Monthly Archives: september 2007

Real-time stats for the masses, it’s OSS

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I’ve put some effort into Last.fm Real-time Stats this week. The Database is now fully relational. Some more bugs crushed and stuff optimized. I wanted to release it this night, yesterday, the day before yesterday and before that, but all I did was more tweaking. Now I’ve decided that I just packed the last change into the release archive.

So here it is:
Last.fm Real Time Stats 2.0.0

Download it now and generate you own real-time stats. Because, admit, you don’t like waiting until Monday to see what you listened last week! You might need some experience with scripts, this is just the first release, but I’ve put quite some effort into the readme, so I hope you’ll be fine. Server requirements are:

  • PHP 5, 4 might also work, didn’t test it. (let me know if you do!)
  • With GD-PNG and zlib (change the log functions in the bottom of the functions file if you don’t have zlib)
  • MySQL, tested on 5.0.38
  • Cron Tabs (see FAQ)
  • Apache is recommended, because I use .htaccess to secure the /inc/ dir in a case of PHP parser failure.
  • A database management utility, such as PhpMyAdmin simplifies things a lot

If anyone is going to host the script and is willing to host the script for other people as well you can leave a message in the comments.

And why it’s 2.0.0? That’s because this one is fundamentally better than the previous version.

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Help Last.fm clean Metadata through fingerprinting

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If you’re a fanatic Last.fm user like me, you’ll probably have noticed a lot of misspelled artist names. There used to be a moderating system which allowed users to vote on merging a misspelled artist with the correct one. This system is long since gone. This doesn’t mean that the crew doesn’t want to see the problem fixed. In contrary, I know they’ve been searching for a solution for a long time now.

It’s almost there. They’ve now started collecting fingerprints of audio files. On his blog RJ announces:

Phase 1 is now underway with the first public “beta” release of our new fingerprinting technology. This will mature into a nice sexy (free) API that lets you grab clean metadata based on an audio fingerprint. For now, all that it does is send the fingerprint data to bootstrap the moderation system. [...]
What we’ll do next is figure out all the popular (mis)spellings for tracks with the same fingerprints. [...] We need people with MP3 collections (of any size/quality) to download and run the fingerprinter to make this work, so spread the word.

I think it’s a genuinely nice sollution to use this kind of data collecting tot algorithmically solve such a complex and vast problem. So get your ass up mouse moving and start fingerprinting your collection today!

Download for:
Windows
Mac OS X
Linux .deb
Source code
Or go to RJ’s blog @ last.fm…

Let me remind you that it might take a while and it’s not the smoothest process, but just restart it a couple of times and you’ll get to the end just fine! (the client does remember where it go to, so it does resume!)

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