all. Even resources like album art and 30 second samples are tightly held by the content owners.

What a crazy world! We are at this incredible point in the history of music with millions of tracks at our fingertips. Now more than ever, we need new ways to explore, organize and share music – but any kind of creativity in this space is stymied. I could build the coolest music app in the world that could help millions of people connect with music, but without a source of legal content, my application will never see the light of day. In my last year while working at the Echo Nest, I’ve seen some really amazing music applications made by very creative developers. These are apps that would make your jaw drop – but you’ll never see them. The apps are languishing on the virtual shelf because there’s no good way to get legal content for the apps.

This weekend at Music Hack Day San Francisco we are going to change this. We are going to make it possible for developers to build applications around music content and release the applications to the world without having to worry about music licensing. To do this, we are working with Play.me a new digital music service that offers on-demand music. With the Echo Nest / Play.me program a developer can write music applications using all of the usual Echo Nest APIs – and include streaming content from the millions of songs in the Play.me catalog. Play.me is very generous with its content giving a user 5 hours per week of on-demand music (once a user goes beyond their 5 hour allotment, full-streams are replaced with 30 second streams). Play.me’s strategy here is simple – they hope that by encouraging innovative applications built around their content they will attract more paying subscribers who get access to unlimited streams. The Echo Nest and Play.me platforms are well integrated letting developers write apps that take advantage of all the deep Echo Nest data – artist similarities, news, reviews, blogs, bios, images, video and even our deep track-level music analysis for every artist and track in the Play.me catalog. This is a big deal for music application developers. We can finally build applications around real music without having to worry about being sued or going broke paying licensing fees if our apps get popular. And if our application brings new subscribers to Play.me, we can make money through an affiliate program. (Here’s the fine print – Play.me is currently US only (sorry, rest of the world), and to hear the full streams you need to register with Play.me (you just need an email address, no credit cards required))

There are already some apps that have been built on top of the Echo Nest / Play.me APIs:

MusicExplorerFX – The award-winning Music Exploration tool.

Slice – a music exploration and discovery application for the Android Platform

PlaylistPathfinder – a novel application that creates playlists by finding paths through the Echo Nest artist similarity space.

I’ll write in more depth about these apps in subsequent posts – but the story for these apps are nearly identical – they were cool apps that were languishing on the music shelf because there was no way to release them with licensed content. Now the apps can be released to the world and even help the application developer make some money.

Over the years, we’ve seen many different ways for people to discovery new music come and go. When I was growing up, the radio DJ was the primary way people people discovered new music. The DJ was the tastemaker for the generation. For the next generation, I think music apps will be one of the primary ways people discover new music.

If you have idea about a cool new music app, but have been stymied by the problem of how to get content for your app, check out this program. More details will be forthcoming during Music Hack Day San Francisco.

(Reposted from MusicMachinery.com)

New API Architecture now in beta

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 07:30:00 -0400

Last weekend at the Amsterdam Music Hack day we opened up beta access to the next version of our APIs. This version is an all new architecture – that I’m rather excited about.

Some new features:

Performance – api method calls run faster – on average API methods are running 3X faster than the older version.
JSON Output – all of our methods now support JSON output in addition to XML. This greatly simplifies writing client libraries for the Echo Nest
Nimble coding – with the new architecture it will be much easier for us to roll out new features – so expect to see new features added to the Echo Nest platform every month
No cruft – we are revisiting our APIs to try to eliminate inconsistencies, redundancies and unnecessary features to make them as clean as we can.

The beta version of our next generation APIs is here: http://beta.developer.echonest.com/

The Echo Nest Song API

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 11:26:00 -0400

The Echo Nest Song API

This weekend at the Amsterdam Music Hack day we are releasing lots of new stuff. First of all, we opening up beta access to the next version of our APIs. This version is an all new architecture – that I’m rather excited about. Some new features:

Performance – api method calls run faster – on average API methods are running 3X faster than the older version.
JSON Output – all of our methods now support JSON output in addition to XML. This greatly simplifies writing client libraries for the Echo Nest
Nimble coding – with the new architecture it will be much easier for us to roll out new features – so expect to see new features added to the Echo Nest platform every month
No cruft – we are revisiting our APIs to try to eliminate inconsistencies, redundancies and unnecessary features to make them as clean as we can.

