At the recent Berlin Music Hackday, developer Hannes Tydén developed a mashup between SoundCloud and The Echo Nest, dubbed SoundCloudEchoNest. The program uses the SoundCloud and Echo Nest APIs to automatically annotate your SoundCloud tracks with information such as when the track fades in and fades out, the key, the mode, the overall loudness, time signature and the tempo. Also each Echo Nest section is marked. Here’s an example:
This track is annotated as follows:
- echonest:start_of_fade_out=182.34
- echonest:mode=min
- echonest:loudness=-5.521
- echonest:end_of_fade_in=0.0
- echonest:time_signature=1
- echonest:tempo=96.72
- echonest:key=F#
Additionally, 9 section boundaries are annotated.
The user interface to SoundEchoCloudNest is refreshly simple, no GUIs for Hannes:
Hannes has open sourced his code on github, so if you are a Ruby programmer and want to play around with SoundCloud and/or the Echo Nest, check out the code.
Machine tagging of content is becoming more viable. Photos on Flicker can be automatically tagged with information about the camera and exposure settings, geolocation, time of day and so on. Now with APIs like SoundCloud and the Echo Nest, I think we’ll start to see similar machine tagging of music, where basic info such as tempo, key, mode, loudness can be automatically attached to the audio. This will open the doors for all sorts of tools to help us better organize our music.
Music Machinery 