This Friday I was a the Vive La Fête concert in the Effenaar (Eindhoven NL). I went with a couple of friends and we all had had a <insert many superlatives> concert. Vive La Fête are absolutely great. I thought so before, but after seeing them live I feel this way even stronger. If you don’t all ready know them, go listen to them today!
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!)
I’ve decided that Last.fm Real-time stats is going to be open source software. It’s been in consideration for a long time now, but it’s final. And I’m ever more liking the idea. At first I was a bit scared of just giving away my hard work, but now I think it’s more than that. I think it’s key to showing what you really created. Just showing the interface doesn’t tell much about a project.
So today I was looking at some work half done:
Can you spot the mistake?
More is the spoiler.
Continue reading
In the last few years I’ve heard ever more people question the potential risk posed by what’s become known as ‘electrosmog’. I’ve always been very sceptic towards it. Never really believing it could have any significant effect. I’ve studied physics for almost two years, so it wasn’t really hard for me to argue against it, since somehow all the people I’ve met didn’t have any strong arguments. I mostly cited one of my profs who once said:”As far as I know, the effect that could have any significance to humans has yet to be discovered.” In response to a student asking him whether he believed using cell phones posed any risk. Until today this and explaining the magnitude of the radiation and comparing it to known extremes were the strongest arguments used. But browsing the web I came across a press release of a research conducted in The Netherlands with strong evidence arguing GSM and UMTS pose no risk (Dutch).
The idea
From time to time I like to code a little PHP and the other day I was looking at the audioscrobbler (the core, the data supply of last.fm) web services for interesting feeds and I saw the week chart feeds. I noticed that they provide a list of all available weeks and quickly realized that you could combine this with the Top50 feed to reconstruct older Top50′s. Just subtract an artists play count from next week’s total play count and you have the current total play count. And hey, if you can reconstruct old Top50′s you can view how they developed and how your musical preferences developed! Continue reading