The beta version of our next generation APIs are here: http://beta.developer.echonest.com/

The first significant new API we are adding is the Song API – this gives you all sorts of ways to search for and retrieve song level data. With the song API you can do the following:

search for songs via artist name, song title, and description. You can affect the results with constraints and sorts:
- constrain the results by a number of factors including musical attributes like tempo, loudness, time signature and key, artist hotttnesss, location
- sort – the results by any of the attributes
Find similar songs – find similar songs to a seed song
Find profile – get all sorts of info about a song including audio, audio summary info, track data for different catalogs, song hottttnesss, artist_hotttnesss, artist_location, and detailed track analysis
Identify songs – works in conjunction with the ENMFP

There are lots of things you can do with this API. Here’s just a quick sample of the types of queries you can make:

Find the loudest thrash songs

song/search?sort=loudness-desc&description=thrash

Find indie songs for jogging

song/search?min_tempo=120&description=indie&max_tempo=125

Fetch the tempo of Hey Jude

search?title=hey+jude&bucket=audio_summary&artist=the+beatles

Fetch the track audio and analysis of Bad Romance

search?title=bad+romance&bucket=tracks&bucket=id:paulify&artist=lady+gaga

Find songs similar to Bad Romance

song/similar?id=SOAOBBG127D9789749

We have two clients that support the new beta version of the API:

jen-api – a java client
beta_pyechonest – a new branch of the venerable pyechonest library. Grab it from SVN with

svn checkout http://pyechonest.googlecode.com/svn/branches/ beta-pyechonest-read-only

I’ll be writing more about all of the new APIs real soon. Access the beta Echo Nest APIs here:

http://beta.developer.echonest.com/

(reposted from MusicMachinery)

The Echo Nest Musical Fingerprint (ENMFP)

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 07:16:04 -0400

Tomorrow begins MHD Amsterdam and at it The Echo Nest is releasing a few new things. Some of our engineering team (who deserve a severe callout for all their work, let me stick with theircodenames) have been working tirelessly to get “songs” to be a first-class member of our API, and as of today, they are — we now track many millions of songs and you can query for them by name and receive all sort of useful metadata, get similar songs (with amazing results even very deep in the catalog), and even get free (legal) playable audio for a huge collection of major label content (more on this later.) As part of this push to provide data about songs, we have been working on a music fingerprint— a way to resolve an unknown audio file (what we call a “track”) to a large database to identify it in our world (as a “song.”) And we’re ready to release this to the community to see how it performs in the wild.

The design goals of our FP were to base it on Echo Nest audio features, to make it simple to implement and to make it as open as possible. Lock in of content resolution data is a terrible thing, and a large part of The Echo Nest’s focus is to make it easy for people to figure out what their music is about without getting stuck in ID space hell. If you have an iTunes collection and want to automatically make Spotify playlists, we should be able to help you. If you write an app that scans your hard drive for tracks to make great recommendations against MOG or the Limewire store, we should be able to help you. If you want the tempo of every song in someone’s terribly labeled iPod library, we should be able to help you. A fingerprint to us is a utility call— like our search_artists — a way to resolve a music identifier to our set of ID spaces. Echo Nest song IDs, if you choose to use them, give you all of our stuff “for free” — from a single EN SO ID you can get recommendations, artist pictures and bios, blog posts, record reviews, and of course all the audio analysis: the tempo, key, events in the song. But over this year we are rolling in support for any other ID space viaRosetta Stone, so you will be able to return Spotify IDs or get last.fm URLs of the song from the fingerprint. Our goal as always is to be the bridge between music and amazing applications— a platform for music intelligence that lets anyone use any service on any audio to discover and interact with music.

