Old Vinyl by fensterbme
The world of online music is growing rapidly. Every day, thousands of new tracks by new artists are uploaded to the Internet. Soon all recorded music will be online and available for you to listen to anywhere at any time, on any device.
However, this seemingly endless supply of new music creates a problem for a music listener. How can you find music that you will like when there are millions and millions of tracks to choose from?
In this blog, I write about the world of online music discovery and recommendation. I look at the tools available to help people find music. I examine some of the issues that can make music recommendations go bad. I also write about things that I find generally interesting including programming, data visualization, playing games, and (of course) music.
About the author: Paul is the director of the application developer community for The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company located in Somerville Massachusetts. 
Paul serves on a number of program committees including the International Society for Music Information Retrieval and UMAP 09. He is the Industrial Co-Chair of RecSys’09.
March 5, 2009 at 11:43 am |
I read your blog about the drummers that use clicktracks in the studio, have you tested songs from Rush and Neil Peart’s drumming?
March 17, 2009 at 12:30 pm |
Hi Paul,
I also stumbled on your blog after reading about the click track post. I really enjoy everything you’ve written so far.
I have a blog where I post a new drum loop everyday and a question has arisen in an area where you seem to have some expertise in:
http://ryangruss.com/?p=1320
Basically, are there any current methods for converting an audio track into a transcribed piece of music. Much like audio to text conversion, but obviously much more complex. Would love to hear your thoughts!
Thanks,
Ryan
March 17, 2009 at 11:16 pm |
ryan:
It is not a solved problem, but it is a very active area of research. Google for “ISMIR transcription” to see the state of the art.
P
April 11, 2009 at 12:46 pm |
i stumbled across this blog from your sun blog post on the api for yes.com. i was annoyed that the website didn’t have an rss feed for song logs or other such easily exportable format. (i had to go select a station, date, hour, click submit, change hour, submit…) then i saw the link to come over to this blog and yow. this is such interesting stuff. keep up the interesting posts!
April 16, 2009 at 7:21 am |
Hi, re Spotify – My other half is worried about using it because it’s peer to peer, but does that mean people are playing music from my pc ? like – sharing, in the way we usually do with peer to peer.
I thought the music files are all at a Spotify server.
And no chance of viruses ?
cheers !
April 16, 2009 at 7:24 am |
@troy – a bit off topic? but no, spotify does not serve music from your PC to other people.
April 22, 2009 at 11:54 am |
Ryan and plamere,
You may want to check out Melodyne, which recognizes audio as notes and can treat it like MIDI. I don’t know if it can render that info into a transcription or not. Hope this helps.
May 12, 2009 at 4:52 am |
Introduction to the quietly proliferating problem of digital piracy in the literary world. “I thought, who do these people think they are?” Ms. Le Guin said. “Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?”
Gappu
June 22, 2009 at 12:49 pm |
[...] how powerful the (upcoming) video manipulation is, check out Where’s The Pow by Paul Lamere in which he remixes the Black Eyed Peas – Boom [...]
July 16, 2009 at 9:10 am |
Seen http://www.sun.com today? This article was linked to front page. I saved a copy of the graphic, if you like. http://www.sun.com/featured-articles/2009-0710/feature/index.jsp
July 16, 2009 at 10:30 am |
Thanks John.
October 19, 2009 at 4:50 pm |
Dear Plamere,
Apart from subjects on this page I have seen your article: Searching for music by melody or rhythm, with the statement: (about Musipedia) The best query-by-melody, and query-by-tapping site I’ve seen.
This was in 2006
You might not yet have seen the Melodycatcher.
We think this tool is clearly better (more accurate)
but undoubtedly you can better judge that for your self.
All questions, comments and suggestions are welcome.
“We” is Florian Bomer and my self, as you can see on the website under “About”
Best Regards
Jan van Os
October 29, 2009 at 4:33 am |
[...] Paul Lamere – The Echo Nest [...]
November 4, 2009 at 12:26 pm |
Paul…. great blog. I was also at Music & Bits, and so I think it’s great you recapped Brian’s talk.
I was wondering if you’ve heard of a really simple online tap-metronome (preferably using Echo Nest) where I can tap in a beat for 20 seconds..and return the average. Do you think that is how EN would work – it’d be the avg? Or would it maybe just choose the first 5 seconds and decide the BPM?
Thanks!
Chris
twitter.com/castig
November 7, 2009 at 7:39 am |
Hi Paul – What happened to Snapp Radio? I loved that site? Is there anything similar you know of??
Best
Seth
December 20, 2009 at 6:42 pm |
[...] Music Machinery. The blog is written by a dev from Echonest, a music intelligence company. From the about page… In this blog, I write about the world of online music discovery and recommendation. I look [...]
January 22, 2010 at 6:21 am |
Paul,
I’ve read your music recommendation app reviews over the years with interest, and mostly agree with your findings that most disappoint.
I’ve just heard about the youtube music recommender (http://www.youtube.com/disco) – I’d be really interested to hear what you think of it.
Can Google can bring the kind of crowd analysis to music discovery that they bring to translation and search (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/helping-computers-understand-language.html)?
(Sorry about abusing the about page, not sure how else to contact you)