Music Machinery

Duke University Archives

Here at the Echo Nest just added a new feature to our APIs called Personal Catalogs. This feature lets you make all of the Echo Nest features work in your own world of music. With Personal Catalogs (PCs) you can define application or user specific catalogs (in terms of artists or songs) and then use these catalogs to drive the behavior of other Echo Nest APIs.  PCs open the door to all sorts of custom apps built on the Echo Nest platform. Here are some examples:

Create better genius-style playlists – With PCs I can create a catalog that contains all of the songs in my iTunes collection.  I can then use this catalog with the Echo Nest Playlist API to generate interesting playlists based upon my own personal collection.  I can create a playlist of my favorite, most danceable songs for a party, or I can create a playlist of slow, low energy, jazz songs for late night reading music.

Create hyper-targeted recommendations  – With PCs I can make a catalog of artists and then use the artist/similar APIs  to generate recommendations within this catalog.  For instance, I could create an artist catalog of all the bands that are playing this weekend in Boston and then create Music Hack Day recommender that tells each visitor to Boston what bands they should see in Boston based upon their musical tastes.

Get info on lots of stuff – people often ask questions about their whole music collection. Like, ‘what are all the songs that I have that are at 113 BPM?‘, or ‘what are the softest songs?’  Previously, to answer these sorts of questions, you’d have to query our APIs one song at a time – a rather tedious and potentially lengthy operation (if you had, say, 10K tracks). With PCs, you can make a single catalog for all of your tracks and then make bulk queries against this catalog. Once you’ve created the catalog, it is very quick to read back all the tempos in your collection.

Represent your music taste – since a Personal Catalog can contain info such as playcounts, skips, and ratings for all of the artists and songs in your collection, it can serve as an excellent proxy to your music taste.  Current and soon to be released APIs will use personal catalogs as a representation of your taste to give you personalized results. Playlisting, artist similarity, music recommendations all personalized based on you listening history.

These examples just scratch the surface. We hope to see lots of novel applications of Personal Catalogs.  Check out the APIs, and start writing some code.