How it works

Our fingerprint is called the Echo Nest Musical Fingerprint (ENFMP) and is based directly on parts of our audio analysis engine that already powers tons of interactive music and music search apps across the globe. We get a detailed understanding of what is happening in a song (note: a song, not just an audio file) for “free” simply by having Tristan be our co-founder, so our work on the ENMFP started there. We worked with audio scientists on ways to scalably hash parts of the analysis and query for “codes” — a sequence of numbers that can match the same song to the ear. We identified an efficient series of transformations of our low level segment description data to make a very accurate code, and our engineering team built a suite of tests, backend servers, and a query API. The ENMFP comes in two parts. The code generator is a binary library that you can compile into your own app. It takes in a buffer of PCM samples (in practice, give it around 20 seconds of 22050Hz mono float PCM), runs a series of signal processing algorithms on the samples, and returns a list of codes. It is as simple as

    Codegen * pCodegen = new Codegen(_pSamples, _NumberSamples, offset);
    for (uint i=0;i<pCodegen->getNumCodes();i++)
        printf("%ld ", pCodegen->getCodes()[i]);

The server maintains a canonical list of songs with corresponding codes and performs fast lookup. We’ve based the server on some popular open source indexing and storage platforms, and we’ll be releasing our modifications to them as a reference implementation shortly.

Use and open nature

Almost all of this implementation is open. The data behind the server is open by design. Anyone can request full data dumps. Anyone that wants to run their own server can provided that they mirror with the other servers. The only non-normative license is in the code generator, which for now is binary-only, available for most platforms (Windows, Linux 32 & 64-bit, Mac OS X, mobile forthcoming) and free to use in any sort of application — commercial, open source, free, webapp, etc. The only pertinent restriction is that codes are sent to only “authorized servers.” The design of this license ensures that one party does not attempt to usurp the ID resolving space out from under anyone. If The Echo Nest dissolves or gets bought by a large fish cannery on accident, we want to make sure the data and query service live on without us. As a corollary, we don’t want anyone “hiding” new resolved tracks from the ID space. Anyone that collects new songs via this fingerprint has to share their data, plain and simple. This hopefully ensures that over the years the combined knowledge from all uses of the ENMFP will catalog every single piece of music available on the internet, and the data will be available to all. We want the ENMFP to grow into a public internet utility.

Features

The ENMFP looks at the underlying music, not just the raw audio signal. This gives it some unique advantages:
- Unlike many FPs, is robust to time scaling
- Can identify sample use in mixed audio
- Can identify remixes, live versions and sometimes cover versions
Can identify a song in <20s of audio
Can also match on track metadata (artist name, title, length) using Echo Nest name matching in the same call
Server and some of the code generator are completely open source
Data is completely open; dumps provided, mirroring required to host your own server (we want people to boot their own copies of the data)

Anti-features

In heavy alpha, not heavily QA’d yet, help wanted
Not completely OSS: the code generator relies on proprietary EN algorithms. Binaries provided, free to use, but not open source.
No ingestion API yet (you are querying against a large but not complete catalog, there is no way currently to add new songs. This is changing soon. If you maintain a large catalog and want it in our reference database, please get in touch.)

How to use

First, you need an Echo Nest developer API key if you don’t already have one. Next, familiarize yourself with the alpha_identify_song API. (As of right now, before we release the server source, the Echo Nest is hosting the only query server via this API.) There is instructions there on how to receive the libcodegen binaries. The libcodegen package also ships with an example code generator that you can call from the commandline, so no worries if you aren’t ready to do some compiling.

How to help

We see the ENMFP as a community project just getting started. If you are interested in booting your own mirror server, or if you have experience with FP tasks, want to help with QA, automated testing, have a large catalog to ingest or test against, please get in touch.

we are especially grateful for the work of Unrepentant Nagios Installer (UNI), Guy Who Fights With Me About the Word “Track” Every Fucking Day (GWFWMAWTEFD), Drinks Turret Coolant (DTC), Mr. HTML5 Canvas 2010 (HC2), So-Glad-I-Kept-You-Out-Of-The-Media-Lab (SGIKYOOTML), Skinny Tie (ST), Main Ontology Offender (MOO), Future Performable Employee (FPE), and of course Ben Lacker (BL)

(this is a repost from notes.variogr.am)

What is that song?

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 07:09:00 -0400

One of the biggest problems faced by music application developers is song identification, that is, given an mp3 file, what is the name of the song, album and artist? There are some hints in the mp3 file – the file name and the ID3 tags contain metadata about the track – but anyone who has worked with this metadata knows that this data is notoriously hard to deal with. The metadata is often missing, inconsistently formatted or just plain wrong. The result of this difficulty is that music application developers spend an inordinate amount of time just dealing with song identification.

Here at the Echo Nest we want to make it easy for developers to create music applications so we really want to solve the music metadata problem once and for all. That’s why we’ve created music fingerprinting technology. Today, we are starting to release it to the world.

The Echo Nest music fingerprinter takes a bit of music such as an MP3 and identifies the song based solely on the musical attributes of the song. No matter how messy the metadata is, the fingerprinter can identify the song since it relies on the music to do the identification. On his blog, Echo Nest co-founder Brian Whitman dives into the technical details of the Echo Nest Musical Fingerprinter.

This is not the first audio fingerprinter in the world, but we think our fingerprinter is distinctive in several important ways:

Very fast – under a second to ID a track
Very accurate – uses Echo Nest music analysis technology at the core.
Open Data – all of the mapping of fingerprints to songs is open data. Anyone can get the data
Open server – all of the server code is open – you can host your own FP server if you wish

We want to make sure that anyone who takes advantage of the EN Fingerprinter participates fully in the EN FP system – and so it is licensed so that anyone who uses the fingerprinter technology will share their FP/song mapping data with everyone. No walled gardens – if you benefit from the ENMFP you are also helping others that are using the ENMFP.

It is still early days with the fingerprinter – we are doing a soft release. If you want to experiment with the ENMFP and you are at the Amsterdam music hackday this weekend send an email to enmfp@echonest.com with your intended use case. We will get back to you ASAP with a link to libraries for Mac, Windows and Linux. - A repost from MusicMachinery.

Music Hack Days are awesome

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 13:23:19 -0400

Music Hack Days are awesome:

Flickr photo by paulamarttila

There are now two Music Hack Days on the calendar for the next month: Amsterdam on April 24th, 25th and San Francisco on May 15th, 16th.

The Echo…

Which band has the hotttnesss?

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 09:02:11 -0400

Which band has the hotttnesss?:

Developer/musician Paul Barrett (aka echodeck) has created pop.ularity a nifty web-based music quiz based on last.fm and the Echo Nest APIs. In the quiz you try to guess which band is hotter…

Lady Gaga meets Edward Tufte

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:40:22 -0400

Lady Gaga meets Edward Tufte:

In his spare time, Echo Nest developer Reid Draper built hotttnesss.com – a neat web app that shows the top 50 hotttest artists (according to the Echo Nest get_top_hottt_artists)…

22 students + 10 days + Echo Nest == Awesome!

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:57:41 -0400

22 students + 10 days + Echo Nest == Awesome!:

The students in Mark Chang’s mobile development course at Olin college just completed the mid-semester #mobdev contest. This was a 10-day sprint to create a compelling product prototype on the…

Bad Romance – the memento edition

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:39:13 -0400

Bad Romance – the memento edition:

At SXSW I gave a talk about how computers can help make remixing music easier. For the talk I created a few fun remixes. Here’s one of my favorites. It’s a beat-reversed version of Lady Gaga’s Bad…

Unofficial Artist Guide to SXSW

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:06:45 -0500

Unofficial Artist Guide to SXSW:

I’m excited! Next week I travel to Austin for a week long computer+music geek-fest at SXSW. A big part of SXSW is the music – there are nearly 2,000 different artists playing at SXSW this year. But…

NodeJS and DonkDJ

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:37:11 -0500

NodeJS and DonkDJ:

Brian points me to RF Watson’s (creator of DonkDj) interesting post about how he’s using NodeJS to solve concurrency problems in his audio-uploading web apps. Worth a read.

The other obsession at the Echo Nest

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:12:17 -0500

The other obsession at the Echo Nest:

At the Echo Nest, everyone is obsessed with music. But there’s also another obsession as highlighted in this new photo blog: lookatthisfuckingcrema.com: